Accentuate the Personal

Many of the most successful projects struck pleasingly human notes for all their impressive scale

- MICHAEL J. LEWIS

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.