Editor’s note: Now that the redesign of the Freedom Tower is moving downtown New York towards the “practical” skyscraper-as-bunker aesthetic, we’re glad Ms. Rhee sent along this review of a new book on another controversial, practical New York tower.

With the ebullient prosperity after World War II, the private car, buoyed by federal highway funds, and air travel began to displace railroads. In order to offset losses railway companies began to take advantage of their valuable real estate holdings. As owner of a dozen blocks in Midtown Manhattan the New York Central Railroad with real estate developer Erwin S. Wolfson began development schemes on Park Avenue. In May 1958 a plan for the largest commercial office building in Manhattan was revealed. Eventually the structure would break other records—the largest mortgage, the most steel ordered for a single construction job, the largest lease in history, and, just a few months back, the largest known selling price for a single commercial building. The prize for signing the aforementioned largest lease was name and signage rights for Pan Am.

Of course this monument to rentable floor space is an extraordinarily average, inoffensive structure. But the Pan Am Building was designed by two of the most respected architects of their time Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi and situated over Grand Central Terminal. That outsize situation catalyzed debate and criticism within and outside of architectural circles. Meredith Clausen’s meticulously researched, yet alternately admirable and maddening, The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream, is overstuffed with details regarding the project. Many examples illuminate exaggerated personalities and actions—New York Central’s proposal to bifurcate Grand Central Terminal to create a bowling alley for extra revenue, for example. That particular proposal failed, but despite public outcry—for the extra congestion it would cause, for the structure’s carelessness in terms of scale and urban design, and, in the case of the heliport, the constant noise—the Pan Am was built and, from the very start, a financial success.

If the book remained a record of the megalomania, economics, and politics that went into building the Pan Am, it would be a mostly-good accomplishment. But Clausen tries to add some gravitas by creating a cipher—a David and Goliath story about the architecture establishment in collusion with corporate real estate interests against the little guy in a battle at the boundary between modernist and post-modernist architecture.

At times Clausen’s narrative twist works, especially as she traces the rise of architecture critics, mainly Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum, and Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times. At many others it is less successful. The layperson never receives a coherent explanation of architectural modernism and how its promise was betrayed via the Pan Am. It is clear from the beginning that Gropius and Belluschi were relatively minor players—and they knew it—brought in to offer a perfunctory sense of academic credibility. But Clausen uses Gropius especially (Belluschi almost disappears from the project) as a straw man for what is wrongwith the endeavor. To be sure, neither man needed to be a part of the project, but Clausen’s evidence points more towards the idols of real estate than the evils of modernism for Pan Am.

Anyone who comes out in favor of the Pan Am comes out as a weak-willed shill of the establishment, while opponents are the voice of the people. But if her book really casts a “harsh light on the architectural star systems” then why in the world is Philip Johnson given a favorable place in the book? To be fair, Clausen seems to give anyone from bovine student groups and letters to the editor to Vincent Scully some space as long as they are against the Pan Am Building, which, of course, only makes her arguments less effective. What we get out of the mess is that the issues are more complicated than Clausen asserts them to be.

Conceptual muddling aside the book falters from repetitive and stultifying prose that should have been beaten out in the first draft and some fact-checking issues (e.g. Douglas Haskell’s college major is, apparently, variable). The completist impulse of Clausen’s research becomes a detriment as she often digresses to topics that bear marginal to related, but unnecessary importance from the central stories which are compelling enough on their own. These faults are unfortunate because the evidence of a great and instructive book exists, but it’s just stuck in the bombast, not unlike its subject.

416 pages | MIT Press | $45 | December, 2004

Pollyanna Rhee studies urban planning and lives in Brooklyn, NY.