Greenwich Village Modern

Although Greenwich Village boasts the city’s largest concentration of early residential architecture with many fine examples of Federal, Greek Revival, and Italianate houses along its quaint tree-lined streets, it is also home to important Modern and contemporary architecture. Designed by Joseph Urban, the first building constructed for the New School for Social Research, completed in 1931, was among New York’s earliest in the International Style. The three elegant concrete towers of University Village (1967), surrounding Picasso’s “Portrait of Sylvette”, were designed by James Ingo Freed of I.M. Pei and Associates and designated NYC landmarks in 2006. Philip Johnson realized four major projects for NYU in the early 1970s. More recently, sizable institutional works have been completed by internationally prominent architects, including Roche Dinkeloo, Skidmore, Owings and Merill and Kohn Pedersen Fox. Join John Arbuckle, President of the New York/Tri-State Chapter of DOCOMOMO, an international organization dedicated to preserving Modern architecture, to explore architecture of the recent past in Greenwich Village.