2025/01/02 by Joseph M. Watson · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Engineering · #Architecture, Design, and Social History #Architecture, Modernity, and Design
paper · doi:10.1080/13264826.2025.2459940
openalex publication_date 2025/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Rockefeller Center has long been described as a city in miniature. The project’s aspirations to completeness have been discussed in a variety of terms, but most critics and historians focus on the contrast between the project’s cohesive visual language and the more varied urban landscape surrounding it. This preoccupation has led to blind spots in received understanding of this well-known project. This article focuses on little-known infrastructural and housing projects—some built, others not—that carry the Center’s history from the heart of Manhattan to the margins of the metropolis. To ensure financial viability, these projects mostly sought to pull wealthy, white commuters into the Center’s orbit, but they also reveal competing visions of urban and regional change among the Center’s architects and managers. Rockefeller Center provides a unique vantage point from which to consider the ways architecture exceeds the formal and visual preoccupations of most architects and architectural historians.