NEW YORK | 53W53 (Tower Verre) | 1,050 FT / 320 M | 73 FLOORS

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Zapatan

even better, it´s still 82 floors, this could mean that there´s hardly a crown and that the floors go all the way up near the top, that´s what makes me assume the building is wider, it lost height, but not floors or occupiable space.

More than likely, there will be less floors...

Originally Posted by NYguy

http://www.artsjournal.com/culturegr...to_shrink.html

Near the beginning of his testimony, Penick said that the shrinkage would force the tower to lose its 150 luxury condominiums, which were planned for the top floors. Later, he said it would keep the condos but lose the 120 hotel units. The Council's Land Use Committee chair, Melinda Katz caught that self-contradiction, whereupon Penick stated that the hotel units would probably be eliminated, not the potentially more lucrative condos.

During a break in the action, I caught up with Penick and Nouvel outside the meeting room. Penick told me that lopping off 200 feet of height (a loss of 100,000 square feet from the building's proposed 658,000 square feet) would mean a loss of 16 of the planned 85 stories.

__

[JayPro]

Can I assume that those models show TV at its originally planned height?

[Zapatan]

even at a loss of 16 floors, the building would likely get wider to make up for the lost space. Even though the final design should be similar I think there will be significant changes to work with the 1050 height.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by JayPro

Can I assume that those models show TV at its originally planned height?

Correct.

[NYguy]

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critic...urrentPage=all

Surface Tension
Jean Nouvel and the art of the façade.

by Paul Goldberger
November 23, 2009

...Nouvel is probably best known in New York for a building that he has not built, or, at least, not yet—an eighty-two-story tower planned for a tiny site on West Fifty-third Street beside the Museum of Modern Art.

As originally designed, the tower was to rise to twelve hundred and fifty feet, the height of the Empire State Building. But the planned building was anything but bulky: around a slender glass tower, Nouvel wrapped a spire of steel bracing that extends beyond the building’s floors to form a needle-thin peak.

The building’s neighbors were aghast, viewing it as an unnecessary intrusion into an already overcrowded part of midtown Manhattan. In October, the City Planning Commission approved the project but insisted that Nouvel take off two hundred feet, removing the top of the steel frame. It’s a bad compromise: the tower, still too big to satisfy the neighbors, is also a lot less graceful.

The chairman of the commission, Amanda Burden, said she didn’t feel that Nouvel’s top was good enough to be in the company of the Empire State Building, so the commission decided that it shouldn’t challenge that building’s preëminence in the midtown skyline.

The commission wanted, in effect, to landmark the sky. Kurt Vonnegut once described Manhattan, ironically, as “Skyscraper National Park,” and it’s as if the commission had taken him literally. The trouble is that it’s impossible to keep a Nouvel design and eviscerate it at the same time. Nouvel’s designs, for all their bombast, are conceived as a whole. You can take them or leave them, but tone them down and you’ve missed the point.

[NYC4Life]

Originally Posted by NYguy

The commission wanted, in effect, to landmark the sky.

WOW WTF??

We might as well demolish every skyscraper ever built in Manhattan and turn the land over to mother nature.

[Zerton]

Does Amanda Burden have a degree in architecture? Who does she think she is to make these design choices?

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Zerton

Does Amanda Burden have a degree in architecture? Who does she think she is to make these design choices?

She could be this generation's greatest arhictect, and that sill wouldn't validate her rule of what is and isn't "worthy" of the skyline. Because when all is said and done, she has no say over the vast majority of designs that will mark the skyline. The irony, not lost on many of us, is that the one tower most of us truly see as befitting the skyline is the one she gets to destroy. The CPC's job was to simply approve the permits, or deny. And they somehow screwed that up, leaving both sides losers.

[Dac150]

Quite the debacle this whole thing has become, and to be honest this whole outcome of events couldn’t be closer from what I pictured it to be. This is just a fundamental case of the ludicrous which embodies the minds of people like Ms. Burden (a burden she very much is to the development of this city’s skyline).

It’s only because there is much potential on the horizon for this city’s skyline to expand in height that I carry minimal disappointment for this particular case. However I never carried much high hopes for this to begin with for just this reason; I mean come on, this one was called miles away.

Disappointing yet a much anticipated outcome.

[Zapatan]

Wait, hold on... so why all the dissapointment? Does this mean the building will not be built?


Before everyone jumps on me with didn`t you read?? english is my second language so chill

[uaarkson]

No one knows if the building will be built. We'll just have to wait and see.

[JayPro]

Go back to post #1198 on the previous page and it you'll see the paperwork that shows that the building is ready to go.
It will rise; we'll just hafta see in what form. And it will still be over 1000'.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Dac150

However I never carried much high hopes for this to begin with for just this reason; I mean come on, this one was called miles away. Disappointing yet a much anticipated outcome.

I see it as just the opposite actually. Amanda Burden was very much in favor of this tower, and everything fell into place, from the LPC hearings granting approval for the air rights, to the CPC hearings where members voiced supported. It only went downhill at the very, very end, when Nouvel presented an unfinished design. Now, what made Amanda Burden approve a tower that she didn't think worthy of the New York skyline is a mystery. Nouvel & Hines have to come back with a completed design anyway before getting final approvals and construction permits. So why is it that time couldn't be used to complete the original design as proposed? Answers? Anyone?

[Dac150]

Unfortunately those questions will most definitely go unanswered; but really, who knows what goes on behind the scenes on these projects. What I want to know is why didn’t Nouvel have is act together with the design when it came crunch time? From that sounds of it now, that seems to have made all the difference in the outcome.

[JayPro]

Could it have something to do with what might be construed as Mr. Nouvelle's unfamiliarity with the NYC building approval process? I mean, one just can't propose a design and assume it will be approved by everyone; so was he perhaps banking on that assumption?

[Duffstuff129]

So if they come in with a finished design it could still potentially be 1250 feet?

As I understand it, it is approved at 1050 feet, but could this be overturned?

[JayPro]

I think it'll hafta stand at 1,050 because of a height limit in the immediate area that (I *think*) may have been overlooked by someone in the loop during the approval process.

I wish too that it might be overturned, tho.

[Zerton]

someone needs to show the council perspective renderings looking up at the 1050' building and the 1250' building from surrounding blocks. I think they would be surprised to learn that from street level it would be a hardly noticeable difference. But that would be too intelligent for them.

[samoen313]

Originally Posted by Zerton

someone needs to show the council perspective renderings looking up at the 1050' building and the 1250' building from surrounding blocks. I think they would be surprised to learn that from street level it would be a hardly noticeable difference. But that would be too intelligent for them.

People are never swayed by any snazzy rendering or model if a building is divisive enough as this one is. The challenge for Torre Verre was getting powerful people into the discussion and try to make the case for it not as a pretty object, but as a crucial milestone. Most people's sense of architecture is very conscious but imprecise. They know if they like it or dislike it, but can rarely come up with specific reasons why. If they do come up with reasons, they can't explicate further why those things bother them. Instead they resort to all forms of daily inconvenience to explain their mistrust of the architecture. It is a reality and a particularly omnipresent one in this country. Building this tower is so important because, even if it isn't in its original totality, if it embodies any of the sublimity we here immediately appreciate then it will certainly convert many people whose reaction is more based on habitual fear of change than an acute revulsion of the architecture.

It's a shame the height was cut, but regardless of the nature of the discussions that have guided its evolution, they've always been within the frame that this will be built and not maybe it could be built. NIMBYs are stupid, but I think the compactness of this project as well as the high-caliber profile of its site and architect have meant that their petty complaints were never going to hold much water.

[Zapatan]

Originally Posted by Zerton

someone needs to show the council perspective renderings looking up at the 1050' building and the 1250' building from surrounding blocks. I think they would be surprised to learn that from street level it would be a hardly noticeable difference. But that would be too intelligent for them.

That wasn´t their problem I don´t think, it was more that amanda birdhead didn´t like the top, why she didn´t just say ´redesign it´no one knows

I don´t know how the building would end up 1250, i suppose if someone reasonable and with authority points out how big of a deal they are making out of nothing then maybe it could be reconsidered, but that just doesn´t sound likely.

at least it got approved at 1050, that´s a start.

ps. anyone know if they are still fighting to get their 200 feet back?