Name-Brand Designs for the City’s Skyline
Designs for the HL23 tower in Chelsea.
N.Y. Times. The HL23 tower, planned for a site on 23rd Street in Chelsea, is the kind of commission Neil Denari has being waiting for his entire working life. Mr. Denari, a Los Angeles architect who once ran the Southern California Institute of Architecture, has labored on the profession’s periphery for decades. But because of a recent demand for name-brand residential architecture in New York, he is finally getting a chance to test his ideas in the real world.
The Glass House building at Spring and Washington Streets was designed by Annabel Selldorf and Philip Johnson.
Neil Denari’s building is part of an eruption of luxury residential towers already constructed or being designed by the profession’s most celebrated luminaries. The financial markets are in an ominous roil. But even if only a few more of these buildings are completed, the final effect could be the greatest transformation of the city’s physical identity since the 1960s.
A rendering of a building on Mercer Street designed by Jean Nouvel.
Bold and formally elaborate — some would say showy — these buildings reflect a mix of attitudes and styles that the city has never seen. They also reveal an unmistakable shift in the appetites and aspirations of an elite group of New Yorkers for whom an apartment’s architectural pedigree has become a new form of status symbol. Decades from now these preening, sometimes beautiful, sometimes obtrusive towers could well be the last testament to this century’s first gilded age.
Herzog & De Meuron designed 40 Bond Street which was developed by Ian Schrager.
When workers broke ground two years ago on Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond in the East Village, the building was hailed as one of the city’s first serious residential projects by an international celebrity firm. Today the cast green glass facade feels slick and mannered. An elaborate gate meant to resemble a three-dimensional work of graffiti is an embarrassing effort to tap into a bygone underground scene.
Designs for Frank Gehry’s Beekman Street Tower.
The muscular forms of Frank Gehry’s 74-story Beekman Street Tower, being built near City Hall, are like the chiseled setbacks and crisp vertical lines of Rockefeller Center’s RCA tower and the neo-Classicism of Stalin-era Moscow. Yet its crinkled stainless steel is a wonder; as light flickers across the facade, it will seem to dissolve into rivulets of water.
A rendering for Tower Verre, Jean Nouvel’s 75-story condominium in Midtown Manhattan.
Similarly the slim, tapered form of Jean Nouvel’s 75-story condominium and hotel tower, planned for a site alongside the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street, is a play on traditional New York skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building. The design of its taut glass skin suggests shards of glass falling from the sky. A weblike pattern of beams crisscross the exterior, as if the building were bracing itself against psychological and economic forces pressing in from all sides.
Bernard Tschumi’s Blue Building apartments on the Lower East Side.
Decorated in a checkerboard pattern of irregular blue and black windows, Bernard Tschumi’s recently completed Blue Building bulges out to one side as it rises above the surrounding tenements, as if trying to pack as much real estate as possible onto its Lower East Side lot. The effect of the distortions is that the building is constantly changing as you move around it, like an enormous piece of costume jewelry twinkling in the light.
Apartments on 48 Bond Street, designed by Deborah Berke and Associates.
In other cases, however, the seemingly noble aim of working within a neighborhood’s character leads to lackluster design. The scale and placement of the windows on the facade of Deborah Berke’s new limestone-and-steel apartment complex just across from 40 Bond, for example, does echo the neighboring buildings. But the results are tepid.
Julian Schnabel’s building on West 11th Street.
The current infatuation with brand names has also opened up the profession to new and unexpected voices. It’s been a good while since I have written about a building as crudely cobbled together as Julian Schnabel’s Palazzo Chupi, which was completed last year on West 11th Street, for example. Still, the overblown scale and collision of styles have a refreshing bluntness; in some ways it’s closer in spirit to the vernacular architecture of the Far East, an atavistic approach that is a nice counterpoint to the hyper-modernity of so much contemporary work.
Jean Nouvel’s building at 40 Mercer Street.
The city has seen monuments to personal ostentation before. But for the most part, New York’s architectural achievements in the 20th century were either major civic buildings or monuments to corporate power. Today that balance has been reversed. The abundance of luxury apartment buildings and the wealth of talent enlisted proclaim their outsize significance. A generation from now we may look back at these condo buildings as our generation’s chief contribution to the city’s history: gorgeous tokens of a rampantly narcissistic age.
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