I doubt this will ever materialize, and not because it’s hideous and unimaginative; it’s because it doesn’t utilize the full volume of the lot it’s built on down to the last cubic centimeter, which is what governs architectural design in NYC…
There was a fabulous structure, the Singer Building, constructed in lower Manhattan in 1908 and for a short time, the tallest building in the world. Despite repeated attempts to rescue it, it was demolished in 1964, because it only occupied a fraction of the theoretical box allowed by zoning and was replaced by a monolithic black slab, which does maximize that volume.
There’s a sort of consistency you get in style across the “ages” if everyone obeys the maximise-your-allowed-volume rule. Even buildings with completely different façade designs and materials seem to fit together.
In NYC, the developers are the actual architects, because they set the constraints, which are to maximize saleable/rentable square footage.None of them have an aesthetic bone in their body. The inevitable solution is a box, and the nominal architects are left to distinguish their box from the other boxes by designing the “amenities”. One of the few structures that circumvented this is Santiago Calatrava’s PATH station,like it or not, and that’s only because it’s a public space and he had unlimited funds at the time, after 9/11.
One Manhattan Square
In the middle of nowhere,and defiling the Manhattan Bridge, the developer here, Gary Barnett, can’t even give these 819 apartments away, so there is some justice.
Imagine the floor directory, though. Total nightmare. There will be floors in the bridges only accessible by diagonal elevator. And at that same level, you’d have floor 42a, 42b, 42c, and 42d in addition to the cross section of the diagonal bridge which would be 42e. At other floors there’d be a single continuous level, or three or two…
Whoever was delivering packages to this place would need a custom mobile app to navigate.
In Europe you have plenty of buildings which seem to be maximizing their footprint, but actually contain spacious courtyards and gallerias. That aint the case here! The famous 1916 New York zoning law was designed to mandate a certain number of setbacks so that skyscrapers did not completely blot out the light at street level. The artist Hugh Ferris depicted the envelopes allowed under the law in a famous drawing.
Well, there are boxes and then there are boxes. Until the last 150 years or so, architecture was governed purely by gravity and materials; structures like the one that inspired this post would have been impossible, even to imagine. You pretty much had to build straight up, and yes, it was good to encompass as much areas as possible, so rectilinear was the answer. That said, there is no comparison in my mind between the charm of how it was applied in the Old World and what’s happened in much of the US, especially in urban centers.
When I was a kid, there was a toy called “Kenner’s Girder and Panel building set”, that consisted of snap-together plastic girders, and snap-on plastic panels.All it allowed was some variation of a box, and enabled you to build what now looks like the center of most major US cities. Somebody learned the wrong lesson.
5 minutes to get the attention of the architectural community around the world is a great achievement if it weren’t for how easy it is to irritate an architect.
They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but is that always true? So, these guys get their name in the design journals, and even get pipsqueaks like me arguing over them, what then, if this is the kind of work they do?
The original WTC were boxes, but at least featured an innovative tube structural system that allowed the required height.For the new building, all sorts of fanciful designs were submitted, including the above, and Daniel Libeskind’s complex angular design. Of course, this being New York, in the end it was all whittled down to another glass box, another giant air conditioned warehouse for unhappy people.
I’m a machine guy, not an architecture guy, so take it for what it’s worth. But when I saw that rendering, first thought was, that so doesn’t fit in with its surroundings. Maybe if it were more isolated somewhere that it could much more dictate the context, but a sore thumb in that context. Then I thought the giant radii at the top but still with the grid windows seemed like too much of a CGI geometric pattern exercise and not a real functional structure.
That FOA concept is much more interesting to me, though that is out of context, so maybe I wouldn’t like that too if it was huge in the same spot. Maybe if either were smaller in the same plot.
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