By Matt Chaban 1/03 4:57pm

Skyscraper Living

7 Photos

Another Splendid Tower for 57th Street

With Another Luxury Tower, 57th Street Becoming Manhattan’s New Gold Coast

Back in September, The Observer wondered just how many luxury towers could possibly pop up on 57th Street, following the announcement of 107 West 57th Street. This was in addition to Gary Barnett’s One57, CIM and Harry Macklowe’s 432 Park and Mr. Barnett’s 225 West 57th Street, which is poised to become the city’s tallest tower at 1,550 feet. And all the way down at the Hudson, there is of course Bjarke Ingels and Durst Fetner’s pyramid apartments.

Now, the shiny strip has a new eastern redoubt. The Observer has learned that a long-planned 57-story tower at 250 East 57th Street, on the corner of Second Avenue, is set to rise this year. Demolition already began on the old high school on the 63,000-square-foot lot in November, the same month World Wide Group, the project’s developer, filed new construction documents for the contorted tower designed by Roger Duffy, the art-loving visionary at SOM who designed the equally daring Toren condo tower in Downtown Brooklyn, Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/27/12 10:16pm

Best Laid Plans

9 Photos

A High Line for the East Side

A High Line for the East Side: Strolling the Park Avenue Promenade

In this week’s Observer, we take a look at two proposals to widen the Park Avenue median and turn it into a pedestrian promenade. One is from SHoP Architects, one SOM, both presented at last month’s MAS Summit. Part High Line, part art walk, the hope is it would create an entirely new destination on the East Side of Manhattan, providing much needed open space along the way. Take a stroll for yourself and decide. Read More

By Matt Chaban 10/15/12 12:01am

Silicon Alley U

5 Photos

Cornell's Island of Tech

For Its Roosevelt Island Tech Campus, Cornell Pursues Some Cutting-Edge Designs by Thom Mayne and SOM

When technology changes at the speed of a microprocessor or the flicker of a screen, in the time it takes to type in a password or hit send on an email, how can buildings be created to contain all this light-speed innovation? That is the quandry confronting the architects designing Cornell and Technion University’s news campus on Roosevelt Island.

“Google didn’t exist 25 years ago, Facebook didn’t exist 25 years ago, even AOL didn’t exist 25 years ago,” Andrew Winters said on a recent afternoon. The director of capital projects and planning for Cornell NYC Tech, he was giving a preview of the the school’s proposed Roosevelt Island campus in a large conference room inside the Wall Street offices of SOM, the master planners for the 12.5-acre project. Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning L.A. architect designing the first academic building on the campus was also present, along with a number of other Cornell construction executives.

“The challenge,” Mr. Winters continued, “is how do you create a tech campus today that is still flexible enough to grow and evolve for the next 25 years?” Read More

By Matt Chaban 8/07/12 5:21pm

The Neverending Story

13 Photos

1.3 WTC

In Updated Designs for 1 World Trade Center, Does the Spire Still Look Like a Spire?

After all the wrangling over the updated designs for the Durst Organization-overseen 1 World Trade Center (we’ve heard there was a list of 20 changes the developer wanted from the Port, all eventually granted), new renderings have been released for the project. They show a building that looks a little sharper, perhaps a little less striking, but something still bound to dominate the skyline, as if that were not already abundantly clear from the just-about-topped-out tower. Have a look for yourself and decide whether this is an improvement. Read More

By Matt Chaban 7/10/12 11:32am

Planes Trains & Automobiles

17 Photos

Moynihan Station Goes Retro

Inside the Retro-Futuristic Moynihan Station: Newest Plans Are a Throwback to the Old Post Office

Back in May, Amtrak invited bigs from both sides of the Hudson, Albany and D.C. to come celebrate the start of phase one construction on Moynihan Station—even Rosario Dawson, train aficionado, was there. Yet more striking than the silver screen star were the new renderings for Moynihan Station that Amtrak showed off.

Not just the banal concourses of Phase 1 that have bandied about before—nothing new there—but honest to god interiors of the grand train hall meant to restore Penn Station to its former glory inside the old Farley Post office. In a bid for both historical preservation and cost savings, the roof of the post office will no longer be ripped off and replaced with a new glass ceiling, but instead the existing one, with its massive steel trusses will be preserved. Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/04/12 6:10pm

Creeping Ivy

6 Photos

Cap and Green

The Class Is Always Greener: Columbia’s Manhattanville Campus Earns Top Sustainabilty Grade

With the exception of a deadly construction accident in March, things have been fairly quiet on the western front of Harlem. Starting nearly a decade ago, Manhattanville became one of the most hotly contested corners of the city, as Columbia University first worked to have the neighborhood rezoned for a new 17-acre campus, approved in 2007, followed by the state leading an eminent domain case on the school’s behalf to repossess the land of two local business owners, which culminated in 2010. (Since then, the city’s focus has shifted south, to another university-led redevelopment.)

All the while, Columbia has gone about the work of creating the most environmentally progressive neighborhood in the entire five boroughs, all from whole cloth.

Last week, the U.S. Green Building Council awarded Columbia’s new campus with LEED ND Platinum, the highest rating in the council’s new-ish neighborhood development program. It is only the fifth project in the state to earn such recognition, and the first to achieve LEED ND Platinum. The designation means that the project has embraced the goals of accessibility, density, design and environmental efficiency, creating a model for future development.

“We like to think of it as a three-legged stool: environment, economy, equity,” Jason Hercules, director of the LEED ND program, told The Observer. “Manhattanville excelled in all three.” Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/16/12 12:30pm

The Neverending Story

Antenna or architecture?

Get to the Point: If Anyone Can Save 1 WTC’s Symbolic Spire, It Is the Dursts—They Snuck Onto the Skyline Before

The fate of the World Trade Center, having been debated and arbitrated by every constituency in town, now rests with a panel of architects and engineers in Chicago. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat is the international arbiter of skyscrapers the world over. All skyscrapers are not created equal, and it is up to the Council to decide exactly how tall they all are.

The problem at 1 World Trade Center, as has been raging across front pages all week, is that the Durst Organization, the august real estate family and minority partner in the city’s newly christened tallest structure, has convinced the Port Authority to forgo a radome, a white fiberglass sheath that was to have encased the 408-foot mast atop the 1,368-foot tower. The mast takes the tower from the symbolic height of the original towers to the perhaps too symbolic height of 1,776 feet, first envisioned by Daniel Libeskind a decade ago.

The problem is that the council does not recognize antennae, flagpoles, signage or other superfluous structures as contributing to the height of the building. That is why the Willis Tower, 1,451 feet, ranks eighth tallest in the world, even though two broadcasting arrays bring its total height to 1,729 feet, the second tallest in the world behind the Burj Khalifa.

This seems absolutely backwards—why encourage “spires,” useless poles with a glimmer of design intent, while forgoing actual, functional structures like antenna and signage. Whatever happened to form follows function? Read More

By Matt Chaban 2/28/12 10:52am

Silicon Alley U

18 Photos

Bohilin Cywinski Jackson

Roosevelt Renderers! Top Architects Tapped to Design Cornell Tech Campus

The innovation offered by a new tech campus on Roosevelt Island is not limited to New York’s technology sector but the design one, as well. Almost every bid had soaring renderings and flashy flythroughs, most notably the winning entry from Cornell. Now the upstate university has announced six of the world’s top firms, including a few local favorites, are in the running to design the new tech campus. Read More

By Matt Chaban 11/16/11 10:00pm

The Neverending Story

8 Photos

At night, the base will be illuminated by LEDs behind the metal screen. Think of it as the reverse of the Empire State Building.

Take a Shine to It! 1 World Trade Base Will Be Pleated Rather Than Prismatic

One of the enduring challenges at the World Trade Center—besides who will lease up the offices—has been what the base of Tower 1 would look like. Fears persisted that the 185-foot concrete shell demanded by the N.Y.P.D. would look like exactly that, a giant bunker. The solution, arrived at by a harried team of architects in less than a month back in 2005, was waves of crenelated glass that would turn the entire structure into a giant crystal.

The only problem was, that approach proved almost impossible to produce when the fabricators began creating mock-ups of the structure earlier this year. The glass would shatter too easily, a major issue for a high-traffic tower that could be susceptible to another attack. The architects at SOM returned to the drawing board and created a solution that is at once very similar to and totally different from their original proposal, a new plan that was approved yesterday by the board of the Port Authority.

The main goal was achieving an aesthetic solution to this ongoing challenge, though it turns out the biggest different between the two plans is economic—the new curtain wall will cost less than half the price of the original one, $37.2 million. Read More