As Transit Building Is Remade, a 'Stirring' Memorial Will Be Removed It is difficult to love the 61-year-old Transportation Building at 370 Jay Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Correction: It is pretty much impossible to love the Transportation Building. But it's quite possible to respect it as a work of architecture. It speaks clearly of the period after World War II when America set out to sweep away the cobwebs of the past even as it perpetuated the memory of those who fought and died just a few years earlier. It is even easier to respect on learning that Lewis Mumford, the pre-eminent architectural critic of his day, thought so highly of the Transportation Building that he hoped it would become a model for commercial development. Designed by William E. Haugaard and Andrew J. Thomas, the 13-story building opened in 1951 as the headquarters of the New York City Board of Transportation. It remained the headquarters of the successor body, the New York City Transit Authority, until 2006. About 250 employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority still work there, but the building is 93 percent vacant. In his Sky Line column in The New Yorker of April 25, 1953, Mr. Mumford wrote: "This seems to be the very model of an efficient office building. Not a cathedral of commerce, not a temple of advertising, not a palace of municipal power: just a group of offices arranged for the efficient dispatch of administration. There was also one important, reverential civic flourish. An 18-foot-long bas-relief granite map in the open-air entrance arcade listed the transportation workers who had served in the recent war, showing - with five-pointed stars set into the stone - where 24 of them died. Normandy. Iwo Jima. Rhineland. Okinawa. Leyte. Ardennes-Alsace. Naples-Foggia. Names that resonated in the early 1950s. Names that could induce a shudder of sorrow or grief. "Every theater in which they served is designated," Mr. Mumford wrote, "and their names - and a gold star, if that was their portion - are printed where they belong on the map. The whole message is delivered with grave simplicity, yet it is one of the most stirring war memorials I have seen, in the way it brings home the facts of a global war and the part that these men played in fighting it. The Transportation Building might seem to be a candidate for restoration. Instead, it is to be entirely reclad as part of its transformation into the Center for Urban Science and Progress, developed by New York University and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, under city sponsorship and financial support. The project was announced by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and more than a dozen other officials on Monday. The conceptual designs shown this week were by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. "Three-seventy Jay Street will no longer be an eyesore to Downtown Brooklyn," Marty Markowitz, the borough president, said at the announcement. His assessment of the structure is one that's undoubtedly shared by many - if not most - Brooklyn residents. Architectural historians like Robert A. M. Stern and Francis Morrone are more charitably inclined. In 1996, Mr. Stern included 370 Jay Street in a list of 35 modern buildings that he deemed worthy of landmark status. And Mr. Morrone described it in The New York Sun of Oct. 7, 2005, as a kind of proto-green building; environmentally conscious long before that became a cliché. "It was healthful," Mr. Morrone wrote. That is, its slab form and openable casement windows ensured every office the maximum of natural light and through-ventilation. Such qualities loom large in New York, where buildings crowd one another and even private houses and luxury apartments tend to be dark and close. New York University said in its announcement that it would "pursue adaptive reuse, rather than demolition and rebuilding, having a dramatically lower environmental impact." If all goes according to plan, the renovated building will open in 2017. Meanwhile, the Center for Urban Science and Progress will operate in leased space at MetroTech Center, across Jay Street. There is no room in the plan for the World War II memorial. The M.T.A. will oversee its relocation, said Kevin Ortiz, a spokesman for the authority, but a decision has not been reached yet on where it will go to keep bringing home the facts of a global war.