One of the advantages of a childhood in Flushing is seeing the remnants of the two World’s Fairs. The New York City Building (constructed for the 1939-1940 Fair and reused for the 1964-1965 Fair) housed an ice rink where I skated often. It also has hosted, since the second Fair, a 1:1200 scale model of the city, which I saw a number of times as a small child and a few times more recently. (Originally, you saw the model from a small moving car – supposedly a helicopter – that made a circuit at the perimeter of the model. I have a vague memory, circa 1970-72, of driving my father crazy by insisting we get back on the ride immediately after we got off of it.)
The buildings were throughly updated in 1992, and major buildings of the last 29 years have been added. So it’s a mix of clearly-defined and up-to-date major buildings, and thousands of ordinary buildings that may be out of date and are hard to distinguish from one another. There are about a million buildings in New York, and most people here (outside the AEC world) can name maybe a hundred. Going there now is not so very different for me than going to, say, the observation deck on top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. I identify the major landmarks and then try to use them to locate more obscure buildings; if I find one, it’s difficult to explain to someone else where to look.
Some links about the model:
New York’s Memory Palace: An Interview With Blagovesta Momchedjikova, by Katie Uva
Cities in Miniature
The Queens Museum’s web page on the Panorama
Atlas Obscura’s web page on the Panorama
There’s an interesting scale problem with the model that is related to the scale issues of architectural ornament and the problem of making a scale model of the solar system. The model is a combination of a large area with a lot of small detail. In facade design, this is why older buildings had three levels of detail: overall shape of the building, large-scale detail (the presence of a cornice, for example), and small scale detail (brackets or dentils on the cornice underside). Modernist buildings that lack one of the two smaller scales are often hard to read from a distance: are those panels in the all-glass facade one story high, of half a story high? The solar-system model problem is that if you make the planets big enough to see, then they have to be very far apart; if you t=make the model small enough to fit in one room, then the planets are tiny.
New York is far from a regular geometry overall, but is some 25 miles maximum north to south and east to west. At the model scale, that’s 110 feet across. The Empire State Building – no longer the tallest in the city, but likely the most famous – is about a foot high including the antenna. The office building that Old Structures is in, to scale, is about 3 inches high and less than 2 inches wide, which is easy to lose in 9300 square feet of model. So, just like the actual aerial view above, you can really only focus on the major buildings. Everything else blends into the general blur of cityscape.
