A Design IV studio section led by Stella Betts traveled to Albany this past week to visit the Empire State Plaza, the subject of her studio’s brief. 

Titled Re-Imagining Empire State Plaza, the studio is both an urban and architectural investigation. Conceived and designed by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and the architect Wallace Harrison, Empire Plaza was built in New York’s capital city of Albany in the late 1960s and early 70s, and is a paradigm of modernist urban planning. Through a series of choreographed operations, Betts is prompting students to deeply re-adapt the plaza by transforming its relationship to its larger urban context and infrastructural systems, rethinking its program and use, adapting its existing buildings to become carbon neutral, and imaging a new kind of public plaza for the people of Albany and the citizens of New York. 

The field trip featured visits to the plaza’s buildings, including a performing arts venue known as The Egg, Corning Tower and its observation deck overlooking the city, the New York State Museum and Library, the Justice Building, and the concourse below the plaza. In addition, the studio visited two H.H. Richardson buildings—the State Capital, with its famous “million dollar stair” completed in 1899, and Albany City Hall, completed in 1883.