[NYguy]

Originally Posted by scalziand

I* hope that when the Battery garage is eventually redeveloped, it is done with a similar magnitude of vision.

Well, the city for years has been talking about unleashing the nearly 3 msf of residential development air rights from the garage and tunnel approach, although that's been put on hold until the economy improves. But I've always loved the idea of another supertower downtown other than the WTC to help anchor things, and bring new excitement to those classic canyons. And it doesn't hurt that the design is a good one...


http://www.evolo.us/architecture/edg...-architecture/

IwamotoScott’s description of the project:

The design for Edgar Street Towers responds to its immediate site context while establishing a strong relationship to the larger urban form of Manhattan. The design is inspired by earlier visionary projects for Manhattan that proposed new hybrids of architecture, infrastructure and public space.

The towers’ design seeks to reinstate Edgar Street as an east-west public way, reconnecting Greenwich and Washington streets. The space of this passageway through the building twists upwards, rising through the body of the towers, pinching at the mid level to allow for larger floorplates, and culminating at a rooftop sky lobby and civic space. This space at the towers’ crown is aligned with the primary Manhattan street grid to the north, directly on axis with 5th Avenue.

Edgar Street Towers’ programmatic mixture serves the local neighborhood while enhancing the public realm of lower Manhattan. The scale and mix of uses aims to reflect the grandness of vision and diversity of architectural experiences found for example in the premier civic, cultural and commercial landmarks organized along 5th Avenue to the north. This programmatic mixture is envisioned to include spaces for living, working, art, performance, retail and a branch public library. The program is organized by the towers’ central atrium, enhanced by daylight channeled from above via an integrated light-transmitting fiber-optic array. In addition, the atrium deploys bio-filtration terrariums occupying hollow spaces within the floors, thus acting as the building’s lungs to provide clean air to its occupants. By night, the light-flow is reversed, whereby the fiber-optic array is lit from integrated solar-charged battery packs.

On a macro scale, Edgar Street Towers takes advantage of the visibility and prominence offered by its site, where its dynamic form acts as a civic landmark and beacon for those coming to and leaving the city.

Media coverage of the study...
http://www.downtownny.com/greenwichsouth/gsmedia.pdf

with a quote from Metropolis magazine...

Craig Scott, of IwamotoScott Architecture—another of the firms that contributed to the Greenwich South design effort—writes in with a clarification.

Although what is available on the Downtown Alliance Web site is, as George Beane writes above, “mostly a collection of polished images,” Scott assures us that the designs are far more developed than that.

IwamotoScott’s tower design, for instance, incorporates a variety of sustainable strategies, including a gradient-aperture structural skin (for material efficiency and to reduce heat gain), a fiber-optic daylighting system, and an air-filtering terrarium floor in the building’s atrium—while also re-opening Edgar Street (now covered by an MTA garage) and generally taking advantage of the site’s prominence above the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.

It's good that people are thinking of Downtown's future beyond the WTC again.



nabil.s