Anyone who has spent at least 50 hours studying 20th century architecture would recognize Albany’s Empire State Plaza as Le Corbusier’s brainchild, a one-block model of his Radiant City, except it’s not. It was a poorly-executed urban renewal project under governor Nelson Rockefeller supported by Albany mayor Erastus Corning II, whose great-grandfather Erastus Corning was also mayor of Albany.
The cold, windy, inhospitable concrete landscape created by architect Wallace Harrison made it strictly a place of business. Its surrounded by four agency buildings uninspiringly named Agency Building 1 through 4, the Justice and Legislative Office buildings that look like a monolithic gate to to a postmodernist Soviet gulag, the renaissance-revival New York State Capitol opposed to the pagoda-like Cultural Education Center, and the mighty Erastus Corning Tower, the tallest building in the state outside New York City. The large pools of water and limited entrances to the plaza discourage civil meetings in the political heart of New York’s government.
The plaza is so out of scale that the only dignified way to get from one point to another is though the passage under the plaza, which itself is suspended above a mammoth parking lot, a bus station, and a tunnelled freeway. Nearly 100 acres of homes and small businesses were razed for this “urban renewal” crime in the 1960s. It was designed to look like World Trade Center, which was completed around the same time, with the buildings sharing the late town towers’ bold vertical stripes.
I got lost while I was underground and found myself stuck inside the Justice Building. Three very helpful state troopers helped me find my way out through a maze of sterile white tunnels and released me through a side door. You can go there, but you won’t want to stay.
