Hilary Ballon

When I heard recently that Hilary Ballon had passed away at only 61, I figured it was a good time to look at her book on Penn Station, which I'd gotten back in 2013 but had yet to read. Previous to it I was aware of her books on French architecture, so I was expecting a fairly staid and academic history of the well known Manhattan station, which was built in 1910 and demolished just over 50 years later. But I was wrong. Ballon's account is highly readable, thorough, and enjoyable, some of the best writing on architectural history I've read in a long time; which of course makes her passing that much sadder.

Based on this book, Ballon had a knack for taking the usual purview of architectural history – building form – and relating it strongly to its context, particularly economics and politics. Reading her account of Penn Station is understanding it in a whole new way, one that makes me appreciate it more but also criticize certain aspects of it – and the people who want to rebuild the original design as if it were a perfect piece of architecture and urbanism. More than anything, the book makes me understand how and why a number of early considerations (no hotel or other revenue component, myopic siting, etc.) doomed the building later on. Its demolition was inevitable, if still tragic.

The book is made up of three parts: Ballon's 90-pages on the McKim, Mead & White station and its demolition; Norman McGrath's photo essay of the building's destruction; and an essay by Marilyn Taylor, a partner at SOM, on the new Penn Station planned for parts of the Old Post Office. Now fifteen years later, the last is actually moving forward, but in a slightly different form. By coincidence, the day I learned about Ballon's passing is the same day SOM's $1.6 billion plan was announced by the governor.… (meer)