Carbuncle Alert in Queens

Ah! You beat me to it. The scaffolding just came down this week and I took photos, but haven’t yet put them up on my blog. It’s a cut-rate Renzo Piano.

The buildings immense size and blockiness is also offensive.

It’s about 15 minutes or so walking from my house to my office. This building is right in the middle (and cater-corner from the Church of my territorial parish.

They also had a launch party on their roof this afternoon, which we could see from the windows of our office.

On the plus side (for me anyways), they’re planning a supermarket for the first floor and it’ll be conveniently on my way home from work.

That looks bad. I could have imagined at least a dozen different ways to have an equally modern looking expansion that didn’t look like it was trying to swallow the poor thing whole.
Well, at least they didn’t demolish it. It was the 60s, after all.

Huh, it’s the same aliens that landed on Soldier Field.

Bloody awful. I hope they blew lots of vuvuzelas during the grand opening to make the artistic picture complete.

As Bill Bryson distinctly put it about another architectural abomination elsewhere;”It was obviously designed by a graduate of the F… You School of Architecture.”

Ag, siestog nee man! Wat verskrikkelik kak !

At least its GREEN and will stay green. Its a breath of fresh air compared to aging Brutalist cement of a half century ago. Besides, if you duck your head and wear a duck-bill cap you can go in and out of the classic bit of Queens architecture and avoid seeing it entirely.

It reminds me of what they did to St Ann’s Church in the East Village. Keep the antique facade and put something behind it that clashes terribly. They could have made the back look like a continuation, maybe using brick that matched, but no, they had to choose something that clashes so badly it dominates.

Somehow fitting in a culture with a greater commitment to reality television than to literature that this grand, old library should be “swallowed up”.
It speaks volumes.

Anyone who calls a glorified block of flats “Moda” should be summarily executed.

I have just encountered this building in person. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, worse than the renders depicted it, and the overall effect is one of cheapness. It does not so much look like the old library is being swallowed by the apartment block as it appears to be in the midst of bursting out of its glass-and-aluminum prison.