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,

First announced in late 2006, the project was an innovative partnership with the city's Department of Education. World Wide would demolish a low-rise section of the High School of Art and Design just off Second Avenue, between 56th and 57th streets, and build three schools on the site (two new ones plus room for the old high school). During construction, the seven-story section of the school on the corner of Second Avenue would remain operation.

In addition to the new classroom, there was also 170,000-square feet of retail in the base of the new school, now home to a Whole Foods. Beyond building the new schools, World Wide would pay $325 million to the Department of Education during a 75-year lease on the site. Once it built the new schools, the main high school building would be torn down, paving way for the tower.

Construction on the new schools was set to start by 2008 and be completed the following year, but the project had yet to get off the ground by then as the economy faltered, and construction on the school did not kick off until 2010. The schools opened in September, in time for this academic year, while the Whole Foods was finished a month earlier.

Meanwhile, the second phase of the project was put on hold indefinitely, like so many other developments back in 2009. When The Observer first reported the tower was being delayed, we wrote that "both the scraper’s height and its composition are now up in the air." But now it is clear the tower will go forward as originally advertized, reaching a height of 57 stories and 715 feet. There are 270 units in the building, down from an earlier reported number of 320—not a surprising trend, given the evolution toward bigger, more luxurious apartments in the city over the past decade. Bigger layouts mean bigger price tags.

Not short on luxuries, building permits list a rooftop terrace on the seventh floor, an exercise room one floor down, a swimming pool in the basement, and, up on the 25th floor, no doubt with commanding views of the East River nearby, "accessory library lounge, dining, music, screening and wine testing rooms." There will also be retail on the first two floors of the building, according to permits, some 27,000-square-feet.

What was not immediately clear was whether or not the project would be condo or rental or if it would still use the city's inclusionary housing program, whereby 20 percent of units are set aside as affordable in exchange for a tax abatement from the city. In an email in late December, John Marino, a spokesman for World-Wide, said "there is really nothing new to report… they are coming out of the ground next year." He did confirm that SOM was still the architect, but also noted that new designs are in the works. A source who had seen the newer designs said the building is more curvaceous than the angular renderings that had been previously shown off. "It undulates," this person said.

So, forget Fifth Avenue, forget Central Park West, forget Bond Street. Now, improbably, 57th Street has become the city's new gold coast, with all its glistening new castles in the sky. And 250 East 57th Street fits right in. "This building will play a crucial role in solidifying the eastern end of this new hub," Mr. Marino said.

"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?"

This was not simply a philosophical question. Like all projects large and small in the city, Cornell NYC Tech would be defined by an unforgiving zoning text, a set of parcels, parameters, pathways and public open space, boxes, empty vessels into which the creative designs and desires of thousands of engineers and entrepreneurs would be filled for decades to come. The plan calls for four new buildings just south of the Queensboro Bridge by 2017 and six more by 2038, for a total of roughly 2 million square feet—about the size of the Google building in Chelsea.

The public review process, including specific plans for the first phase and more general ideas about the rest of the project, begins today when the City Planning Commission is expected to certify the project. It then faces half a year of intensive community scrutiny, though recent meetings on Roosevelt Island have shown broad, positive support for the campus. The site is already occupied by a 1930s hospital building set to be decommissioned next year. Once that happens, demolition will commence to make way for the campus.

The new campus may be looking for the future, but the very first problem it must tackle is as old as Noah. Because the project resides on an island, an especially narrow and low-lying one at that, it is highly susceptible to flooding. The first pieces of the campus created, then, was the main pathway, called the Tech Walk, that runs through the middle of the site, roughly along the highest point of the island. All buildings will have their primary entrances on this thoroughfare as a precaution against extreme flooding. "Code requires us to build to 100-year-flood standards, but with global warming, we're preparing for a 500-year-flood, which could become our new 100-year-flood," SOM associate director Colin Koop explained.

The geography of the city continues to define the shape of the campus, but from the Tech Walk, the designers—which also include James Corner Field Operations, the firm responsible for the High Line among other high-flying landscapes—turned their attention to the skyline. A number of important landmarks, including the U.N Building, the Empire State Building, the famous Pepsi sign in Long Island City, and the bridge and its massive piers, created vistas the team wanted to accentuate. They carved paths creating view corridors to these spaces, and filled in between the lines either with buildings, which the designers refer to as "nodes," or grand lawns and plazas, which are the "links" that will be among the campus' myriad public amenities.

"We wanted to create a cinematic experience, with framed views of different things," Mr. Koop said.

The team is also using this as an opportunity to redesign the road that encircles the campus, which is actually so old it does not meet current city requirements. The new configuration will create a wider esplanade along the water, followed by a bike lane (it is a college campus, after all), then a single driving and parking lane after that and a generous sidewalk beyond.

If the entire design of the site is meant to emphasize the river and the views beyond, the challenge for the buildings themselves is to be landmarks, as well, ones that create an unmistakeable presence for the campus without interrupting or overtaking the island on which they will rest. Only the academic building, the work of Mr. Mayne's firm Morphosis, has an explicit design so far. One design decision about it and almost every other building except for the two dorms is that they will be limited in height to five stories, or about as tall as the bed of the bridge. The two dorm buildings will not surpass the masts of the bridge, which reach about 300 feet above the island.

The first phase calls for one of the dormitory towers, a hotel conference center space for hosting events and visiting faculty and a so-called corporate co-location building where students and established tech firms and investors can meet to work. The centerpiece, though, is Mr. Mayne's academic building. Resembling an aircraft carrier from another planet (it even has a similar elongated pentagon shape), the specifics of the design are still being worked out. But like at Mr. Mayne's Cooper Union building, it will emphasize interactivity.

"Hallways aren't hallways anymore," the architect said. "They are the connection points where all the real work gets done, where the chance interactions inspirations take place." A huge atrium, perfectly aligned with 57th Street, will be the focal point of this work, creating a grand entrance for the students, faculty and visitors, and funneling them into a grand staircase connecting the five floors. Every landing has nooks for tables and couches to encourage public work and relaxation. Elevators are pushed to the edges of the building to discourage their use.

A large cafe, open to the public, is just off the atrium—Mr. Mayne joked that Starbucks is the new campus library—and retail will ring the building, providing an amenity not only for students but also Roosevelt Islanders, who are are starved for shopping.

The exact finish of the building is still to be determined, but by far its most striking feature will be a gigantic two-acre solar array, part of the promise to create a net-zero academic building that generates as much energy as it uses (for a tech project, that is an especially impressive task). "The site is challenging and the programming is challenging, but more than anything, net zero is challenging, and that decision has informed every aspect of this design" Mr. Mayne said. "This will be an absolute prototype."

Just like the ideas the campus is meant to elicit.

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.

Naturally, the very next morning, The Observer was hot on the trail of those renderings. (Really, do we care about anything else?) Sadly, one bureaucrat or press handler after another said, well, those are preliminary designs, so we're not really ready to reveal them.

But Amtrak just did, even if it didn't mean to, in its latest report on high-speed rail for the Northeast Corridor (coming someday, we promise, fingers crossed), which the fine folks over at WNYC's Transportation Nation picked up. Therein lie the renderings we were after, along with a lot of other cool high-speed rail pics that will keep us dreaming until we can finally get on board.

That is set for 2025, but if Moynihan timelines are any indication, not to mention the deaths of such projects as ARC, then 2055 does not seem unreasonable.

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."

LEED ratings have become a practical necessity for any new development in the city, ranging from university buildings to office towers to luxury condos. Even novel projects, like single-family homes, are pursuing this sheen of green, and thanks to Local Law 86, every new city building achieves the rating as well.

Now, to broaden its influence and further promote dense, sustainable growth throughout the country, the Green Building Council created the LEED ND program. Developers get points for everything ranging from transportation proximity to clean construction practices to the size of the blocks within the development—bigger ones tend to encourage out-of-scale superblocks.

Columbia's Manhattanville plan, created by SOM and Renzo Piano, entered the program five years ago, shortly after the rezoning was approved by the city. "Because of our serious commitment to sustainable design, we wanted this project to be seriously considered from the start," said Joseph Ienuso, senior vice president for facilities. "It’s a very rigorous process, we’ve been working on it five years."

The campus actually served as a pilot project for the council, helping it to refine exactly what criteria would be used to rate other neighborhoods in the program. "Theirs was a project that fit well with the goals of the program," Mr. Hercules said. "It was a shared learning experience." (This involvement had no bearing on Columbia’s receiving of the highest rating, Mr. Hercules said.)

“This is a milestone for Columbia not only because we are building a future in our home community in New York," university president Lee Bollinger said in a statement, "but because we are doing so with a commitment to the best urban planning principles and the highest quality architecture that reflect both the core values of city life and the fundamental need for a more sustainable society."

Manhattanville gets considerable points for many of the factors that make Manhattan and the rest of New York an inherently sustainable place to be, such as compact blocks, diversity of building types and proximity to robust transportation options. Still, Mr. Hercules said these do not guarantee a project scoring well or even making the cut. "Otherwise everything would be LEED certified," he said. "Somethings are easy in New York, others are hard."

Affordable housing is a big one. Critics have complained that there was not enough in the university's plan, and while it could not include any within the project, there is ample faculty housing (cutting down on commutes) as well as a $1 million affordable housing fund that will help seed local projects.

But those features are fairly standard. It is the more innovative commitments that pushed the Manhattanville campus to outperform others, such as a promise to build a minimum of 84 percent of its buildings to high sustainability standards (LEED Silver or above). An innovative below-grade service network, that keeps maintenance and delivery work off the streets, was given favorable marks. The possible inclusion of ferry service from the pier at 125th Street was another highlight, as were job training programs both within the campus and without.

"There’s a balance that needs to be made when new and larger projects come in," Mr. Hercules said, touching on the topic of gentrification that some locals feel remains unaddressed. "But the program considers all of these issues, and we feel this project made steps in the right direction."

One of the most unique features of the Manhattanville project, especially given its size and the fact it will be in progress for decades, is the commitment to clean construction practices. This involves everything from acoustical baffling added to extra-high construction fencing, which combined keep down noise and debris from spreading into the neighborhood, to using low sulfur fuel in the construction equipment. "One thing that’s pretty obvious when you’re at our site is you don’t see the puffs of black smoke you see at a lot of other construction site around the city," Mr. Ienuso said. The equipment is also washed down before leaving the site, so as not to track dust throughout the neighborhood.

"These things may seem small, but they add up," Mr. Ienuso said.

One person who had a hard time doing the math was State Senator Bill Perkins, who represents the Manhattanville neighborhood and has been an outspoken critic of the project. He said while the community might get some ancillary benefits from the LEED recognition, such as cleaner air and maybe a few jobs, it was primarily the university that would be benefiting, this despite the fact that it was community outcry that forced the university to embrace more sustainable practices.

"The neighborhood will be built to a better standard, but the community will not be here to enjoy it," Senator Perkins said. "It's almost like I picked the cotton but you get to wear the shirt."

Two things not factored into the Green Building Council's calculations were the case of eminent domain and the fatal accident this spring. On the issue of eminent domain, Mr. Hercules said it was "one factor among many."

"That’s something that’s somewhat outside the scope of our rating system," he continued. "Obviously, it’s important how a development is going to get control of their site. We obviously wouldn’t encourage anything that would disenfranchise anyone in the community. But once the developer has the property, it’s out roll to encourage a sustainable community."

This would not be the first time the council has overlooked such issues. The first project to ever receive LEED ND, back in 2009 was the city's plans for Willets Point—yet another eminent domain poster child.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Spire showdown. (dbox/SOM, Durst Organization)

Antenna or architecture?

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?

"It's a practical concern," Kevin Brass, public affairs manager for the council, said. "What is to stop someone from just adding on a taller and taller antenna?"

Indeed, the council was created in 1969 to settle such disputes. They have been raging since skyscrapers were rising, when 40 Wall Street, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State all tussled for pride of place on the skyline. Indeed, the Empire State is the 10th tallest building in the world if it's 204-foot antenna is included. Staring out at the city from across either river, visually, this is the height one registers, not the 1,250 feet where the original structure tops out.

“Is it part of the design, or is it a pole on top of the building? That is the question, and we don’t know the answer to it yet,” , Mr. Brass said of 1 World Trade Center. It is a question, then, of architectural intent. And the problem is that the architect of 1 World Trade Center, David Childs, is none too happy about the decision.

“Eliminating this integral part of the building’s design and leaving an exposed antenna and equipment is unfortunate,” he said in a widely disseminated statement. “We stand ready to work with the Port on an alternate design.”

The Port, and the Dursts, are less eager to do so. A spokesman for the developer, Jordan Barowitz, said that fabrication of the spire—they insist it is a spire, an architecturally integral piece of the design, and one that was indeed designed by Mr. Childs’ firm, SOM, albeit no longer clad in its fancy suit—is already underway, imperiling any additional design tweaks.

“It’s not really at risk for us, we’re building the building, we have to build it, whether the council says so, that’s the council’s business,” a World Trade Center source said.

SOM is holding out hope that the Port might persuade the developer, who took a management stake in the building in 2010 for $100 million, to add some sort of design flourish. It has had to compromise on the base of the tower, after all, after serious fabrication issues. (It bears noting that that was seen as a diminishment, as well.) But the mast must be installed this summer to keep the building on schedule, which does not leave much time for a solution to be designed, fabricated and installed.

Port Authority chief Pat Foye does not seem eager to implement a change, either. “What was designed was impractical, unworkable and quite frankly dangerous to workers who would have to be called in to maintain it, and that’s not something we nor Durst could abide,” he told reporters after a conference on Friday.

The Dursts insist it was not the $20 million cost of the radome that killed it but the maintenance scheme, which was complex, expensive and possibly even dangerous, involving the hoisting of one-ton replacement pieces into place. SOM was given eight months to come up with a more satisfactory scheme but could not.

Still, if anyone could convince the council the tower is indeed as tall as the developers say it is, it is the Dursts. For years they were toiling away on the impressive if not especially tall One Bryant Park, standing a hail 945 feet. Atop it stood what could only be described as a white toothpick, pushing the height of the building to 1,200-feet, and supplanting the Chrysler Building as New York’s second tallest.

It was a move as brash as the one undertaken by Walter Chrysler to surpass 40 Wall Street, when he deployed a hidden 60-foot spire within the dome of the Art Deco dandy, during the original skyscraper race. No matter—it was surpassed within a year by the Empire State Building. Just as 1 World Trade Center someday will be.

SOM, the firm that designed Cornell's original entry and one of the world's largest, made the cut. They have designed everything from the Lever House to the masterplan for Columbia's new Manhattanville Campus. Local stars Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, responsible for the High Line and Lincoln Center, were tapped, as was New York fanboy Rem Koolhaas and his Office of Modern Architecture. He has yet to build in the city, but he just completed a celebrated expansion to Cornell's architecture school.

Steven Holl is another local boy on the list, one of the dean's of New York architecture. He has designed a philosophy department offices for NYU, is completing a sports center for Columbia at the northern tip of Manhattan and is perhaps best known for his funky residence halls at MIT. Morphosis, run by LA's Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne, knows a thing about New York campuses, having built the new metallic monolith for Cooper Union in Astor Place. And the ostensible dark horse is Philadelphia's Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a firm that makes some sense given that their most famous work is as designers of all the Apple Stores. Perhaps a giant glass cube for Roosevelt Island?

"We were incredibly impressed by the quality represented in the 43 firms originally considered for designing our core building," CornellNYC Tech Vice President Cathy Dove said in a release. "Our goal is that this first building exemplify sustainable design principles, represent a forward looking attitude and form vibrant and contemplative public spaces that can be expanded through future buildings."

On the sustainability front, the first building will be designed as "net zero," meaning it uses no grid energy, generating or limiting its own use through strategies ranging from solar panels to thermal wells to the right kind of window shades and light bulbs. Successive buildings will not be quite up to that standard but will at least meet LEED Silver standards, a mid-range sustainability benchmark grade—think of it as a compact car but not a hyrbid.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

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. This is chiefly because the new system is essentially off-the-shelf glass, rather than custom made panes. "Not only will this system be cost-effective, but it will also provide a unique façade benefitting an iconic building," deputy director Bill Baroney said in a statement.

Previously, custom rolled panes were cut at different dimensions, each taking on a prismatic aspect that would refract the light in dynamic ways, according to SOM director and 1 WTC project director Kenneth Lewis. Now, the standardized panes will be affixed to a metal screen not unlike the one at 7 WTC. Starting with flush panels at the edges of the bases four sides, the panels will begin to open up in a V-pattern as they move toward the center of the plane, creating a pleated effect. From flat surfaces at the corners, the panes will open to as much as 60 degrees at the middle of the space.

"It's the same base, the same ideas David talked about before, but a different way to get there," Mr. Lewis said, referring to the designer of the tower, David Childs. "It's shimmering, luminous, reflective, dynamic, everything we envisioned for this iconic building."

The progressive openings serve a practical as well as aesthetic purpose, allowing air into ducts at the base.

Mr. Lewis said the new base would be more reflective than refractive, relaying the surroundings, though the structure will still glow, via the sun during the day and lights at night, which are now LEDs, rather than florescent lighting as before.  (It is like an upside-down Empire State Building.) The panels will also convey an Op Art-sense of movement as passersby make there way around the structure.

Mr. Lewis said the base would both echo and contrast with the tower above at the same time. The metal screen will be made of the same steel currently at the corners of the tower's curtain wall. The glass in the base is also of the same aspect as the tower above. The entire composition will look more of a piece, then, though there is also the difference of before, when all the glass was on a solid plane, while now it is broken up in the base. Instead of creating a cloud on which the tower floats, it will appear more to dissipate as it approaches the ground."The nature of this system is that the surface comes down and then begins to transform," Mr. Lewis said.

"It's a very simple treatment," he added. "This project has always been about simple forms and simple solutions."

The most noticeable difference is arguably at the tower's corners, which are no longer chamfered in the distinctive tapering style of the tower but instead squared off. Mr. Lewis said it would have been too technically difficult and visually cluttered to wrap the new pleated system around the diagonal corners.

"This was a big challenge, but we're all very pleased with the results," Mr. Lewis said. "You fall in love with all your children, but the situation changes and you make it work."

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Naked no more. (Getty)

The Observer is both heartened and saddened by the news that the fine designers at SOM have come up with a solution for the base of 1 World Trade Center. On the one hand, this means the tower will have a nice shiny base after all to make it look not so monolithic when it opens two years hence, the Conde Nasties packing themselves in. On the other hand, it means the Port did not take us up on our brilliant idea to clad the base of the building in a shimmering curtain of steel.

Crain's got the scoop on what will be going on the base of the tower, and it sounds less delicate—literally; the original scheme kept cracking during fabrication—though no less interesting:

Now, sources said the base will be covered with glass louvers that are set at different angles on the base and lit from behind, creating an inviting atmosphere that would also reflect the nearby memorial honoring the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. The glass is treated so it would pebble instead of shatter in case of an explosion, much like a car windshield does in a severe accident.

With the deal for the Greek church in place, is there anything left to complain about at ground zero?

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC