While you can, grab a glimpse of the sky on the south side of Washington Square Park, before the Monument obscures your view. New York University's Loeb Student Center, a fab midcentury modernist gem by some standards, is about to be demolished— guts and asbestos first. Over the next two years NYU will build the $70 million Helen and Martin Kimmel Center for University Life, designed by Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates, the architect of the Ford Foundation building near the United Nations (1967) and, more recently, the octogonal Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City (1997). The 12-story, white granite behemoth will have all the charm, as one observer has said, of a corporate office building in downtown Houston. It will house a 1022-seat theater, a two-floor conference center, and countless student-activity offices from the Drumz and Rhythmz club to the Aesculapian League, all linked by a glass-sheathed staircase lit day and night, and topped off with a two-story glass mansard roof. The building will balloon to twice the size of Loeb and on winter afternoons its shadow will plunge most of the southeast corner of the... More >>>