Accentuate the Personal

New York has seen seven skyscrapers rise higher than the Empire State Building since 2014 but few, I suspect, would show up on a list of the decade's finest buildings. Is it because objects at this order of magnitude-the so-called supertalls-depend on computers to do what was once done by the human eye and hand? It seems that the better we get at integrating data and algorithms into the making of a building - what is called parametric design - the more difficult it is to make that building memorable, let alone archetypal. And so once again the best buildings of 2024 are those where the personal decision-making process cannot be offloaded onto artificial intelligence.

The process of designing the Far Rockaway Library began with that sophisticated data-gathering instrument, the bicycle. In 2012 Craig Dykers, co-founder of Snøhetta, rode from Brooklyn to Queens to ask people what they wanted in a community library. Although he told me that "60% ran away," those who lingered gave a sense that Far Rockaway was an "active and energizing place" that needed a correspondingly active building. The result is an ecstasy of motion and color. You enter at the point of its corner site, between two angled walls of fritted glass adorned with what seem to be playfully decorative squiggles. They are actually sentences about city life, written by the artist José Parlá and enlarged to the point where the walls of the library themselves become the pages of a monumental book. The last element to be resolved was the color of those walls, which was settled when the designers rose early to observe the sunrise at Rockaway Beach (less than a mile away). They were struck by how the orange was richly speckled with violet and red, a palette that is reprised in the walls here. No visitor will make the connection, consciously at least, but all will sense that this is a rare public building of intimately personal character.

The Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, occupying a luxuriant 15acre site in Sarasota, Fla., have added three new buildings that encompass 188,000 square feet, more than 10 times the size of the Far Rockaway Library, but they also show a pleasing human touch. The center-piece is the Morganroth Family Living Energy Access Facility (LEAF), which according to the Selby contains "a garden-to-plate restaurant, a new gift shop, vertical gardens, and a nearly 50,000square-foot solar array"; one has to look twice before realizing that all these functions are wrapped around an unexpectedly pleasant parking garage. The Selby specializes in "air plants," or epiphytes, that depend on other plants for their support, which does not suggest a massive architecture rooted firmly in the ground. When I visited earlier this year, I was struck by the airy lightness of the entrance canopy, which was made as open as possible, with no sullen turnstile, and wondered how it would hold up in a hurricane. Now we know. Hurricane Helene, which buffeted Sarasota on Sept. 27, left the Selby unscathed, including its irreplaceable plant research center that was intended to be hurricane-resilient. The project is a collaboration between Overland Partners, a firm of Texas-based architects, and OLIN, the landscape architects.

Ever since architecture became an instrument of personal expression - which according to Leo Steinberg began with Michelangelo - the garden posed a special challenge. The botanical world takes center stage there, and the architect's humble task is to put an attractive border around it, to serve as frame-maker, not as painter. That task is fulfilled splendidly in the $250 million expansion project at Longwood Gardens, an hour's drive west of Philadelphia. Besides a new glass conservatory, architects Weiss/Manfredi were charged with adding a new restaurant and event space. Rather than crowding yet more buildings to the ensemble, they chose instead to tuck them behind the 400-foot-long retaining wall that is the defining feature of the garden's main approach. Here is a considerable amount of elegant architecture, virtually invisible - "hiding in plain sight," as the architects put it.

It is gratifying, at a moment when the world's greatest architectural achievement is the rebirth of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, that a restoration project must be counted among America's best buildings of the year. This is Michigan Central Station in Detroit, the fraternal twin of Grand Central Station. Built in 1913, abandoned by Amtrak in 1988, and purchased by Ford Motor in 2018, it has now been restored by Quinn Evans, specialists in historic preservation. Its ground floor is open to the public and used by community groups, while the tower above is available as commercial real estate, the three lowest stories reserved for Ford.

So meticulous and sensitive is the restoration that one can scarcely believe that the station had once been left for dead and stripped of all that could be carried off. In a perverse stroke of luck, the restoration benefited from the pillaging. Building fragments and artifacts, which would have disintegrated in the rain and wind-beaten shell, were quietly returned by their owners who found themselves transformed retroactively from looters into architectural patrons. In the process, a building that had become an embarrassing eyesore on the skyline once more became a proud emblem of Detroit, battered, unbowed, proud.

Michigan Central Station shows that while parametric design may give you a flawlessly energy-efficient skyscraper it has nothing to teach us about the art of architectural restoration. The criteria that matter in restoration-human experience and memory - cannot be reduced to mere data. Such an ambitious project would likely never have been launched by someone without intense personal memories of the station in its prime, as has Bill Ford Jr., the Ford executive who guided the nearly $1 billion restoration of the building and its grounds.

Not every executive is in a position to wheedle so much out of his board. The First Christian Church in Columbus, Ind., had to make do with $3.2 million to reconstruct its sublime tower, a shaft that rises 166 feet without any projecting cornice or other architectural digression. It forms the summit of Eliel Saarinen's brilliantly original church, which was built during World War II, a time when bronze suddenly became unavailable and the intended carillon could not be realized. It must have been daunting to persuade a cash-strapped congregation that it is worthwhile to rebuild a bell-less bell tower. That requires yet another immeasurable quality, love of beauty, of building, of community - for which there is no algorithm, thankfully. The restored building deserves a visit. Go and see it.