“[M]ostly everybody gawks at the canopy,” Michael Kimmelman writes in The New York Times, describing a recently installed project designed by Preston Scott Cohen. It’s one of the Empire City’s best new works of architecture, he says. It stretches over a somewhat obscure street, sitting in the shadows of the far- from-obscure One World Trade Center.
It’s a modest, angular structure, Kimmelman says, but that’s part of what makes it so remarkable. The glass canopy, though a fairly small structure that covers little space on the North End Way street, manages to steal the limelight from the Goldman Sachs headquarters and the rest of the surrounding public space, which Goldman Sachs also commissioned.
“It is composed of three tilting, jagged triangles. Picture giant shards of glass,” he writes. “They filter light gracefully through enameled panes, the light shifting with the passing day.” Kimmelman says that he’s stopped by the canopy on different days and at various times, and that it always has an effect on him. (Sometimes it’s the simplest designs that bring the most pleasure.)
And there is an elegant simplicity to the triangular covering, he says, calling it an “inside-out High Line.” People walk the length of the park, pausing to take in the sacred city scenery that it offers. Now people too pause under the canopy, because the architecture turns it into a place to be instead of just pass through.
