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  #2041  
Old Posted Dec 5, 2014, 5:33 AM
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Assuming it's not too late, the city should limit new construction for a mile around the ESB
Guy just has no clue.

Do I think they should put up a new supertall right next door to the Empire State? No, I don't think so. But it doesn't have anything to do with blocking the view of the Empire State.
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  #2042  
Old Posted Dec 5, 2014, 1:04 PM
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By this guys logic, the ESB should never have been built in the first place, because it distracts from the architecturally superior former tallest building in the city. The ESB is not sacred, its just a building.
     
     
  #2043  
Old Posted Dec 5, 2014, 2:05 PM
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Some people think the only skyline they've known is the only one that should exist.



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...oot-tower.html

Who Wants a Supertall Skyline? The Emerging Aesthetic of the 1,000-Foot Tower





December 5
By Justin Davidson


Quote:
When you’re putting up a multi­billion-dollar tower that’s a quarter-mile high, there’s not much leeway to make it a work of art. On the other hand, when you’re putting up a multibillion-­dollar tower that’s a quarter-mile high, it had damn well better be a work of art.

Dozens of supertall buildings are being built or planned, radically redrawing the skyline. If we avert our gaze, we’ll get a bundle of glass stakes fencing off the air above ­Manhattan. Skyscrapers can be better. The difficulty of making an elegant symbolic presence out of an immense vertical machine has been vexing architects for more than a century. And yet it must be done.

“Problem,” declared the skyscraper wizard Louis Sullivan in 1896: “How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife, the graciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions?”

.....Sullivan expressed these anxieties in an essay called “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” In 1982, the critic Ada Louise Huxtable updated his concerns in an article for The New Criterion (which became a book) called “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered.” Sullivan gazed forward with trepidation and excitement; Huxtable looked back and saw a string of failed fantasies. Modernism had produced exquisite prototypes, like the IBM Building — and also a host of clumsy knockoffs. Postmodernism had reduced major questions to the ironic recycling of ornaments; Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) tower committed “architectural malapropism at drop-dead scale.” Both movements had yielded some fine buildings, but, she concluded mournfully, architecture had ceased to matter in New York because midtown was becoming so massively overbuilt.

She hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet.

In the 32 years since Huxtable’s essay, the skyline has been wrecked, repaired, raised, and amped up, not just in midtown but on the far West Side, in lower Manhattan, in downtown Brooklyn, and on the waterfront. And yet it’s amazing how little has changed. Office towers like One Bryant Park and the future Coach Tower at Hudson Yards are taller, fatter, and greener, yet historical habits endure long past their usefulness.

Huxtable pointed out that the skyscraper’s repeating five-foot-wide module once derived from the minimum size of an office. Today, financial firms demand open floor plates, yet the five-foot pane endures in almost every curtain wall. Similarly, most tall buildings consist of virtually identical stacked floors because concrete contractors would rather pour, repeat, and go home on a predictable schedule. Routine is cheap; every other option adds risk. Office towers’ most dramatic advances take place in their innards. You can practically date a skyscraper’s construction by the air quality in its offices, the speed of its elevators, and the softness of its lighting. Concern with the insubstantial — air, light, and speed — transfers to the structures as a whole, because even the most apparently straightforward architecture traffics in illusion. Designers keep insisting that a half-billion-pound colossus can “dematerialize” into a gleaming foam.

Too many high-gloss behemoths are so superficially designed that they betray at least part of their mandate. The coming flock glories in the upward thrust, but the earliest skyscraper designers groped toward a vertical style. They enlarged European precedents, creating piled-up palazzos encrusted with giant cornices, columns, and pediments. Sullivan’s generation divided the tower into three parts — evoking a column’s base, shaft, and capital; a tree’s roots, trunk, and branches; or a drama’s exposition, denouement, and conclusion. Sullivan saw in this the natural, and therefore sublime, expression of what a building does: high-ceilinged shops on the bottom, in the middle a warren of offices repeating as many times as necessary, topped by a windowless attic. “Form ever follows function,” he declared, a formulation slightly less terse and much less prescriptive than the modernist battle cry it inspired: Form follows function!

New York’s density imposes another trinity: the interior, the street, and the skyline. Hundreds of people live or work in a tower that, every day, thousands pass and millions see. Those separate scales impose different aesthetic demands, all equally important. It used to be a given that a great building met its private and public responsibilities with equal panache, but today’s most ambitious architecture is often brutally self-absorbed. Skyscrapers tend to flummox our marquee architects. Regularly flogged for indulging in squirmy structures and pointless flourishes, they can feel uncomfortable with the constraints of high-rise construction.

Zaha Hadid waited until she was in her 60s to design her first, a showstopper in Miami that is still years from completion. Frank Gehry draped a conventional rental building in a crinkly metal robe at Eight Spruce Street. Another Pritzker Prize winner, Christian de Portzamparc, produced the disastrous One57, a condo tower so clumsily gaudy that a fellow architect surmised he must be a socialist pranking the plutocrats. If so, the joke’s on the entire city.

A variation on that blinkered narcissism produced the studiously plain Goldman Sachs headquarters at 200 West Street. It’s grandly fitted out, but for those of us who don’t work there, it just hulks mildly on the lower Manhattan skyline like the oversize kid in the class photo whose name you can’t recall. We’re caught between flamboyantly theatrical towers and those that fetishize simplicity — between the diva and the nerd.

Skyscraper architects still succumb to the seductions of symmetry, the perfectly Cartesian antidote to a chaotic world. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s One World Trade Center and Rafael Viñoly’s apartment tower at 432 Park Avenue both present a simple orderliness that belies the lopsided pressures all around: high winds, irrational people, immense investment. The recent image of the two window cleaners dangling on a cockeyed plank at One World Trade dramatized the disjunction between an implacably geometric juggernaut and the messy frailty of individual lives. The architectural challenge of supertall buildings is to accommodate humans in structures of inhuman scale.

I can think of three architects who have pulled off that trick at heights of 800 feet or more. In Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower in Chicago, undulating concrete balconies recall Sullivan’s geometric traceries, animating the façades with ripples. (Her Solar Carve Tower on West 14th Street is one of the most exciting chapters in the future of the High Line.) SHoP’s planned 1,350-foot needle on West 57th Street respects both the landmarked Steinway Building it rises over and the sky it shoots into. So slender that it’s practically calligraphic, it will glint on the skyline, thanks to a genuinely opulent exterior finished in terra-cotta and bronze. And Herzog & De Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street, now under construction, hoists a modernist mountain village into the sky above Tribeca, topping out in a vertiginous pile of cantilevered penthouses.

...It’s not enough just to gawp at these towers’ bravado or grumble at the arrogance of the hyperrich gobbling up the sky. Like it or not, the elongated condo is an ever more assertive category of New York architecture, and it too can function as a form of public art. The combination of slenderness and height means that skyscrapers can sprout from modest lots, minimizing their impact on the street and narrowing the shadows they cast. The fact that they contain the caviar of real estate means that they can afford the luxury of being good. We have to live with the follies of the outlandishly wealthy; we can at least insist that they pamper themselves in a way that also enriches the city.


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  #2044  
Old Posted Dec 6, 2014, 5:07 PM
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A skyline that developed after 50 something years is better than a cluster of similar looking buildings built right after each other. (think of the GM Detroit buildings)

Its funny though that some NIMBY said this a "Dubai on the Hudson" and its so true. I'll pass as well...
     
     
  #2045  
Old Posted Dec 6, 2014, 6:01 PM
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Originally Posted by NYguy View Post
Guy just has no clue.

Do I think they should put up a new supertall right next door to the Empire State? No, I don't think so. But it doesn't have anything to do with blocking the view of the Empire State.
Does he realize that a mile is 20 blocks? That's a world away by NYC standards.

I do think that planning should include protecting sightlines and key landmarks, though. If he'd said no supertalls between Park Ave. and 7th Ave., from Madison Square Park to Bryant Park (ie, 26th to 42nd), then I would agree.
     
     
  #2046  
Old Posted Dec 6, 2014, 6:27 PM
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Just a bit off tangent...Sightlines IMO should only be "landmaked" if a particularly monumental structure meant to be showcased is seen as not to be blocked from any angle.
And sometimes, I would imagine, that's quite hard to do.
     
     
  #2047  
Old Posted Dec 7, 2014, 4:44 AM
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Originally Posted by Perklol View Post
A skyline that developed after 50 something years is better than a cluster of similar looking buildings built right after each other. (think of the GM Detroit buildings)

Its funny though that some NIMBY said this a "Dubai on the Hudson" and its so true. I'll pass as well...
In the Ren Cen, 4 out of 7 towers are identical and another 2 are twins. The Ren Cen also represents a massive percentage of total square footage downtown. This developent has no twin buildings and will barely make a mark on the Manhattan skyline. I think your comparison is deeply flawed.

Last edited by Guiltyspark; Dec 7, 2014 at 4:47 PM.
     
     
  #2048  
Old Posted Dec 7, 2014, 1:43 PM
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Originally Posted by JayPro View Post
Just a bit off tangent...Sightlines IMO should only be "landmaked" if a particularly monumental structure meant to be showcased is seen as not to be blocked from any angle.
And sometimes, I would imagine, that's quite hard to do.
In the case of the Washington Monument, maybe. In the case of the Empire State, no. It's tall, but is basically another in a series of large skyscrapers that make up the Manhattan skyline. Had the economy not tanked, it is very likely that the ESB's reign wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as it did. It's view corridor warrents no more protection than that of the Chrysler or Woolworth buildings.



Quote:
Originally Posted by Guiltyspark View Post
This developent has no twin buildings and will barely make a mark on the Manhattan skyline. I think your comparison is deeply flawed.
Of course it's flawed. Not only do we not know what the second half of the development will look like, bu this development - as large as it is - is but a portion of the overall Hudson Yards redevelopment which will see many large towers rise up in the area. It will resemble New York on the hudson, because that's exactly what it will be.
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  #2049  
Old Posted Dec 8, 2014, 4:14 PM
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http://inhabitat.com/nyc/will-the-hu...ap-your-pants/

Will the Hudson Yards “Thrill Device” really make you crap your pants?




by Nicole Jewell
12/08/14


Quote:
In this week’s odd architecture news, Related Companies president Jay Cross reportedly surprised guests at a real estate luncheon recently by boasting that the second tower in the developer’s mammoth 30 Hudson Yards project will have a very interesting feature. Referred to as a “thrill device” by Cross, the amenity is something that visitors can choose to pay for separately to “crap your pants.” Needless to say, inquiring minds really want to know.

Cross’s comment has sparked quite a bit of speculation since, with many wondering just what the special “thrill” feature could be. The most common guess is that the second tower will be equipped with a glass walkway connected to the building’s 1,000-foot-high outdoor observation center.
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  #2050  
Old Posted Dec 8, 2014, 4:51 PM
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Something similar to the Sears glass cube would be nice. Unless they start bungee jumping visitors off the edge or tip of the observation deck?

Although I'm hoping no one is wearing shorts or a skirt because I don't want to be walking on the street and somebody does actually crap their pants. Thats a wrap for the day if I get hit.
     
     
  #2051  
Old Posted Dec 8, 2014, 5:16 PM
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As far as I can tell, the ledge itself won't actually be over the street, but you could probably see up there.


Older renderings...














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  #2052  
Old Posted Dec 8, 2014, 7:52 PM
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Nice nautical-themed building. I can see a ship's prow, a mast and sail.
     
     
  #2053  
Old Posted Dec 8, 2014, 9:38 PM
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I have a hard time imagining that little room at the top is going to survive unless they have something very particular in mind.

I'd love to be wrong and have a nice restaurant take the space. I mean, Laurent Gras needs to go somewhere at some point. 3 Michelin Star Chefs don't stay without a home for this long, and he's been rumored for a mid-town spot for a while.

I'd love for them to one up the TWC's space which is already fantastic.
     
     
  #2054  
Old Posted Dec 8, 2014, 10:04 PM
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Originally Posted by StoOgE View Post
I have a hard time imagining that little room at the top is going to survive unless they have something very particular in mind.

I'd love to be wrong and have a nice restaurant take the space. I mean, Laurent Gras needs to go somewhere at some point. 3 Michelin Star Chefs don't stay without a home for this long, and he's been rumored for a mid-town spot for a while.

I'd love for them to one up the TWC's space which is already fantastic.
The Windows On The World Restaurant on top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center before 9/11/2001 was the highest grossing restaurant in America. I doubt that a Restaurant at the top of the North Tower of Hudson Yards would have an issue.

Last edited by Roadcruiser1; Dec 9, 2014 at 12:43 AM.
     
     
  #2055  
Old Posted Dec 9, 2014, 12:33 AM
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Originally Posted by Roadcruiser1 View Post
/

The Windows On The World Restaurant on top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center before 9/11/2001 was the highest grossing restaurant in America. I doubt that a Restaurant at the top of the North Tower of Hudson Yards would have an issue.
Right, but Windows on the World was 30 dollar burgers and 70 dollar steaks and seated a good number of people.

I'm talking about the tiny little spot at the tip top.

That's a 20-30 seating space at the most. If that's going to function as a venue it's going to need to come in at 250+ a setting. Laurent Gras would be fantastic there.

L20 in Chicago was relevatory before he ran off.
     
     
  #2056  
Old Posted Dec 9, 2014, 12:45 AM
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I'd be a good location for a hookah lounge or some sort of club. Would be an epic location.
     
     
  #2057  
Old Posted Dec 9, 2014, 4:26 AM
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I believe that space at the very top (above the observation deck and ballroom) was being planned as a private club, sort of a throwback.


Some earlier posts about the observation deck...


Quote:
http://observer.com/2012/10/hudson-y...ervation-deck/

And above Hudson Yard’s outdoor observation space will be a veritable playland of attractions reaching to the top of the tower, and by extension beyond the Empire State Building’s topmost observation room, at 1,250 feet, the place where zeppelins were once meant to dock.

“It’s more akin to the Rainbow Room to be honest,” Related spokeswoman Joanna Rose explained. “We have a ballroom, restaurant and bars above the observation deck that offer panoramic views. And yes, we are looking at locating some of those above the 1250 mark.”




Quote:
A "private lounge that seats about 10 people"...go to 44:25 in the video


Video Link
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Last edited by NYguy; Dec 9, 2014 at 4:38 AM.
     
     
  #2058  
Old Posted Dec 9, 2014, 4:50 AM
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This building is so cool...
     
     
  #2059  
Old Posted Dec 9, 2014, 4:53 AM
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Ballroom idea sounds neat and a lounge/private room. Imagine if they did weddings up there. I'd be a good idea. A New York styled wedding almost 1300 ft above.

I have a lot of confidence in this tower. This and Nordstrom are probably the best projects to look forward too if I had to pick.
     
     
  #2060  
Old Posted Dec 9, 2014, 5:51 AM
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Originally Posted by chris08876 View Post
Ballroom idea sounds neat and a lounge/private room. Imagine if they did weddings up there. I'd be a good idea. A New York styled wedding almost 1300 ft above.
Well, not quite... those renderings and quotes posted by NYguy are referring to the 1334 ft version. We're 50 feet below that now...
     
     
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