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http://www.nysun.com/article/69896
Eighth Avenue Livens Up
By JAMES GARDNER
January 22, 2008
Something strange happens to Central Park West, that prince of thoroughfares, as it heads south past Columbus Circle. Suddenly the dream ends and this noble street turns into a toad — ugly old Eighth Avenue. With the exception of Norman Foster's new Hearst Building at 57th Street, SOM's Worldwide Plaza at 49th Street, and Renzo Piano's recently unveiled Times Building at 41st Street, there is all too little distinction to this weary, workaday stretch of Manhattan. It is almost with relief when, after the porn shops and discount clothing stores of Midtown, Eighth Avenue shatters and disperses at last into the anarchic tangle of streets that make up the West Village.
Of late, however, Eighth Avenue has become the site of numerous developments, mostly residential, all responding to the improbable cachet that Hell's Kitchen has recently come to enjoy in Manhattan's overheated real estate market. Two of the newest buildings, the Link at 310 W. 52nd St. and the Platinum at Eighth Avenue and 46th Street, are completed or nearly completed, and come to us from the never idle drawing boards of Costas Kondylis & Partners LLP Architects.
By far the better of the two developments is the Link, a 43-story tower; in fact, the Link is quite simply a better building than we had any reason to expect from 8th Avenue. I would go so far as to say that it is more beautiful than it appears. By that I mean that, to superficial inspection, it looks like yet another drably modernist tower of the sort that abounds along the avenue. But if your eye should linger on it a second longer than it usually does on midtown architecture, you will notice a subtlety and an insinuating grace that grows ever more powerful the more you look at it. Like the Trump World Tower on First Avenue and 47th Street, also designed by Mr. Kondylis's firm, the ruggedly ordinary typology of the Link is enlivened by deceptively graceful proportions.
There is something of quiet, unflappable authority in the way this silvery and columnar building, with its sharp right angles and slightly cruciform imprint, rises into the air of Midtown. It is so dogmatically, unapologetically rectilinear that in its apparent embrace of tedium, it nevertheless offers real visual interest. Even its window surrounds — which, like those of most new developments, suggest flimsiness and cost-cutting — possess a grit and sufficiency that are usually lacking in projects of this sort.
The poignancy of the Link's excellence is enhanced by the circumstances of its placement in the urban fabric. It does not front Eighth Avenue, from which it is barred by a truly dreary Hampton Inn, clad in appalling beige brick. Meanwhile, along 51st Street, its access to the street is abruptly blocked by a concrete, bunkerish garage. But along 52nd Street, one lot in from Eighth Avenue, the Link suddenly flowers into unanticipated loveliness. Not its least distinguished element is an entranceway introduced by a perfectly cubic, crystalline pavilion that may be the first, and one hopes not the last, structure in the city to be strongly influenced by the new Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and 58th Street. There is absolutely no reason for this cube to be where it is — occupying the carriage path, as it were, that links the recessed entrance to the street. Rather, it is an architectural folly, a fragile grace note, but one of the utmost elegance.
Contiguous to the shining glass tower, and part of the same development, is a far smaller structure, six stories high and faced in dark stone, with a curtain-walled midsection. There is a touch of mannerism to its almost parodically diminutive metal balconies. Clearly it is intended to serve as a transition to the lower-lying buildings between Eighth and Ninth avenues. And it is a tribute to the design sense of Costas Kondylis & Partners, as well as to Gal Nauer Architects, which helped in the design, that this seemingly incompatible structure should exist in such harmony with the glass tower just to the east.
Like the Link, the Platinum is a 43-story structure, but it is a far inferior architectural product. It consists of a tower rising from a black and undistinguished base. The tower itself is a dark affair with ribs of lighter brownish hue. At various points in its shaft's ascent, it acquires slight accretions or diminutions in a trite and meaningless tribute to the deconstructivist style that informs such nearby projects as the Condé Nast and Reuters buildings. If the Link ennobles Eighth Avenue, the Platinum merely aggravates and confirms the general dreariness of the place.