When you first arrive in New York, all you want is to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and through Central Park. After living in New York for a few years, you start appreciating things that are more unusual — like the Noguchi Museum.
My level of nerdiness: deliberately going to the Hyatt Grand Central New York hotel just to finish shooting exactly one angle of two sculptures that I missed last time and didn’t photograph — so I could write this post about two girls…
Awilda and Chloe are two incredibly beautiful sculptural heads by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, adorning the lobby of the Hyatt Grand Central Hotel.
Elongated marble faces with closed eyes are part of Jaume Plensa’s highly recognizable series of works often referred to as “Portraits of Silence.” To me, they feel like reflections, and because the eyes are closed, these portraits seem to invite you to look inward rather than outward. This is silence as a form of resistance to the noise of the world — a world that is becoming louder, faster, and more scandal driven. Against this backdrop, it becomes especially important to preserve inner harmony while continuing the process of self discovery.
“These faces are not portraits, they are inner landscapes,” Plensa himself comments on the series.
The three-meter-tall faces appeared in the hotel in 2011, but it’s important to note that their future can hardly be called secure. The hotel, originally opened in 1919, is slated for demolition. Construction is set to begin as early as 2026, and an extraordinary 83-story skyscraper — 175 Park Avenue (also known as Project Commodore) — will rise on this site. The architects are the firm SOM, the same team behind One World Trade Center (WTC).
And this is despite the fact that the hotel itself had already undergone a major renovation in the late 1970s, when a young and then little-known developer, Donald Trump, took on his most ambitious development project — transforming the historic Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt. It was this mega-project that marked the beginning of Donald Trump’s very bright and independent career as a prominent urban developer. I recommend watching the Netflix documentary about Trump, which features a great deal of New York from the second half of the 20th century.
Cost of admission: free
📍 Address: Hyatt Grand Central / 109 E 42nd St, New York, NY 10017
Water’s Soul by Jaume Plensa
And I can’t help but note that another work by Jaume Plensa appeared in New York in 2021 (technically in New Jersey, but on the Hudson waterfront) — a 24-meter-tall head titled Water’s Soul.
Decorative chandeliers at Hudson Yards by Jaume Plensa
On the Manhattan side of the Hudson, in the Hudson Yards area, you can see another work by Jaume Plensa — decorative sculptural spheres located in the lobby of the building at the address…
📍30 Hudson Yards, New York, NY 10001
