From the 4/19/05 Cincinnati Enquirer:
In Covington, Ascent will reach for the sky
City Commission votes today on condo project
By Sara Pearce
Enquirer staff writer
From the moment settlers constructed their first building on the downtown riverfront, our eyes have been drawn to it.
In the centuries since, the Ohio River's banks have seen it all. Warehouses. Town houses. Parking lots. Stadiums. Saloons. Parks. Mansions. Offices.
Each incarnation has been a bellwether of our hopes, dreams and aspirations as a city. From thriving port and commerce center to major-league town and cultural hub.
And as the riverfront and skyline on both sides of the river have evolved, major additions have been hotly debated, which is one of the many things that immediately separates The Ascent at Roebling's Bridge from what has gone before it.
The building with the lofty name, designed for Corporex, is a sleek, $40 million, 21-story condominium tower that everyone seems to like.
"Beautiful," "love it," "bold and elegant" were some of the comments from Licking-Riverside residents at a March meeting.
The proposal has been approved by the Kenton County Planning Commission, Covington Architectural Review Panel and Covington Urban Design Review Board. Tonight, it faces one final group: Covington City Commission, which is scheduled to vote on it.
If approved, the Ascent will be built at a corner of East RiverCenter Boulevard and Scott Street. Now a parking lot, it's known as the Coach & Four corner after the restaurant that operated there for 40 years.
It would be the first strictly residential high-rise to be built on either side of the downtown riverfront since Adams Landing opened in October 1992. It is to include 80 units, ranging from 950 square feet to a 7,000-square foot, three-story penthouse - with the average size approximately 2,000 square feet.
Until the exterior design is finalized, interior design and prices will not be determined.
The Ascent would sit on the 1-acre site at an angle, curving in a subtle "c" to maximize views. Its deeply sloped roof echoes the lines of the historic Roebling Suspension Bridge that crosses the Ohio River just a few hundred yards away.
From his first sketch, architect Daniel Libeskind turned to the bridge as his muse.
"It is shaped in a special way to play off the great Roebling Bridge," he says during an interview from his office in New York City. "It is a gateway to the bridge, so it takes its form from the curvature of the bridge's cables, and its color from the reflection of water and sky.
"It opens up new possibilities on that side of the river."
Local architectural historian Walter E. Langsam echoes that sentiment.
"It's a very exciting proposal, and I'm thrilled that it is a response to the bridge," says Langsam, an adjunct professor in the University of Cincinnati's department of art, architecture and planning who worked in Covington's Historic Preservation office for three years.
"We have lost our sense of how grand the bridge is. When it was finished (in 1866), the bridge was the tallest structure in the Ohio River valley. It is a major achievement that has been dwarfed by the high rises and other buildings that have grown up around it.
"But this building is not monolithic, it's not a solid block - it is a vivid, visually intuitive response to the bridge and the older parts of Covington. It will draw a lot of attention to itself, to the project and to Covington."
Libeskind is an architect whose work often is described as avant-garde.
"He doesn't look at things through the same lens that we do," says Tom Banta, the Corporex executive vice president who is overseeing this project.
For decades, Libeskind was a theoretical architect. He taught at colleges, including a stint at the University of Kentucky in the early 1970s, and designed buildings. But, he did not have a single building of his built until The Jewish Museum, Berlin was completed in 1999 and opened in 2001.
Once Libeskind's work leapt from theory to reality, it started a building boom.
He now is working on dozens of projects in cities such as Milan, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Hong Kong and Seoul, including the project that brought him global attention: the World Trade Center site in New York City. Libeskind was selected as the master plan architect for the site after a highly public and pitched battle.
His plan for that 16-acre site is viewed by many as inspiring and ambitious. It includes parks and other open spaces, a museum and multiple towers, culminating in a twisting 1,776-foot tower that would be the world's tallest building.
Detractors were quick to point out that Libeskind had little experience with tall buildings. At that point, the four-story Berlin museum was his highest building.
That has changed.
In 2002, Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North opened in Manchester, England. The low, swooping buildings include a slender tower with a sloping roof that is similar to the Ascent design.
A tall, bending tower is part of the 63-acre Fiera Milano project in Milan, Italy.
And now there is the Ascent.
While the design is fresh, it is far more conventional than the low-lying, splintered, metallic buildings such as the Denver Art Museum extension and The Jewish Museum, Berlin that have become Libeskind hallmarks.
Still, it is a dramatic departure from the boxy commercial buildings nearby, and the traditional 19th and early 20th century buildings that have characterized Covington until recently as historic but shabby.
"It's pretty average, cookie cutter design on the riverfront right now," says Vic Canfield, chairman of Covington's Urban Design Review Board, which approved the project unanimously at its March meeting. "Corporex tried to vary RiverCenter a little bit - but it all has the same reddish brown hue, and the buildings look alike."
Departing from the norm is just the "kick in the butt" needed to bring innovative architecture to the riverfront, says Terry Boling, a working architect and assistant professor at DAAP.
"Corporex has sent an important message to everyone in the area by picking someone who is not really mainstream or conventional," says Boling. "If he can do it the way it is proposed, that will open doors for other developers to take a similar route and be a little more visionary.
"There's no reason why the whole riverfront couldn't be dotted with these amazing buildings, this could start a precedent."
Canfield agrees. "It's exciting to have a world-class architect designing a building that will be an eye-catcher and draw people's attention," he says.
Even Covington Mayor Butch Callery, who readily admits to clashing with Corporex chairman Bill Butler many times over the years, feels it is the right time for a bold statement along the river.
"I have heard virtually no negative feedback," he says. "The design is striking, and I think it will encourage other development all around."
Having a celebrity name to drop only adds to the project's cachet, he adds. "Getting Daniel, well, that was fantastic - he's a big name."
Architects have become mainstream enough that a recent episode of "The Simpsons" had the Springfield Cultural Advisory Board hiring Frank Gehry (designer of UC's Vontz Center for Molecular Studies) to design a cutting-edge, metal-clad, off-kilter concert hall for the mythical town.
"An architect with an international reputation often has a different kind of confidence and persuasiveness," says Langsam. "They seem to make clients less cautious."
And the public, too, says Alex Welden, chairman of the Kenton County Planning Commission. "For a lot of people, a big name legitimizes something that might not fly otherwise," she says. "It is a pretty strong statement. And maybe it's unfortunate but, if some talented local person did it, we would probably have a much harder time selling it.
"Daniel's name opens doors."
E-mail spearce@enquirer.com
DANIEL LIBESKIND
Age: 59
Born: In Lodz, Poland in 1946. His family moved to Israel when he was 11 and to the United States when he was 13. He became an American citizen in 1965.
Education: He started college as a musician but left as an architect, graduating from Cooper Union in 1970 with a bachelor's degree in architecture. He received a Master's Degree in architectural history and theory from University of Essex in Colchester, Essex, England in 1972.Regional connection: taught architecture at the University of Kentucky in the early 1970s.
Most noted for: winning the competition to become the Master Plan Architect for the 16-acre World Trade Center site.
Late start: Libeskind did not have a building of his built until he won the competition for The Jewish Museum, Berlin which was completed in 1999.
Global reach: Current projects include "The Eye and the Wing," an extension to the Denver Art Museum and The Museum Residences (a parking garage and condominiums he is working with Corporex on); WESTside, a new neighborhood in Bern, Switzerland; The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco; Fiero Milano, a new neighborhood in Milan, Italy; "The Crystal," an extension to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada.
Quote: "Why should we have banal buildings by anonymous people who are not interested in architecture?"
Read more about him: Pick up "Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture," by Daniel Libeskind (Riverhead Books; $XX) or "Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the future of Ground Zero" by Philip Nobel (Metropolitan Books; $25).
Online: www.daniel-libeskind.com.
Daniel Libeskind says: "A great building - like great literature or poetry or music - can tell the story of the human soul."
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