Jagged! (Atelier Jean Nouvel)

Last year, The Observer discovered that Jean Nouvel’s soaring MoMA Tower—called "the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation" by The Times' architecture critic—would not be a jagged victim of boom time hubris but in fact a real part of the skyline after all. Hines, the project’s developer, filed amended plans for the tower last July, showing that even at its Burden’d height of 1,050 feet, the Pritzker prize would still rise.

Now, more encouraging news that this project will actually become a reality: Hines has tapped Corcoran Sunshine to market the MoMA Tower, officially known as the Torre Verre, according to Crain’s, which means sales can't be too far away

"Corcoran Sunshine has always had a great relationship with Hines, a longtime client of the firm, and for the past several years we've been working on the planning and design of this landmark property," said Kelly Kennedy Mack, president of Corcoran Sunshine, in a statement, declining to elaborate on the project. "It will be the ultimate destination for the world's most elite buyers."

Assuming the economy holds on and sales begin in the near future, the project would be well positioned to take advantage of the roaring recovery in the most exclusive corners of the New York City housing market. The past month has seen a record price for co-op ($50.2 million at 740 Park), a staggering Central Park duplex ($70 million at the Ritz-Carlton) and a jaw-dropping new record (somewhere north of $90 million for the penthouse at One57).

Now, we learn that Harry Macklowe’s 432 Park Avenue is well-underway, with building permits recently filed that call for a 1,398-foot tower, as The Real Deal revealed on Friday. At 84 stories, the tower is one foot taller than most recently reported, and technically taller than the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center (might as well be an asterisk). The price will no doubt be just as high.

Whether Torre Verre will be able to command the same prices of some of its rivals will be curious to see. On the one hand, it will not be the tallest, nor directly on the Park, but the cache of both its architect and the museum’s brand name might just help push it over the edge.

Why the name was ever changed from MoMA Tower is a mystery to us. Perhaps the developers should pull a Frank Gehry and call it “New York, by MoMA.” Maybe residents could even borrow art to hang on their walls--for a small donation, of course.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Amanda approves.

It was Amanda Burden who stopped the MoMA Tower, giving Jean Nouvel's 1,250-foot spire a haircut, and it is up to her if the project will ever snake its way onto the skyline. As The Observer revealed last month, developer Hines Interests has resubmitted plans for the shorter, stockier Torre Verre, and they await Ms. Burden's approval. Where the head of the City Planning Department once thought the top of the tower was undignified, unworthy of sharing space with the Empire State Building, she now loves it.

Arts Journal blogger CultureGrrl revealed in a recent post what Ms. Burden told her about the MoMA Tower at May's Downtown Whitney groundbreaking.

"The top is glorious," Burden told me when I ran into her at the Downtown Whitney's groundbreaking, before the plans were formally filed. "It's going to be a great signature addition to the skyline." She added that the building's "facets are more pronounced" and there is more of a sense of movement around the exterior.

High praise!

A department spokesperson cautioned The Observer about reading too deeply into these pronouncements, though it certainly sounds like the tower is on its way to being approved. When that might happen remains unclear because the new plans are currently undergoing a chair certification, which has no set timetable, unlike a standard land-use application. It could be approved tomorrow or in two years—as long as it takes to get the designs in line with what the department, and its strong-willed commissioner, desires.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Hines declined to release new plans, and initially suggested there were none. Through a public information request, The Observer has obtained copies of architectural drawings from the City Planning Commission. While they may not be as sexy as the kind of full-color renderings architects usually prepare to wow the media , they shed plenty of light on the new shape of the project.

Having lost 200 feet in height cost Hines almost 30,000-square-feet of new development in the tower. Instead of rising to 85 stories, all but the top four of which were occupiable, there are now 78 stories, with four stories on top still reserved for mechanical systems, such as elevators and HVAC. The total square footage is roughly 629,000, or about half as much as the bulkier Chrysler Building.

This shrinkage has not appeared to cost Hines much, after all. In approving the project, the City Council required the developer to reduce the number of hotel rooms, a matter that had concerned the neighbors because it can mean lots of transient visitors—not that the Warwick Hotel isn't across the street, or a huge Hilton on Sixth Avenue. Instead of 147,000 square feet of hotel space, with 167 rooms on the eighth through 17th floor, there is now 96,000 square feet on the eighth through 13th floor—the plans did not detail the number of rooms, but the City Council approval stipulated no more than 100 rooms.

There has actually been a net gain in residential space, to 480,000 square feet, up from 458,000. Instead of spanning the 19th floor through 81st floor, the apartments will be on the 14th floor through the 74th floor. The plans did not state how many units there will be, but some examples can be seen in the plans. Three apartments on the 23rd floor measure 1,847 square feet, 2,263 feet and 2,296 feet, compared to one 5,669-square-foot apartment on the 59th floor. The square-footage of the top most floor, which conceivably would be combined with units below to create a larger duplex or triplex, measures 3,204 square feet.

Space for MoMA in the tower will remain constant at roughly 52,000 square feet, and the plans also call for a restaurant located in the lobby and basement of the building.

As for the appearance of the building, compared to earlier drawings and renderings, it does look a little bit squatter, but not by much, and the articulation of the tower has changed slightly. Viewed from Brooklyn, across the East River, it would not be invisible, appearing somewhere in the lee between One Bryant Park and the old CitiCorp Center. Still, it will not tower over these buildings, either.

Hines declined to comment on the new details for the tower, but it describes the changes thusly in its new application:

The facade consists of several sloped planes at different angles, which ascend to a sharp needles at the top of the building. The tower top is distinguished by three distinct asymetrical peaks, of varying height and shape. The top peak has a vertex with an interior angle of 27 degrees. The facade treatment of the building consists of non-mirrored glass and painted aluminum elements. And the interior structure of the building is expressed on the facade in an aluminum web "Diagrid" pattern of nodes and spokes, which extends from the sidewalk to the top of the building, not including mechanical spaces. The mechanical equipment at the top of the building is set behind a facade of blades, or louvres."

That last point is of particular note because it was the under-designed nature of the tower's top that led Ms. Burden to have it shortened.

As before, the redesigned tower is producing a mix of opinions, directed as much at Ms. Burden as at Mr. Nouvel.

Architecture critic and editor Jayne Merkel, when presented with the new plans, felt an appropriate response had been made by the developer. "Most people will see it from below, where it will still look quite tall, somewhat faceted, and thin," she wrote in an email. "It will not appear to be quite as pencil thin on the horizon as the first scheme would have, but I am not at all sure that that is a problem either. It won’t be lonely in Midtown Manhattan, and I don’t think it is so brilliant that the original height was justified. I suspect that if the revised, shortened tower had been submitted originally, its champions would have liked it just fine."

Carol Willis, director of the Skyscraper Museum downtown, believes the decision by the city to lower the tower was an unfortunate one. "Manhattan has two big defining characteristics, its vibrant streets and its competitive skyline," she said. "We've done a great job in the past decade with protecting and improving the quality of experience of the 'sidewalks of New York,'  but I think it's a shame that the skyline seems to be losing its ambition and diversity."

For a look at a truly tall building, consider the Supertall exhibition currently on view at the museum.

The Death Spire. (Atelier Jean Nouvel)

New York City may have brought down Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but another torrid Frenchman will not be held up by the likes of us.

Jean Nouvel, winner of the Pritzker Prize and a severe man even by the standards of his profession, delivered unto the city a “real skyscraper” in 2007. The Torre Verre, more commonly known as the MoMA Tower, would rise to 1,250 feet, an obsidian shard piercing the heart of midtown, built on land traded by the museum to a developer, Hines, for $125 million and three floors of galleries in the base of the new building. A rival to the Empire State Building 20 blocks south, The Times’ Niccolai Ouroussoff called it “the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation.”

Mr. Nouvel, in defending his creation to the City Planning Commission, which was then  deciding the outsize tower’s fate, said at a July 2009 hearing, “It’s like music, part of the rhythm of the city and the skyline.” Commission chair Amanda Burden was less taken with Mr. Nouvel's tune, and knocked 200 feet off the top of the tower, bringing it well south of the Chrysler Building it would have eclipsed (and much closer to its as-of-right height).

Among the issues, she deemed the building’s thorny crown an eyesore for visitors to the Empire State Building, a position that drew outcry from the tower's legion of worshipers. "Approving the design of Tower Verre while lowering the height was not a compromise but an example of curatorial caution run amok, an attempt to turn midtown into an architectural preserve," wrote Justin Davidson in New York magazine.

The tower will rise to something closer to the bottom of its crown, though its new profile has not been revealed.

Ms. Burden's burden not withstanding , like many of the starchitectural erections proposed during the boom, the tower was put on hold, left for dead by some. Hines argued during the approval process that the project simply could not work if not approved at its original height. It  would simply be too small to justify the expense of such an ambitious tower. So much for so much.

And yet, this is New York. Expensive real estate can always be justified.

Two weeks ago, Hines quietly filed a new set of plans with the Department of City Planning. They are compliant with two special permits that the commission and the City Council approved in the fall of 2009, which enforce the 1,050-foot height along with restrictions on things like a loading dock for the new building and the museum's sculpture garden fence—something that has been bothering the neighbors ever since the 2003 renovations. According to a department spokesperson, the application is a chair certification, which does not require public approvals. The process is meant to ensure that the project is in accordance with what was previously agreed upon; a review has no set timeframe.

The resolutions required a tower of similar design proportions. How much the new design resembles the old one, just shorter, is not immediately clear. Initially, Hines said it had filed no new plans, but when The Observer pointed to a notice on the City Planning website, spokesman George Lancaster admitted that the project was back on and imminent. “We DID file revised plans with City Planning for the shorter tower adjacent to MoMA,” he wrote in an email. “We aren’t going to release drawings or details just yet but will in the near future.” He would not say whether the project had financing yet.

The controversial crown.

MoMA was equally taciturn. "The filing is Hines' so I don't have any details on it here. Our plans with regard to the project remain unchanged," emailed Margaret Doyle, the museum's communications director. When asked about something Hines would not discuss, the recently acquired Folk Art Museum and how it might factor into the project, she replied, "MoMA has not yet announced any plans for the Folk Art Museum building."

“Of course for the neighborhood it’s going to be a problem, because it’s a big, tall building,” said Al Butzel, attorney for the Coalition for Responsible Midtown Development, a local community group that filed an unsuccessful suit against the project last summer. “Ten-fifty is better than 1250, but it’s still much more than we wanted, which was 500, closer to the Financial Times building next door.”

Justin Peyser, co-founder of the group, put it more succinctly and cynically in an email: "Our city has always been for sale to the highest bidder and this bid is awfully high."

In Paris, they forbid tall buildings, too.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Four weeks after City Planning Commission chairwoman Amanda Burden put her own giant stamp on the project, chopping the allowed height to 1,050 feet, Mr. Nouvel went before a City Council subcommittee and pleaded to raise the tower’s height back up.

“You have to keep the city alive,” he said, speaking with a heavy French accent. “I try to respect the neighborhood. The building is so slim.” He was joined in his appeal by the project’s developer, the Texas-based Hines Interest, which claimed that a suddenly smaller building—brought down from the level of the Empire State Building to that of the Chrysler Building height—would threaten the economics of the situation.

But still, it wasn’t an all-out threat to scrap the tower.

The project manager for Hines, David Penick, was asked by Councilman Dan Garodnick flatly: “Can this building not be built at 1,050?”

His response? Six seconds of silence, followed by: “It’s—it’s very hard to say.”

Much will depend on the market, Mr. Penick added, in an almost refreshing bit of candor compared with the typical developer who comes before the Council and disingenuously pronounces that even the slightest change to his planned building would have an apocalyptic effect on his project.

After the hearing, Mr. Nouvel was kept muzzled by Hines, as Mr. Penick said to him on the way out, “Now, I don’t want you talking to reporters.”

He didn’t.

ebrown@observer.com

Burned by a post-approval architect swap at Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project—the Brooklyn developer dropped Frank Gehry and his iconic basketball arena earlier this year—the chairwoman of the City Planning Commission is going to new lengths to see that she’s not the victim of a future bait-and-switch.

The first to experience this new approach are MoMA and Texas developer Hines Interests, which are planning a slender, pointy, 1,250-foot skyscraper adjacent to the West 53rd Street museum. Designed by Jean Nouvel, the tall, bald, soft-speaking French architect who last year received architecture’s Pritzker Prize, the much-praised tower would soar above midtown with hotel rooms and ridiculously pricey apartments filling its Empire State Building–like height.

But the design needs the assent of Ms. Burden’s Planning Commission. And, on Sept. 9, it’s slated to take some major actions on the building. Most notably: Ms. Burden and her colleagues are expected to take a gigantic 200-foot bite off the height of Mr. Nouvel’s baby, and, according to an executive involved with discussions, layer on a set of regulations aimed at handcuffing the developer to its current design.

Generally, developers receive approvals for a building’s basics—density, height and massing—but they are typically not held to their specific designs or architecture. In the case of Mr. Ratner, after he went before Ms. Burden for her assent in 2006, he had only to follow basic “design guidelines” that called for items such as some glass walls along the street. (This was a state process in which Ms. Burden had a more peripheral role.) Thus, when he dropped Mr. Gehry earlier this year, Mr. Ratner was free to dramatically change the Nets basketball arena to a cheaper, more functional design.

The swap was said to have incensed Ms. Burden, who is known to approach many projects that come before her with a heavy, detail-focused hand.

Indeed, with regard to the MoMA tower, she said at a July hearing that the issue of potential design change was “bedeviling” her.

“You have an extraordinarily talented architect and a very dynamic and, for me personally, a thrilling design,” she said, according to a transcript. “However, what is to assure me and the commissioners and the city that this glorious design isn’t going to turn into the as-of-right massing, which would be a calamity?”

As for the 200-foot chop, it seems Ms. Burden and her staff were less than thrilled about the looks of the air conditioning and other mechanicals atop the tower in the current design. Per a City Planning statement issued Sept. 8, the top, with what would be the city’s highest occupied floors, was marked by “highly visible mechanical equipment”—apparently enough to cost the developer the super-tall crown.

ebrown@observer.com