Two of the three original Gateway Center towers, designed by Eggers & Higgins as a model for urban redevelopment after the Second World War. (In the picture above, the entrance to the Gateway subway station is in front.) They were meant to be clad with ordinary brick, and they would have been ugly excrescences; but for various reasons they ended up with these gleaming chrome walls instead, creating a constantly shifting play of light all day. “Towers in a park” was the International Style ideal of a city; it was usually a miserable failure when actually built, but many of the miserable failures were inspired by this conspicuous success, which was one of the most talked-about building projects of the postwar era.
