In the late 1960s, New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected a scandalous proposal submitted by Marcel Breuer and Associates to float a fifty-five-story office tower in the air rights above Grand Central Terminal. The tendency among historians has been to treat Breuer's tower as an act of vandalism, but this article argues that such an interpretation obscures the real political and economic stakes of the controversy. In fact, Breuer's design uncovered the single-minded profit orientation of development interests and the preservationists who opposed the scheme operated less on behalf of a landmark threatened with defacement than against an economy of development operating without meaningful public oversight. Contemporary accounts repress this antagonism between preservationists and a growth machinery operated by corporate capitalists; they repress exactly what the proposal made visible to its critics. And the scandal of Breuer's proposal was not in the threat it posed to the terminal but precisely in the irreconcilability, in the 1960s, of development and preservation.

中文翻译：

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“在错误的时间在错误的地方的错误建筑物”：Marcel Breuer和中央大塔楼争议，1967–1969年

在1960年代后期，纽约市地标保护委员会拒绝了马塞尔·布劳尔（Marcel Breuer and Associates）提出的一项丑闻提议，即在中央车站上方的空中吊起一幢五十五层的办公大楼。历史学家之间一直倾向于将布鲁尔的塔视为破坏行为，但本文认为，这种解释掩盖了争议的真正政治和经济利益。实际上，布劳耶的设计揭示了发展利益的一心一意的利益取向，反对该计划的保鲜主义者较少代表一个面临污损的地标而运作，而不是反对没有有意义的公众监督的发展经济。当代的说法压制了保存主义者和公司资本家所操纵的增长机制之间的对抗。他们完全压制了该提案对其批评者可见的内容。布劳尔提议的丑闻不是在威胁码头，而是在1960年代发展与保存的不可调和。