| NYguy |
Feb 11, 2014 3:00 AM |
http://www.fastcompany.com/3025601/s...he-new-skyline
From Barclays Center To Modular High Rises,
SHoP Architects Is Changing The Way We Build Buildings
A band of seven is drafting a different kind of firm--one that values more than fancy blueprints or lucrative scut work.
http://e.fastcompany.net/multisite_f...ew-skyline.jpg
By Andrew Rice
Quote:
SHoP Architects, a young New York firm, has grand designs. The firm's seven partners say they won't be content to merely leave a mark on America's most important skyline; they also want to transform the business of creating buildings. "Sometimes we joke," says one partner, Vishaan Chakrabarti, "that the nearest precedent is McKim, Mead & White."
It's a nervy comparison for a New York architect to make, even in jest--a little like a pop group invoking Mozart--but SHoP has begun to back its ambitions with big commissions. Over the past few years, the firm has become the city's go-to designer for complex, civically important projects. In November, when the owner of a controversial Manhattan waterfront scheme unveiled plans for a 50-story hotel and marina, SHoP was his architect. When Michael Bloomberg, the city's previous mayor, announced a $1.1 billion mixed-income housing development, SHoP partners were at his side. There's also an ultraluxury midtown condo tower, 100 feet taller than the Empire State Building; a dockyard redevelopment around an old Brooklyn sugar factory; and even an outlet mall in blue-collar Staten Island, to be adjoined by the world's tallest Ferris wheel.
SHoP aspires to rethink the very notion of how architecture should be practiced, experimenting with everything from how architects get paid to how the firm participates in the treacherous worlds of politics and construction. SHoP's partners talk of breaking free of the tired convention that divides firms into two categories: the hip little ones, which devise adventurous buildings that exist only on paper, and the corporate behemoths, which design soulless glass skyscrapers that actually get built. "They have managed to cross the line from 'boutique' to 'big' really quickly," says Lance Brown, a professor at the City University of New York and president of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. SHoP wants it both ways, making the case that innovative design can add tangible value to real estate. And somehow, at least so far, SHoP has managed to please both architecture critics and real estate developers--perhaps its most impressive trick of all.
"There's this idea that if you make money, you're a sellout," says Coren Sharples, another SHoP partner. "We didn't really understand that."
....................The firm was revived by a stroke of creative inspiration. In the darkest days of the recession, SHoP got a chance at a commission that would vault it to the front rank: the Barclays Center. "We needed that project," Holden says. "We were reeling." Forest City Ratner was desperate itself, forced to scale back its original plan for Atlantic Yards, a mixed-use complex by Frank Gehry, in the face of financing problems and lawsuits from neighborhood activists. The developer was left with a boxy stand-alone arena design, which pleased no one, so it came to SHoP. "Inside of a week," Forest City's Gilmartin says, "they produced an image that was provocative, compelling, and ultimately became very close to the design of the building." SHoP gave the building a distinctive "skin," an interlocking structure that jutted out over the front plaza, forming an open-roof canopy that the architects called an "oculus." The idea--which proved successful--was to create a public space in what was once one of New York's most forbidding traffic intersections. "The protests stopped the day it opened," Pasquarelli boasts.
That's not completely true: Some skeptics still haven't forgiven SHoP for hitching itself to the Barclays Center. "I can't look at it without seeing the politics," says Fran Leadon, coauthor of the AIA Guide to New York City. But the Barclays Center became SHoP's calling card, bringing it to the attention of New York's real estate industry.
"I felt the design took a lot of balls," says Michael Stern, managing partner of JDS Development Group. Stern hired SHoP to take on another difficult project: an East River site that had sat vacant for more than a decade due to bureaucratic delays and financial setbacks. When Stern acquired the parcel from a previous owner last year, he inherited a painstakingly negotiated set of zoning constraints that prevented his planned pair of condo buildings from sharing a base. So SHoP gave him copper-sheathed towers that bend toward one another and meet in a central "skybridge" that contains amenities such as a health club. With those buildings under construction, Stern has SHoP working on another project, a 1,350-foot residential skyscraper above a landmarked building on 57th Street.
The 57th Street development--one of several recent ones meant to cater to the billionaire condo buyer--is the kind of building that is unique to New York. But lately, SHoP has begun to branch out of its hometown, vying to design a new generation of embassies for the State Department, building an office center for technology companies in Botswana, and working on a futuristic planned city in Kenya. Chakrabarti recently published a book, A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America, which proposes that places like Dallas and Denver construct "hyperdense" core areas served by convenient public transportation. That vision, of course, looks a lot like New York. "I think our work right now represents the new direction of urbanity in America," Chakrabarti tells me.
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