Rem Koolhaas to Rediscover the ‘Mid-rise’Slazer Enterprises announced last night that Rem Koolhaas’s firm would design a mid-rise condo over a Creative Artists Agency screening room on 22nd Street next to its looming 60-story One Madison Park, and we’ve learned that this will be something more tasteful than your standard glassosaur. Koolhaas, after all, has seen preservationists kill his Manhattan commissions before; remember his proposed extension to the Whitney? So his local guy, Shohei Shigematsu, promises a bolt of wacky probity. The project, for which Shigematsu hopes to reveal designs by March, will stand behind One Madison Park. Quietly. “Rather than endless high-rise, we would like to have some new discovery of mid-rise,” Shigematsu told us. That might mean zigzag units with different ceiling heights or balconies that stretch across multiple floors. And what about Daniel Libeskind, rumored to be working on the island’s tallest condo nearby for Elad Properties? “We are interested in the identity of this place because it used to be a very prominent shopping street in the early conception of Manhattan,” says Shigematsu. “Libeskind is part of the fact that the area is becoming more interesting.” All this classy restraint makes us that much more suspicious that the preservationists are just waiting in the bushes armed with obstacles for both architects. —Alec Appelbaum
Related: Rem Koolhaas Tackling New One Madison Park Building [Curbed]