[NYguy]

This is great news. A little more from the article posted above...


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

From the High Line to Living High

March 11, 2012
By Eliot Brown

An avant garde New York architecture firm that helped design the High Line now gets to design a tower over the elevated parkland. Diller Scofidio + Renfro has been tapped by developer Related Cos. to design the first residential building at the West Side rail yards, the 26-acre site near the Jacob K. Javits Center where Related plans a cluster of new towers.

And it'll be tall. Jay Cross, who runs the rail yards development for Related, says the planned building on the northeast corner of Eleventh Avenue and 30th Street would likely have around 700 units and be roughly 800 feet tall. The developer wants it done around the same time of its first office building on the site, in which Coach Inc. has agreed to buy about 600,000 square feet of offices, in 2015, he says.

For Diller Scofidio, which would be working with the Rockwell Group design firm, the job is a new type of assignment. It typically focuses on the institutional—the firm redesigned Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and is designing Columbia University's new business school—and hasn't done a skyscraper.

It was part of a team that designed the High Line, and it's also designing, with Rockwell Group, a planned arts center immediately to the east on the rail yards, giving it a lot of projects right around the planned tower.

"For us it represents and opportunity to do an ensemble urban project," said Elizabeth Diller, a founding principal at the firm. "We're very conscious of the adjacency to the High Line."

Here's the location of the tower: