Cityscape

Champagne Design

Eventually, however, the tower's developer acquired the Findlay property, and Portzamparc was able to spread out, to arrange his volumes in a more pleasing manner. Did it go from being amazing to being beautiful? I ask. "Exactly," he says, recalling that when Arnault was shown the second project, "he said, 'Before it was amazing. Now it can be beautiful.' "

The word beauty has not often been uttered by architects since Adolf Loos unequivocally declared, back in 1908, that ornament is crime. Twentieth-century architects have explained their work mostly in terms of rationalism or, more recently, metaphor. But Portzamparc, who was educated at the famed École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, talks more like an artist. Beauty is important to him, though he is somewhat reluctant to admit it: "Yes," he says. "I know it's not trendy. It's very funny, because architects don't dare to speak about beauty. Even me. I never use this word."

Joe Rose, on the other hand, isn't at all shy about the b word. Speaking at City Hall to an audience of developers, civic-group leaders, politicians, and architects, Rose announced that he intends to introduce height restrictions to the city's zoning code. In an almost heretical move, Rose would impose a specific height limit on each zoning district except those in midtown Manhattan and the Wall Street area. Currently, developers can build tall by buying up air rights and, in some cases, securing bonuses for public plazas. Rose wants to abolish those practices. But he also would build one loophole into those regulations.

The city, he told the audience, "should be able to grant waivers from some regulations on the basis of exceptional design." Then, in a turn of phrase that was astonishing to hear within Rudolph Giuliani's City Hall, Rose declared, "Let us instill the quest for beauty into the powerful economic drive of this city's real-estate entrepreneurs." The quest for beauty. The expression is redolent of the Gilded Age. It harks back to the City Beautiful movement of a hundred years ago, a push for implementing grand, Beaux-Arts-inspired plans -- wide boulevards, great monuments, formal gardens. But in my lifetime, I've never encountered an architect or developer who would admit to being on a quest for beauty. Until Portzamparc, that is.

He stands beside a model of the tower, caressing it as if it were a woman. "So the recess line is here," he says, cryptically. "This is a calculation of the hollow . . ." He explains that, instead of introducing the regular stair-step setbacks suggested by zoning to reduce a building's bulk on the upper levels, he made asymmetrical slices. Running his fingers along the edge of the diagonal that separates white glass from green, he points out places where he has carved sections from the upper floors to shift the bulk downward.

"I discovered that this Manhattan zoning is fantastic," enthuses the Frenchman. In European cities, the rules often spell out the precise dimensions of a building. New York's regulations (though they vary from district to district) are usually interpreted as mandating a wedding-cake shape. But really what they call for is a building that is simply thicker at its base and thinner above. They offer wiggle room, Portzamparc realized; New York's zoning resolution already accommodates beauty. It's just a low priority for most builders.

Rose, quixotically, talks about bumping beauty a few notches higher on the city's list of priorities. "This is not Colonial Williamsburg, and the world's greatest and most dynamic city should be a hospitable environment for bold new structures," Rose said in his speech. He envisions a process akin to landmarking, a public board or commission that would advocate for good contemporary architecture, waiving the zoning rules when a project of sufficient merit comes along. Developers, instead of getting a plaza bonus, would get a beauty bonus. It's a radical concept. (And a frightening one, because one man's notion of an exemplary building -- Donald Trump's, say -- is another man's idea of grounds for a lawsuit.)

"If there is no benefit to you legally or otherwise, if you have no rights even for a hearing because of good design, then why would you possibly waste a penny on it?" Rose argues.

Why? Because you are someone like Arnault. Arnault seems to have approached architecture the way he approaches fashion, hiring talented designers and actually letting them design. The tower's appearance was so important to Arnault that he was willing to pay 60 percent above the original construction estimates and later muscle his partner out of the project when he balked at the cost. "Zoning enabled us to do it, but it also was the client who actually allowed Christian the ability to do this," points out John Mulliken, the project architect for the Hillier Group, the New York firm that collaborated with Portzamparc.

Mulliken leads me on a tour of the tower, which has a geometry all its own. The interior layout is as eccentric as the exterior design suggests. Beyond a lobby lit by neon muted by milky glass are office spaces that bend to conform to the kinks in the façade. Mulliken takes me out on the tower's eleventh-floor balcony, and we look up. "There's a line here called the fold," he says. Above us, the building slides outward at a five-degree angle. Above the fold, the wall is vertical. Window washers, Mulliken says, will have to negotiate this topography with the skill and ingenuity of rock climbers on the Shawangunks.

This building also has its own lyrical terminology. Mulliken points to a deep-blue crystalline shape below us. "This is the heart of the flower, right here," he says. "It's like a little jewel within the complex." We then take the elevator up to the uppermost stop, to the "mezzanine." It is a balcony overlooking the "Magic Room," a space that occupies an entire floor and has 30-foot-high ceilings. While other buildings might have a monumental lobby, this one saves its grandest moment for a meeting hall at the top. Where a more conventional corporate headquarters might install the CEO, the LVMH Tower has a gigantic aquariumlike area.

After he had designed all the office space the client required, Portzamparc found there was room left over in the zoning "envelope." So he squandered three floors of the building's most valuable square footage to create his Magic Room. "Really," Portzamparc says, "when you are there, it's a beautiful place."

I wish Joe Rose well on his quest for beauty, but I'm damned if I know how a revamped zoning resolution or a public-design commission could find a way to encourage a gesture so irrational, so profligate, and so wonderful as Christian de Portzamparc's Magic Room.