Yesterday, Eliot Brown donned a hard hat and joined Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner for a tour of another Ratner project–one that’s much further along and still hasn’t lost Frank Gehry. The 77-story tower near City Hall, called Beekman, will be the city’s largest residential building when it tops out in November. (Eliot says it’s at 67 stories now, and they can add two floors each day when it’s not windy, but apparently it’s often windy.)
Mr. Ratner offered a bit of insight about working with Gehry, the famed architect, whose Beekman design was thwarted–not by community groups or a sour economy–but by plumbing.
“Frank works with models,” he said. “He works by models and drawings that he thinks are beautiful, and then he tries to make them into a building. So we worked with different ideas—at one point it was a building that twisted around and around like a corkscrew, and it was really beautiful, really nice. The problem was, in a building, you have to line up all the bathrooms and all the plumbing and we couldn’t come up with a way to do that.”
See the whole slideshow here.
