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  #21  
Old Posted Nov 7, 2007, 10:22 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by STERNyc View Post
Hopefully it's of the same quality as his never built Tour San Fin

I liked that one. Hopefully, the design will be something that stands out from the mass that is Midtown Manhattan.

Quote:
Mr. Nouvel hinted at something novel: "I'm for a specific architecture, and I'm opposed to a global or generic architecture, especially for skyscrapers. A tower for me is akin to what the steeples of cathedrals were before. And each time, from this standpoint, you have to create a point of identity."
Could be very interesting....
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  #22  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 12:03 AM
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I'm looking foward to the rendering. I hope however the design isn't too out of the box. His design for that Paris complex is very unique, but something of that nature wouldn't go in Manhattan.
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  #23  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 1:00 AM
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Is this project definitely a go?

Am also anxiously awaiting the renderings. My guess is that in today's dollars, one BR apartments will start at $2.5 million easily.
     
     
  #24  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 1:25 AM
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Originally Posted by hartss View Post
Am also anxiously awaiting the renderings. My guess is that in today's dollars, one BR apartments will start at $2.5 million easily.

sometimes living in NYC is a joke
     
     
  #25  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 12:51 PM
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Originally Posted by Dac150 View Post
I'm looking foward to the rendering. I hope however the design isn't too out of the box. His design for that Paris complex is very unique, but something of that nature wouldn't go in Manhattan.
I think it would probably be something unique, but still true to New York.
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  #26  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 8:13 PM
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I think it would probably be something unique, but still true to New York.
80 South Street (granted the obvious) is a good example of that. Something different, but still looks right at home. As long as we don't get something like Ghery's design for the NYTT, then .
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  #27  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 8:33 PM
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That area of Manhattan is so vast, it would take a truly unique tower to stand
out. Or at least a taller one.







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  #28  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 8:57 PM
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Very true, and I don't think 40 floors will break the skyline. It'll just be a canyon addition.

On a side note, those pics really showed me how 712 Fifth Avenue really could use a nice crown.
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  #29  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 9:03 PM
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Expect a very weird cladding, vivid colors and ungraceful proportions.
     
     
  #30  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2007, 9:17 PM
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Originally Posted by Dac150 View Post
Very true, and I don't think 40 floors will break the skyline. It'll just be a canyon addition.
Could be a mixed use tower with decent height for the area...

Quote:
After a fierce and very hush-hush competition among five world-leading architects, France's Jean Nouvel has been chosen to design a new 60-plus story tower in the heart of Midtown Manhattan.

To rise next to – and be joined with - the Museum of Modern Art's sleek, serene and recently expanded home on West 54th Street, the new building will contain 75,000 square feet of additional exhibition space for the museum. Sources say it will also contain speculative office space and – bien sur – luxury condominiums.
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  #31  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 5:10 AM
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NYtimes story w renderings

     
     
  #32  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 5:24 AM
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I'm so happy!!

Quote:
Next to MoMA, Reaching for the Stars



A rendering of the Jean Nouvel-
designed tower to be built adjacent
to the Museum of Modern Art.



By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published:
November 15, 2007

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building.

If New Yorkers once saw their skyline as the great citadel of capitalism, who could blame them? We had the best toys of all.

But for the last few decades or so, that honor has shifted to places like Singapore, Beijing and Dubai, while Manhattan settled for the predictable.

Perhaps that’s about to change.

A new 75-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel for a site next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation. Its faceted exterior, tapering to a series of crystalline peaks, suggests an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights. It brings to mind John Ruskin’s praise for the irrationality of Gothic architecture: “It not only dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle.”

Commissioned by Hines, an international real estate developer, the tower will house a hotel, luxury apartments and three floors that will be used by MoMA to expand its exhibition space. The melding of cultural and commercial worlds offers further proof, if any were needed, that Mr. Nouvel is a master at balancing conflicting urban forces.

Yet the building raises a question: How did a profit-driven developer become more adventurous architecturally than MoMA, which has tended to make cautious choices in recent years?

Like many of Manhattan’s major architectural accomplishments, the tower is the result of a Byzantine real estate deal. Although MoMA completed an $858 million expansion three years ago, it sold the Midtown lot to Hines for $125 million earlier this year as part of an elaborate plan to grow still further.

Hines would benefit from the museum’s prestige; MoMA would get roughly 40,000 square feet of additional gallery space in the new tower, which will connect to its second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries just to the east. The $125 million would go toward its endowment.

To its credit the Modern pressed for a talented architect, insisting on veto power over the selection. Still, the sale seems shortsighted on the museum’s part. A 17,000-square-foot vacant lot next door to a renowned institution and tourist draw in Midtown is a rarity. And who knows what expansion needs MoMA may have in the distant future?

By contrast the developer seems remarkably astute. Hines asked Mr. Nouvel to come up with two possible designs for the site. A decade ago anyone who was about to invest hundreds of millions on a building would inevitably have chosen the more conservative of the two. But times have changed. Architecture is a form of marketing now, and Hines made the bolder choice.

Set on a narrow lot where the old City Athletic Club and some brownstones once stood, the soaring tower is rooted in the mythology of New York, in particular the work of Hugh Ferriss, whose dark, haunting renderings of an imaginary Manhattan helped define its dreamlike image as the early-20th-century metropolis.

But if Ferriss’s designs were expressionistic, Mr. Nouvel’s contorted forms are driven by their own peculiar logic. By pushing the structural frame to the exterior, for example, he was able to create big open floor plates for the museum’s second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. The tower’s form slopes back on one side to yield views past the residential Museum Tower; its northeast corner is cut away to conform to zoning regulations.

The irregular structural pattern is intended to bear the strains of the tower’s contortions. Mr. Nouvel echoes the pattern of crisscrossing beams on the building’s facade, giving the skin a taut, muscular look. A secondary system of mullions housing the ventilation system adds richness to the facade.

Mr. Nouvel anchors these soaring forms in Manhattan bedrock. The restaurant and lounge are submerged one level below ground, with the top sheathed entirely in glass so that pedestrians can peer downward into the belly of the building. A bridge on one side of the lobby links the 53rd and 54th Street entrances. Big concrete columns crisscross the spaces, their tilted forms rooting the structure deep into the ground.

As you ascend through the building, the floor plates shrink in size, which should give the upper stories an increasingly precarious feel. The top-floor apartment is arranged around such a massive elevator core that its inhabitants will feel pressed up against the glass exterior walls. (Mr. Nouvel compared the apartment to the pied-à-terre at the top of the Eiffel Tower from which Gustave Eiffel used to survey his handiwork below.)

The building’s brash forms are a sly commentary on the rationalist geometries of Edward Durell Stone and Philip L. Goodwin’s 1939 building for the Museum of Modern Art and Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 addition. Like many contemporary architects Mr. Nouvel sees the modern grid as confining and dogmatic. His tower’s contorted forms are a scream for freedom.

And what of the Modern? For some, the appearance of yet another luxury tower stamped with the museum’s imprimatur will induce wincing. But the more immediate issue is how it will affect the organization of the Modern’s vast collections.

The museum is only now beginning to come to grips with the strengths and weaknesses of Mr. Taniguchi’s addition. Many feel that the arrangement of the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries housing the permanent collection is confusing, and that the double-height second-floor galleries for contemporary art are too unwieldy. The architecture galleries, by comparison, are small and inflexible. There is no room for the medium-size exhibitions that were a staple of the architecture and design department in its heyday.

The additional gallery space is a chance for MoMA to rethink many of these spaces, by reordering the sequence of its permanent collection, for example, or considering how it might resituate the contemporary galleries in the new tower and gain more space for architecture shows in the old.

But to embark on such an ambitious undertaking the museum would first have to acknowledge that its Taniguchi-designed complex has posed new challenges. In short, it would have to embrace a fearlessness that it hasn’t shown in decades.

MoMA would do well to take a cue from Ruskin, who wrote that great art, whether expressed in “words, colors or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again.”



The interior of Jean Nouvel’s
building, which is to include a hotel
and luxury apartments.


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
     
     
  #33  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 6:43 AM
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That is three drop dead gorgeous designs that Nouvel has provided for New York. One is done, one is under construction and this may be the best of the lot. Here is to New York continuing to inspire him to create further masterpieces in the future.
     
     
  #34  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 8:29 AM
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75 floors of that beauty! Yay!
     
     
  #35  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 11:52 AM
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OK, he still got it.
     
     
  #36  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 12:03 PM
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wow. i woke up this morning, opened the Times home page and my heart leaped! this is stunning. just stunning.
     
     
  #37  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 12:07 PM
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A French Architect Goes Global
By DAVID D'ARCY
November 7, 2007

Like a character out of Jules Verne, Jean Nouvel, 62, says that he creates a small world in each building that he designs.

"Every time I'm making architecture, it's in a world that doesn't exist for me. Each time it's an unfolding of interior spaces, details, locations, new relations among the elements of the ensembles, colors and materials that are not always the same. Each time, I try to create something that works in depth," he said over the telephone from his Paris office. "I don't believe in architecture that repeats itself in an automatic way. That's why each of my buildings is different in its details."
[graphic]

These days, Mr. Nouvel, like Verne, has gone global -- a future concert hall in Paris; skyscrapers in Le Havre, France, and Doha, Qatar; and a dreamy museum for the sheik of Abu Dhabi. Soon he'll have three projects in a new world, Manhattan -- 40 Mercer, a somber condo slab in SoHo; the Hudson-view 100 11th, with some 1,600 windows, all of different dimensions; and a mixed-use skyscraper fused to the Museum of Modern Art through shared galleries.

The oft-punned Mr. Nouvel -- new in French -- has fans from Jacques Chirac to Brad Pitt, who named his daughter Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt. Red-State Hines Interests of Houston, developers of 40 Mercer and the MoMA spire, liked Mr. Nouvel enough to hire him to build an office tower outside Paris, too.

Twenty years ago, a nouveau Nouvel unveiled his Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, a sleek blend of sculptural economy and elegant arabesque decoration. Another Parisian landmark is his 1994 Cartier Foundation, a glass and steel transparency in a glass-walled garden. Not bad for a renegade who once condemned Le Corbusier and all things modernist.

In New York, his projects are less public, yet 100 11th's façade promises a Nouvel baroque flourish, with a mosaic that deconstructs its view in 1,600 reflections. (Mr. Nouvel's favorite buildings, the Sainte Chapelle in Paris and the cathedrals of Chartres and Rheims, are known for their light.) "The idea was to work with the view in relation to the Hudson and with the sunset," he said. "I wanted to escape the traditional neutrality of the curtain wall, which doesn't immediately express the fact that you are looking." On a clear day, you can see Nouveau Jersey, and rival Frank Gehry's luminous new AIC building across the street.

Mr. Nouvel's debut New York design in 1997 (never built) was of a hotel cantilevered over the East River, a fusion of bridge and pier jutting out from the Brooklyn waterfront.

The Frenchman says critics get stuck on that stand-alone defiance: "I'm a contextual architect by desire and by conviction, and I have been since the moment I began this profession. I've always thought that you build a building, wherever it is, in a particular place, with the notion of respecting everything around it."

"In New York," he added, "there are always an enormous number of things to tap into that already belong to a history. It's our job to reveal the presence of that history. What story are we telling? What are we continuing? In architecture, you always make the future on the basis of the past, on the structure of the past."

Call it chacun a son contexte: "It can be based on contrasts, or on a dialogue. But each time it's a precise analysis of the place and of a sensibility." 100 11th Avenue, he says, is all about its site. "I can't imagine transporting it somewhere else, even to another location in the center of Manhattan."

In Paris, Mr. Nouvel has sought harmony -- his kind, bien sur. His Musée des Arts Premiers on Quai Branly, leaf-covered and on pillars, is as long horizontally as the nearby Eiffel Tower is tall.

"I put the building in the middle of a very large garden, with the effect that this is not a public building that you discover at first glance, but through the trees. . . . It's a protected territory, a territory where objects, which are inspired by beliefs that are not ours, can coexist and shine forth."

Like the Institut du Monde Arabe, Quai Branly suggests a French acceptance of foreign cultures -- a fact that's less clear on Parisian streets. Yet the two buildings don't look anything alike. Admirers call Mr. Nouvel "grammarless." Critics say he lacks a style.

The architect laughs. "My style is the effort each time to find the right reason to do this or that. For me, what characterizes a style is not always to repeat the same elements in a vocabulary -- it's the permanence of an attitude. You can recognize architecture by the permanence of that attitude, even if the vocabulary of elements is very different."

He cites his Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, a massive hulk for culture on the Mississippi that mimics the gray depots alongside it. A red stripe sets it apart. "I thought of the waterfalls and the rapids around Minneapolis to make a building that was an extended echo of the industrial buildings and mills that are there." After all, he noted, "Theater is an industry."

Abu Dhabi's climate and Mr. Nouvel's museum project are a world away, a cluster of buildings under a cupola with its own microclimate in a $2 billion Guggenheim "village" that is only sun and sand today. "For a contextual architect, that's difficult," he said with a chuckle.

"I created a peninsula, with an architecture built around different buildings, simple buildings. Arab architecture is always geometry and light. Here it's a strict geometry, with perforations that create a play of light on the terraces and the buildings underneath."

Delicate arabesque perforations (as in Mr. Nouvel's Doha tower) filter light through the cupola. They echo the Institut du Monde Arabe's mousharabieh, decorative portals that open and close to regulate the passage of light.

Mr. Nouvel's client is Thomas Krens, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, who commissioned a temporary museum in Tokyo, an unbuilt opera house in Taichung, Taiwan, and a partly submerged museum in Rio de Janeiro that sank as a project because of local opposition.

Mr. Krens, Houston-based Hines Interests and 100 11th's Cape Advisers Inc. seem unfazed by Mr. Nouvel's complicated designs -- "playing too many notes," as Mr. Nouvel says coyly. "I hope in any case that my architecture is complex. I'm a believer in complex thought," said the Dr. Evil look-alike co-author of a treatise with the inscrutable Jean Baudrillard. "A building shouldn't be able to be decoded in a single glance. You always want to hide at least a part of your logic. You always want a depth in which some aspects raise questions. I still cultivate a certain degree of secrecy."

Secrecy shrouds Mr. Nouvel's planned MoMA tower. Hines, MoMA and Mr. Nouvel won't discuss it, yet Mr. Nouvel's office told sources for the Slatin Report, a real-estate blog, that he was chosen for the job. A MoMA press release in January noted that the site's $65 million sale to Hines mandated 50,000 square feet of exhibition space and 10,000 square feet for storage.

Mr. Nouvel hinted at something novel: "I'm for a specific architecture, and I'm opposed to a global or generic architecture, especially for skyscrapers. A tower for me is akin to what the steeples of cathedrals were before. And each time, from this standpoint, you have to create a point of identity."

The onetime theorist reads little these days. He recently reread "The Idiot" by Dostoyevsky. "My bedside reading is 'The Book of Intranquility' by Fernando Pessoa. It's the book of someone who is inactive, who is questioning about things that are the most subtle, the most insignificant. Maybe it's my way of achieving calm through literature." Other favorites are Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Mr. Baudrillard. "If it hadn't been for structuralism, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today," he said.

Nor without two French presidents, Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac.

For Nicholas Sarkozy, "it's still very early," he said. "In the electoral campaign there was not much talk of culture, even less about architecture." But Mr. Nouvel will be watching, perhaps on an island somewhere.
     
     
  #38  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 12:34 PM
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All I can say is WOW! I love it already!



And 75 stories is not bad!
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  #39  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 12:43 PM
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Damn, that is quite purdy. I likey.
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  #40  
Old Posted Nov 15, 2007, 1:03 PM
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Just when it seemed all of the excitement was shifted to the far west side and
Downtown, comes this beauty in the heart of Midtown. Now we wait for Extell's
57th Street tower. While new towers (like BofA) rising to the south of the GE add
to the excellent views, this tower will add to the north...



[/QUOTE]
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