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Originally Posted by CCs77
Pretty good pictures you've got there NYGuy.
You have been designated to go there again when the summer begins and repeat the session  |
I most certainly will.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/20...-new-york-city
Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?
By Paul Goldberger
May 2014
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....It is easy to think of the super-tall, ultra-luxury towers as a story more about money than about design, and to a certain degree it is. But if the first two buildings, One57 and 432 Park Avenue, are any indication, the interiors, at least, are designed to an exacting standard, with extremely high ceilings and expansive rooms to go with the awesome views, as if the developers realized that at prices upwards of $8,000 a square foot they couldn’t get away with the mean little rooms and cheap finishes that they might peddle elsewhere. As Barnett said to me, “They’re getting something for their $40 or $50 million.” (Well, yes, you’d hope.) He added, “These people don’t want to get squeezed into a small box.” Both buildings have elegant bathrooms that are more in line with what you would expect to find in a custom, one-of-a-kind interior than a developer-supplied one. And both buildings have spectacular kitchens, which will in all likelihood prove once again the maxim that in New York the better equipped an apartment kitchen is, the less cooking goes on within it.
Despite the garishness of One57’s exterior, I’m not ready to write off the entire super-thin, super-tall building type as incompatible with serious architecture.
Viñoly’s 432 Park, on the outside, is as sophisticated as One57 is glitzy. Its façade is a flat, minimalist grid of smoothly finished concrete. As one looks at the building it’s hard not to think of Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect who is famous for making concrete feel more sensual and luxurious than marble. To some people, concrete is still concrete, no matter how refined its finish, so you have to give Macklowe some credit for not pandering to the lowest common denominator of moneyed taste.
Macklowe’s own apartment, in the Plaza, was designed by the late Charles Gwathmey, who did a great deal to shape the developer’s taste and gave him an obsession for detail that is more characteristic of an architect than a profit-driven builder. In the case of 432 Park, Macklowe seems not to have cut any corners; his philosophy has been to spend as much as it takes and figure he’ll get it back by charging sky-high prices, like the $74.5 million he is asking for the full-floor apartment on the 87th floor, or the $30.75 million he wants for a three-bedroom apartment down on the 64th floor.
The tower is an essay in pure geometric form: it is a perfect square in plan, and rises straight up, without a single setback; all four façades are identical, made up of a grid of windows, every one of which is roughly 10 feet square. No windows are bigger, and no windows are smaller. If the windows didn’t have glass in them, the whole building would look like one of Sol LeWitt’s tower sculptures from the 1980s.
Macklowe is trying to sell restraint and opulence at the same time, which is not an easy task. To do it, he revved up a marketing campaign that is even more elaborate than the One57 effort, with a huge sales office in the General Motors Building that, like the one for One57, replicates finishes, kitchens, and bathrooms of the apartments, which were designed by Deborah Berke, not Viñoly. There is also a hardcover book, a special magazine, and a Web site (with text in English, Russian, Portuguese, Chinese, French, and Italian) that allows you to see virtual images of finished apartments and photographs of the actual views from five selected heights. The climactic moment in the sales center comes when you see the mood-setting film, produced by the design agency dBox, that shows images of luxury—think British country houses, private jets—that morph into images of 432 Park, all to the background music of Mama Cass singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Never has austerity seemed so alluringly posh, not to say decadent.
If the size of the 432 Park Avenue tower, which replaces the old Drake Hotel, seems out of scale with its surroundings—which it is—it’s worth noting that it’s not the first residential building in the neighborhood to have that problem. Diagonally across the street is the building that might be considered the true first super-tall, super-thin residential tower, the Ritz Tower. It was built in 1925 to the designs of Emery Roth and Carrere & Hastings, and it rose 41 stories to 541 feet, a height that seemed every bit as outrageous in the 1920s as 1,396 feet does now. Ayn Rand was almost surely referring to the ornate Ritz Tower in The Fountainhead when she wrote disdainfully of “a Renaissance palace made of rubber and stretched to the height of forty stories.”
Two other new towers in the 57th Street area have to be considered as architectural efforts at least as serious as 432 Park. The first, 53 West 53rd Street, the tapered tower beside the Museum of Modern Art, was designed by Jean Nouvel several years ago for the Hines development firm but has been delayed since 2009. The tallest tower that is not on a wide street or avenue, it has gained some notoriety because of MoMA’s plans to expand into its lower floors and in the process demolish a small architectural gem, the former American Folk Art Museum, built in 2001.
And then there is 111 West 57th Street, designed by the architectural firm SHoP, which will be the thinnest tower of all, and quite possibly the most elegant: 1,397 feet, balanced on a base only 60 feet wide. The builders of 111 West 57th are Kevin Maloney of Property Markets Group and Michael Stern, the head of JDS Development Group.
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