The Imaginary Apple

Source: www.slate.com --- Wednesday, October 18, 2017
There’s a room at the Queens Museum’s Never Built New York , an exhibition of the city’s architectural paths not taken, that collects forgotten designs for the very land on which the museum sits. For nearly a century, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park and its surroundings have been treated as one of the city’s most tantalizing blank spaces, a screen on which New York’s planners and politicians have enlisted talented architects to project their fantasies. Two times the park hosted the World’s fair, a national fever dream of the future. Planning czar Robert Moses and architect Wallace Harrison wanted to build the United Nations here as a sprawling classical forum instead of the elegant skyscraper we know today. Marcel Breuer, Kenzo Tange, and Lawrence Halperin pitched a soaring Flushing Meadows Sports Park. Paul Rudolph drew up the Galaxon, a giant stargazing dish. Every city has a place like this for every era: a succession of dream sites that tell of local ambitions and failures. ...

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