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Flashy Towers by Gehry, Van Berkel Drape, Pleat N.Y. Skyline
Review by James S. Russell
June 10 (Bloomberg) -- New residential projects in New York by brand-name architects keep on coming. Ben van Berkel's Five Franklin Place takes the glass-box condo and ties it up in sinuous ribbons of black metal. Frank Gehry drapes the Beekman Tower's 76 stories in voluptuous folds of stainless steel.
More is to come from Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind and Jean Nouvel. These are not just emblems of confidence in the New York market. They also express faith in architecture that strives for significance.
Rising architecture star Van Berkel of Amsterdam's UNStudio didn't make the 20-story Five Franklin Place look like its Tribeca neighbors. Instead, he craftily reinterprets old New York. The tall rows of cast-iron columns that face Lower Manhattan's old loft buildings become contemporary when he turns them sideways. These tubes whip around corners in auto-body-sleek curves, widen to form sunshades, dip to enclose balconies and narrow to frame views over Tribeca's tumbled roofscape.
Van Berkel compares the design to couture, specifically the pleated fabrics conjured by Issey Miyake.
``They move comfortably with the body,'' he says in an interview at the project's showroom. Similarly, he softens the stiffness of the condo box.
Inside, he calls for high ceilings in the duplex units on the lower floors, stealing a brilliant light-capturing idea from those old lofts. (These units start at $2.8 million.)
Sculptural Kitchen
Working with B+B Italia, the legendary design manufacturer, he creates a swooping pedestal, as graceful as a Brancusi sculpture, that erupts out of the floor to become a kitchen work surface. Your morning Wheat Chex will never look the same.
His curves soften sharp corners and blend cabinets into walls. A half-round door wrapping a bathtub slides away to reveal not only the living room but urban panoramas while you lather. Van Berkel is a stylist, and he creates design as debonair as Streamline Moderne for the project's developers, Leo Tsimmer and David Kislin, former commodities traders.
One of van Berkel's best-known designs is the 1998 Mobius House, which seemed to fold over and double back on itself. He reworks the idea in the expansive penthouses (priced up to $16 million).
You never encounter dead ends, he says, and ``walk in endless ways, where you can always open a door and view a panorama of the city.'' It's a notion that's both romantic and elegiac.
Gehry's First Skyscraper
In contrast to van Berkel's self-conscious sleekness, Frank Gehry's first real skyscraper -- at age 79! -- makes a stark silhouette on the skyline. Clad in a rumpled shiny surface of stainless-steel panels,
the T-shaped rental-apartment tower for Forest City Ratner will rise 867 feet, notched by shallow setbacks at 16-story intervals.
It's the classic New York wedding-cake profile, and it derives a strange power from being stretched vertically so much. It will stand totemically amid medium-height buildings on Spruce Street near the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Gehry and partner Craig Webb soften the effect with a surface warped into drapelike folds that sway as they descend the tower, as if picked up by a passing breeze. The sharp edges and soft surfaces look unreconciled in models yet may come to life in the changing light of day.
It's a daring esthetic gambit that injects some needed vigor into the skyline.
Inside, the 903 apartments (mostly studios and one-bedrooms) line up along their skinny corridors with bland efficiency (the work of apartment-plan specialist Ismael Leyva). Rents are expected to be about $5,800 a month for a 1,000-square-foot unit.
Upper floors, with 360-degree views, feature larger layouts. The exterior wiggles give some units a bay window. That's the end of the excitement, though.
Public School Pedestal
As part of a deal brokered with state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the tower rises from a pedestal formed by a six- story, orange-brick public school that could readily be mistaken for a pharmaceutical lab. Yes, there will be some new green space, yet the dim, architecturally abused streets of Lower Manhattan -- not to mention the school children -- deserve a bit of the Gehry lyricism too.
At its best, the celebrity-architect trend is finally upending the presumption that developers can put up any piece of junk if they have the location and the view. Van Berkel and Gehry transform the constraints of building in New York, mainly its idiosyncratic zoning. Architecture again reflects the city's restless dynamism.
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