Archinect - News

Josef Albers's Manhattan mural could return to New York

2014-11-25T13:26:00-05:00

Josef Albers’s Manhattan, a mural that enlivened the lobby of New York’s Met Life (previously the Pan Am) Building from 1963 until its controversial removal in 2000, could make a triumphant return to the city. Possible sites include the World Trade Center Transit Hub, The Art Newspaper understands. Finding a suitable home for the work is not the only obstacle: the original mural is in a landfill site in Ohio.

Can J.F.K.’ s Pan Am Terminal, a U.F.O.-Like Monument to America’s Jet Age Innocence, Be Saved from the Wrecking Ball?

2013-07-09T17:01:00-04:00

If the design, by the firm of Tippets Abbott McCarthy and Stratton, wasn’t as sophisticated as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal a few hundred yards away—surely one of the great buildings of its era, transportation hub or otherwise—the Pan Am terminal was the second-best piece of architecture at JFK, and in some ways it captured the feeling of the moment more directly.

Building High Anxiety

2013-04-01T00:13:00-04:00

“A $100 million building cannot really be called cheap,” Ada Louise Huxtable, the celebrated architecture critic for The New York Times, wrote in 1963. “But Pan Am is a colossal collection of minimums.”

Ginia Bellafante recently wrote an article marking this month's 50th anniversary of the completion of Park Avenue’s Pan Am Building, since renamed the MetLife Building. Although, initially the public/critical reception was primarily negative, today the building is one of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the City.