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Don’t You Dare Drink Starbucks in the Lobby of 15 Central Park West
Critic Paul Goldberger takes a look at the most expensive co-op in Manhattan.
Posted 08/01/08 in Daily Intel : Real Estate Porn
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Take a Look at the Freedom Tower Lobby
Some day — one hopes sooner rather than later — the Freedom Tower will be an actual building, not just an idea to argue about, and that building will have a lobby. Daily Intel got the first look at renderings of the planned lobby, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. A 60-foot-high expanse of prismatic glass looks out on the memorial pool. "The lobby sheds light into the memorial pool," explained SOM's TJ Gottesdiener. "And the front door is celebrated." Where the old Twin Towers sealed themselves from the street, the new lobby echoes the old bustle of downtown — true to the notion that Daniel Libeskind laid out before he lost control of the building's design. "The greatest thing about Danny's master plan is that it lets streets flow," Gottesdiener said. Got that? Even more impressive than the renderings, SOM just said something nice about Libeskind. —Alec Appelbaum
Posted 08/02/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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The Black-Tie Horrors of the New ‘Times’ Tower!
The staff of the New York Times, as you may have (repeatedly) heard, is not entirely enamored of the paper's shiny new building, across Eighth Avenue from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. (This probably says more about the sorts of conversations we have than about anything else, but we've been finding it profoundly odd for the last month or so to no longer be able to use the phrase "43rd Street" to refer to the paper's headquarters. "Eighth Avenue" just doesn't work the same way.) People don't like the elevators, they don't like the toilets, they don't like the automated window-shade system, and they don't like the lights, which sometimes turn off on their own. (They also don't like the leaks, mice, and maggots, though that displeasure would not be unique to Timespeople.) In today's new New Yorker, that magazine's architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, an alumnus of 43rd Street who presumably has listened to his old friends kvetch about their new tower, passes along yet another dissatisfaction with the new workplace:
In a nice, democratic gesture, most of the building’s perimeter has been left open, bringing in lots of natural light, and the private offices for editors all have glass walls facing into the newsroom. One member of the editorial board, who gave up a large, enclosed office in the old building for one of these small fishbowls, growled to me, “There’s no place I can change into a tuxedo.”
God, it's hard working in the newspaper business these days. Towers of Babble [NYer]Posted 07/30/07 in Daily Intel : In Other News
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Art Society Chief Retires; Moynihan Station Apparently Complete
So it seems the longtime president of the Municipal Art Society, Kent Barwick, who's run the preservationist organization for nearly four decades, is stepping down. The Crain's story reporting this news, which we happened across today, notes the Society's major accomplishments under Barwick: leading the effort to save Grand Central, preventing Mort Zuckerman from building huge towers on the old Coliseum site that would have cast large shadows on Central Park, pushing for waterfront parks and development, and, Society chairman Philip Howard told Crain's, "building a magnificent new Moynihan Station." Oh? We'll admit we haven't been up Eighth Avenue in the Thirties in a week or two, but, um, we really think someone would have told us if there were a magnificent new Moynihan Station. Right? Municipal Art Society Head Stepping Down [Crain's NY]
Posted 07/27/07 in Daily Intel : In Other News
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On Perry Street, the Death of Real-Estate Bling?
Luxury-condo marketing went through the looking glass at a brokers' breakfast this morning for 166 Perry Street, a new 24-loft, bumpy steel-and-glass condo set to rise just east of Richard Meier's sleek towers in the far West Village. The building has private swimming pools for its penthouse duplexes and art-installation screens over the ground floor, but, interestingly, Corcoran Sunshine marketers are pushing it as, well, simple. "There's an architecture-collector market," marketer James Lansill told us in Jean-Georges's Perry Street restaurant, which will deliver room service to the building. "It's not about bling at all." Oh, no. Not at all. —Alec Appelbaum
Posted 06/26/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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Biking Dutchman Hijacks Governors Island Planning Meeting
Walking into a presentation by the five finalists vying to design a new Governors Island park last night, everyone thought there were two front-runners: James Corner, who has proposed a "superthick" promenade abutting a dense lawn and a "fog forest" with misters to lead you to soccer fields, and Joshua Prince-Ramus, whose plan calls for a patchwork of parcels around the edge that can adapt to private development. But then Adriaan Geuze, another of the finalists, rode into the Chelsea auditorium on a wood-frame bicycle, and he stole the show. Geuze is a Rotterdam architect with corkscrew hair and, last night, a floral-print shirt, and he got the crowd laughing when his PowerPoint presentation showed a butterfly landing on the island and then spreading into a "poetic pattern" of zany footpaths.
Posted 06/21/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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How to Succeed in Hudson Yards Without Really Trying
Does the developer who wants to tear down the High Line above 30th Street have an inside track on getting the Hudson Yards contract? Sources who ought to know tell us that the Durst Organization, which complained last week that preserving the High Line would cost $117 million, has hired the architecture firm of FXFowle to prepare its Hudson Yards bid. Coincidentally (we're sure), FXFowle is the same firm that prepared the architectural protocol for the project on behalf of the MTA and the Hudson Yards Development Corp., a city-created overseer. The MTA claims it wants to keep the High Line, provided it understands the costs and revenues involved. But it will take quite a bid by another developer to dispel the notion that Durst has already seen the answer sheet. —Alec Appelbaum
Posted 06/15/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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Libeskind to Build Another Tower in Lower Manhattan
Daniel Libeskind has been busy lately, with a museum opening in Toronto, new residential projects around the world, and a Freedom Tower stubbornly moving nowhere in Lower Manhattan. And now he's got another — more easily built, one presumes — building coming to New York. The architect told us yesterday he has a commission to design a residential tower somewhere in Lower Manhattan — though he won't say much more than that until paperwork is filed Friday. Here's what he'll reveal: The commission is from a private client, and he hopes to make the building a landmark "by taking the notion of green out from the inside of the building." It won't be on Liberty Island, as we originally guessed, but Libeskind confirmed it's on a built "historic site, one of the iconic sites of New York City." And, he added, "I guarantee you'll see the Statue of Liberty from there." Hmm. You have any guesses? —Alec Appelbaum CORRECTION, July 13: A Skidmore, Owings & Merrill flack emails to remind us that the Freedom Tower currently being constructed isn't even Libeskind's design anymore; it's by SOM's David Childs. So maybe this new one will not only be more easily built, but will also stay Libeskind's!
Posted 06/12/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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Starchitect Showdown! Will Rockwell or Gehry Build the Better Playground?
It's never too early to start Manhattan tykes on high-end real-estate mania. The Parks Department has just announced that Frank Gehry will be designing a no doubt titanium-clad playground for Battery Park — which puts the L.A.-based starchitect in head-to-head competition with New York's own David Rockwell, the man behind countless restaurant and hotel interiors, some of Broadway's wittiest set designs, and a planned "imagination playground" on Burling Slip, a bit uptown on the East River. How do the two compare? See for yourself.
Posted 06/07/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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Gwathmey Shocker: Soho Condo to Look Like Soho!
Celebrity architect Charles Gwathmey didn't make himself many East Village friends with his last project here, the so-called Sculpture for Living on Astor Place, which was widely derided as out of context for the neighborhood. Perhaps he's learned his lesson. We got an early peek at Soho Mews, his newest local effort, and it's a tasteful, intriguing new condo that's a clever update of Soho's cast-iron factory tradition. The façade uses different treatments of glass, frosted here and unvarnished there, to create what Gwathmey describes as an "active Tartan grid" that will glow with different colors at different times of day. And the block-through lot, with a courtyard between the West Broadway and Wooster Street entrances, allows a sumptuous lobby that recalls the classic uptown prewars. "It's a courtyard model that is unique in the city and patterned on the great old hotels," the architect told us. "This is a loft tailored for a design-savvy customer." And one who likes his Soho to look like, well, Soho. —Alec Appelbaum
Posted 05/25/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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Lincoln Center Holds a Press Conference on Overhaul, Tells Us Mostly What We Already Knew; Also: LEDs!
Will LEDs and info displays seem as quaint in the 2050s as the white-walled, elevated Lincoln Center seems now? Not if architect Liz Diller has the touch her clients say she does. At a construction update today, Diller detailed how Diller Scofidio & Renfro, with FXFowle and other design specialists, plans to festoon every border of the twelve-institution center with a constant stream of showtimes and words as part of the $900 million effort to refresh the fifties-era complex. After recounting already-established plans at the press conference — a new lawn, outdoor restaurants, a sexed-up fountain — Diller told us more about the electronic displays, which, she said, will really grab passersby at key spots on 65th Street and on Broadway.
Posted 05/01/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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At Jane Jacobs Memorial, City Planner Steals the Show, Discreetly
Jane Jacobs, the Death and Life of Great American Cities author who revolutionized city planning when she told the world why the best village was the West Village, died a year ago yesterday at 89. Last night, about two dozen hard-core Jane-ophiles (Jacobeans?) gathered to toast her at the Village’s White Horse Tavern, a favorite Jane haunt — she lived just down the block — before she moved to Toronto in 1968 to help her sons avoid the draft. The star of the evening was architect Alexandros Washburn, city planning chief Amanda Burden’s newish design czar, whose lack of press since starting his job in January is notable given that (a) he’s overseeing the Jacobs-y design aspect of most major building projects in the city and (b) he has urbane Greek good looks that had most of the female Janeheads at the pub cruising him in that discreet New Urbanist way.
Posted 04/26/07 in Daily Intel : Intel
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What Daniel Libeskind Does When Not Rebuilding Ground Zero
The sneering was involuntary when we read that Daniel Libeskind, whose idealistic World Trade Center scheme became the cudgel that George Pataki used to freeze ground zero, would keynote a weeklong conference of brand managers at Chelsea Piers. But then the effervescent architect started guiding a half-full ballroom through his recent work, and we realized this guy's had a lot of output while we've bickered over a memorial. Libeskind's new projects under construction include a jagged apartment tower facing downtown Cincinnati and a wing of the Royal Ontario Museum that suggests a giddy urban campsite. Libeskind, as ever, refused to carp. On the World Trade Center, he told us: "You see the slurry wall being repaired — you see something optimistic there." Well, at least he does. —Alec Appelbaum
Posted 04/17/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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First Look: Second Avenue Subway Stations
We reported earlier on today's groundbreaking for the Second Avenue Subway, and we told you that "stations on the line will have natural light and column-free corridors (and, according to renderings, odd shards of Daniel Libeskind–esque glass)." Here now, renderings of those stations. (There's a larger version here.) Libeskinn-esque, indeed. —Alec Appelbaum Earlier: Daily Intel's coverage of the Second Avenue Subway
Posted 04/12/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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Pretty, Affordable Housing for Brooklyn?
Maybe visionary architects can do more than concoct condos and museums in this town. A competition to design affordable housing in the South Bronx, which ended with the January selection of U.K. architecture firm Grimshaw and local good-guy architect Richard Dattner, went so well that the city's Department of Housing, with other agencies, is planning another, similar competition for later this year. The city will collect proposals for a 150-unit complex, dance theater, and retail space in Brooklyn, near BAM, by May 4, Housing commissioner Shaun Donovan said at the Center for Architecture last night, when he also announced another, unspecified competition for later this year. Architect Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA, part of the runner-up team for the Bronx project, told us that he and his group will submit to the Brooklyn competition, and last night, for the first time, he showed off their Bronx proposal — a scheme of colorful mid-rise buildings that absorb sunlight and eschew dark hallways. The Brooklyn winner would face Frank Gehry’s Miss Brooklyn and her gargantuan friends — unless, of course, it's built while lawsuits keep all those titanium panels waiting on the loading docks. —Alec Appelbaum
Posted 04/10/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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New York's Ugliest Buildings, Chosen by the Experts
From the world travelers at Gridskipper comes a highly enjoyable list of "14 Ugliest Buildings in New York." What sets this package apart from the usual bloggy spitballs is that the spitballers, for once, are very, very qualified: All are big-time architects or architecture experts. The choices include some usual suspects (frankly, hating on Astor Place's Sculpture for Living is a little played out; one might as well take issue with the city strictures that force architects to set undulating forms on square bases). Some, however, are downright inspired (see which structure occasioned the description "It's exactly like the Berlin Wall, but uglier"). And if you've ever harbored uneasy feelings about Hearst Tower, you'll delight in its quick and efficient evisceration by John Hill of A Daily Dose of Architecture, which begins with "Step 1: Hire Norman Foster." Ugliest Buildings in New York, According to the Experts [Gridskipper]
Posted 03/01/07 in Daily Intel : In Other News
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Robert A.M. Stern Tweaks the Upper West Side
A brand-new storefront is coming to the Upper West Side and — get this — it's not a chain store. Starchitect Robert A.M. Stern this afternoon unveiled his redesign of the Kaufman Center, a music school born in 1952 as a Jewish art school and installed in a modernist structure back when the area was scruffy. The natty neoclassicist presented plans for a “vivid fire-red granite” two-story lobby and glazed-glass exterior to make the 67th Street façade glow at night — all the better to stand up to hulking Victoria's Secret next door, on the corner of Broadway. (Click here for a larger version of the rendering.) Like the more avant-garde firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro, which is redesigning neighboring Lincoln Center by leveling that forbidding plaza, Stern tells us he’s “tweaking” a modernist façade to draw passersby in a neighborhood that’s gone domestic. “A lot of new buildings around here are bunkers,” he told us. Indeed. An example: the soon-to-be-completed 15 Central Park West, that pile of limestone and columns just down the block. Who designed that? Oh, yeah: Robert A.M. Stern. —Alec Appelbaum
Posted 02/21/07 in Daily Intel : Developing
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Now Calatrava's Transit Hub, Too, Isn't Quite Working Out as Planned
We've always been partial to Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center transit hub; the building, a kind of spiny origami piece with movable wings, is the most genuinely exciting structure on the site. It's also the only one that, for a long time, seemed to be getting anywhere. So it's with a heavy heart that we report the following: The damn thing is suddenly a billion dollars over budget. The projected cost for the hub is now a jaw-dropping $3.4 billion. (And that's the kind of money, as we learned today, that will buy you about 120 apartment towers in Brooklyn.) The contractors are embarking on a "major value engineering effort" to steer the project back to its original $2.2 billion price-tag. We think we know what that means — dumbed-down form and Plan-B materials — although the builders swear the "overall integrity of the design" will be intact. Screw integrity. Give us the movable wings. $3.4B For WTC Hub a Rail Shock [NYP]
Posted 02/09/07 in Daily Intel : Ground-Zero Watch
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DHS Now Officially Full of Shit
• The federal formula used to allot New York its pitiful share of anti-terrorism funds has been officially discredited. A new GAO report says — in as many words — that Homeland Security officials lack methods to assess risk. Actuarial math aside, failure to classify the Empire State Building as a landmark was a bit of a giveaway. [NYDN] • In related news, the Empire State Building is America's favorite piece of architecture, according to the American Institute of Architects poll. The White House is number two. [WNBC] • Meet Tom DiNapoli. As New York's Chris Smith reported yesterday, state legislators reneged on a deal with Governor Spitzer and installed the assemblyman as the new state comptroller. On the upside, according to the Times, DiNapoli is apparently the nicest guy in Albany. [NYT] • The plot thickens in the Long Island fake-cop case. The con man in question not only wore fake uniform and a prop badge; he owned a car complete with a siren, maintained the cop identity 24/7, and shook down criminals for a living. [NYP] • And it's official: The bankrupt Air America now belongs to real-estate mogul Stephen Green, brother of Mark. The price tag on the voice of the American Left? $4.25 million. We assume they threw in The Nation. [amNY]
Posted 02/08/07 in Daily Intel : The Morning Line
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New Fulton Street Subway Station to Keep Its Dome (Except Not Really)
When the concept for a public building includes words like "seashell-shaped glass dome," you can be fairly sure that the final version will be a windowless concrete cube. And, indeed, plans for the MTA's Fulton Street Transit Center, a downtown hub, a few months ago seemed to lose its glass when the authority's board said it needed the money instead for a pedestrian tunnel connecting Fulton with the World Trade Center E train station. "We're not building cathedrals here," the Times quoted a board member saying (in a phrase that, to our ears, encapsulates everything wrong with modern city planning in five words). But wait! Suddenly an engineering solution has arrived — the tunnel could be done on the cheap — as well as some federal funds. The dome is back on! Except it won't be glass. Or seashell-shaped. Or as tall as promised. In fact, it's going to be a fairly squat stainless-steel cone. Oh, well, you take what you can get. We're not building cathedrals here. Planners Clash Over Transit Hub, and Riders Win [NYT]
Posted 01/08/07 in Daily Intel : In Other News
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