A glass canopy above a little-known pedestrian street, North End Way, in lower Manhattan has received a rave review by New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, who calls it “One of the best new works of architecture in New York.” Designed by McCue professor of architecture Preston Scott Cohen, chairman of the department of architecture at the Graduate School of Design, the canopy is composed of “three tilting, jagged triangles. Picture giant shards of glass,” Kimmelman writes.
Cohen’s new building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, described, with multiple photographs, in a piece in Harvard Magazine, uses a sophisticated skylight as its central feature. His glass canopy in New York, near One World Trade Center, also unifies an interior space with natural light from above. The longest of the three glass triangles, writes Kimmelman, “slices the arcade, which bends toward the south end, along the diagonal. That sweeping diagonal brings together what could otherwise be—precisely because North End Way isn’t straight—a disjointed space.”
