An Avatar Of Steel

Another short trip: I was in Philadelphia last week, and I walked the not-quite two miles from my meeting to the train station on my way home. I took the two unimpressive pictures below on the way:

That’s the rear, Arch Street side, of the Reading Terminal Market, which is, as the name says, adaptive reuse of the old Reading Railroad terminal. The terminal consisted of an office-building headhouse facing Market Street and the huge arched-roof train shed behind, to the north.

That’s all still there, but the train shed has been converted to a kind of front porch for the massive convention center across Arch Street. The bridge you see in my photos connects the old building to the new and is in the same location as the old rail-bed viaduct. (For all I know, it may be a piece of the old viaduct, clad in a modern skin, but I’d guess not.)

Those things that look like the ends of arches in my photos are sort of the ends of arches. Here are the actual arches that make up the train shed roof, from Carol Highsmith’s photos taken during the train-to-convention-center work:

And here’s a construction photo, probably from 1891:

The arches are trusses, not solid, and are purely functional in appearance. So what we’re seeing on the facade – in 2024 or in 1893 – is a fascia. It looks like an arch, but it’s not the structure. Rather, it’s a representation of the structure hidden behind. I stand by my opinion that “structural honesty” in architecture does not really exist, but avatars and symbols certainly do.