Indoor parks in New York City? Well, yes – after a fashion. We've already seen a mobile micropark (the adorable Healing Garden, which lives inside a trailer). On a much grander scale is the Ford Foundation Atrium, inside the Foundation's headquarters on East 43rd St.
The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice inhabits a 12-story box of steel, granite, and glass built in the 1960s. The award-winning landmarked building was immediately recognized for its creative architecture. As an aesthetic object it stands taller than countless much bigger NYC office buildings.
Shortly after the building opened in 1967, the Architectural Record opined: "Kevin Roche's design for the new Ford Foundation headquarters is a unique symbolic expression that designates a new kind of urban space...highly charged with a symbolic content that invests the most ordinary aspects of the building's life with an almost ritualistic significance."
Equally impressed, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in the New York Times that "this civic gesture of beauty and excellence...is a grant of some importance [to New Yorkers] in a world where spirit and soul are deadened by the speculative cheapness of the environment." The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic couldn't have known at the time how thoroughly "speculative cheapness" would come to infect nearly every aspect of our country, well beyond the bounds of the business world.
The winter garden inside welcomes the public Monday through Saturday, except when special events are held.
A reflecting pool at the lowest level provides a focal point and a sheen of calm to a busy day.
A slow walk up and down the atrium's paths and stairways, winding among its dozens of plant species, provides a sweet and unusual respite from the pace of the city. Any time you're on the East Side in the vicinity of Tudor City and the UN, rest your soul at this indoor oasis, a park in all but name.
Ready to speed up again? Watch the Ford Foundation's time-lapse video of the blank space becoming a refulgent garden.
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