A little more about the question of style. Style is not about what you say but how you say it, not about content but delivery. The impersonal announcements of voicemail, or of a public address system, are almost pure content, there is very little delivery beyond a certain functional brevity. But an actual person speaking includes variable emphasis of tone and volume, facial expressions, hand gestures, asides, jokes, and so on. The effect can be conversational or stentorian, formal or informal, intimate or cold, depending on the style. That is why the word was originally used in the context of rhetoric. Architectural style is comparable. Pennoyer’s clock in Moynihan Hall is sometimes described as Art Deco, which I suppose it suggests, although the clock face is as modern as a Max Bill timepiece. Art Deco has a frivolous side, but this clock is monochrome matte grey, so rather serious, although the telescoping form is sculptural, so it’s not completely serious. “You need to know the time but there is more to life than train schedules.” The decoration is restrained, but it’s there, which gives us something to look at. That is what is missing in the architecture of the hall—there is nothing to look at. This is not really SOM’s fault, or at least it’s not because they made mistakes. Once committed to a modern architectural vocabulary, the result was preordained. Modernist architects eschew style, or rather, they work in only one style, which can be characterized as “functional,” “clean,” or “no-nonsense.” Just the facts, ma’am. But the hall of an important railroad station in an important city demands more than facts. That is what the architects who designed the great stations of the Moderne era—Thirtieth Street in Philadelphia, Union Station in Omaha, Union Terminal in Cincinnati, understood.
MOYNIHAN HALL, CONT’D.
