also clearly sees the communal importance of the great private spaces of public gathering of those days and we’ve cruised nearby Broadway, once home to bustling crowds and a series of great movie palaces, celebrations of assembly, of a sense of the shared enterprise of citizenship, of belonging.
Part of the brilliance of Saratoga is the way in which this sense of the consequence of civic construction is re-inscribed in a normative pattern that sought to annihilate its predecessor. What Ranalli recognizes in his own singular way, is that the structure of human relations and values he identifies with the good city can be produced with a variety of architectures, if they are able to successfully embody long-standing institutions, spatialities of connectedness and gathering, and if they insist on the consequentiality of pride and of hope. In a language of bright originality, Saratoga incorporates a long and deep tradition of gathering and purpose, a sense of the centeredness of community and a heroic insistence on the idea of beauty in service.
Both the dilemma and the triumph of Saratoga are reflected in a sense of surprise, bordering on wonderment by many who live in the adjoining project that they have been given that kind of a building. Here is the representation of our sad culture, of diminished collective expectations alongside a truly stunning riposte. On a humble site in a poor neighborhood, in an “outer” borough, George Ranalli has overcome a raft of taxing bureaucratic and financial obstacles to produce – for people persuaded that they don’t deserve it – a gem, a great work of architecture, a space of hope and happiness, an affirmation of the possibility that urban life can be good for all of us.