CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/10/2016

Never Built New York

Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates' 1994 proposal for a hotel, retail and entertainment complex near the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue was meant to be the "gateway" to the city's much-vaunted 42nd Street Development Project. Sadly, the architects, "already at odds with their 'schlock' developers," lost the competition, according to Never Built New York authors Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell. "The designers’ idea was to wrap the hotel’s base, and the retail buildings around it, in protruding square billboards plastered with colorful, frenetic imagery, an appropriate nod to Times Square itself. The tower was to be topped by a gigantic sunburst logo resembling a jester’s cap, blurring the line between signage and structure in Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s classic fashion. 'We wanted the quality of the building to come from the communication itself,' said Scott Brown. 'The chief idea was to put that communication on the street, and then on the regional scale, seen from a distance. In between things are pretty simple...it’s a decorated shed.'" See Carol Kino's fascinating illustrated feature asking "What went wrong" with 13 key projects in today's Wall Street Journal Magazine.