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Quote:

Originally Posted by Submariner (Post 6362993)

Why is it going to take over a year to dig out this site?

They have to proceed cautiously so as not to awaken the Balrog.

^call gandalf, maybe he'll hurry up the process for us.

Quote:

Originally Posted by McSky (Post 6362999)

They have to proceed cautiously so as not to awaken the Balrog.

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/i...doLdff9AEJVVjz

Maybe it won't take as long of you recruit enough of them to speak friend and enter.............

^ "yes, have hobbitses we must GOLLUM!"

YIMBY's latest update on 220 CPS also included a sliver of the 225w57 site, where you can see the excavation that has begun.

http://www.yimbynews.com/wp-content/...12/220cps3.jpg
http://www.yimbynews.com/2013/12/exc...rk-south.html#

Oh yeah, here comes the eternal wait.

Apparently there's still hope that the cantilever will be shelved

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/ar...rref=arts&_r=0

Seeing a Need for Oversight of New York’s Lordly Towers

Quote:

.....Members of the Art Students League haven’t yet voted whether to approve the sale of their air rights to Extell for the Nordstrom Tower. While the league stands to gain millions, cranky artists might still succeed where Landmarks failed, and shelve the cantilever.

Here’s hoping they do.

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2810/1...7347bc31_b.jpg

First month of excavation completed successfully. Barlog has not been awaken. How deep do you think they can dig in 20 months... to the center of the Earth?
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2820/1...a3d8f2ac_b.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3795/1...8d5267bf_b.jpg

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7444/1...8c18c566_b.jpg

^yeah by that progress they must be lying.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ILNY (Post 6383215)

First month of excavation completed successfully. Balrog has not been awakened.

http://i1293.photobucket.com/albums/...c.jpg~original

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blaze23 (Post 6383087)

Apparently there's still hope that the cantilever will be shelved

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/ar...rref=arts&_r=0

Seeing a Need for Oversight of New York’s Lordly Towers

I don't see a need for "oversight", because as we've seen, it always comes down to someone else's taste. And in the case of the Tower Verre, we came out on the bad end of that deal.

Quote:

So, soon the view south from the park will be as if from inside the world’s biggest chessboard, with the buildings on Central Park South mere pawns before the queens and bishops that blot the sky behind them.

What do these projects add at street level where the other 99 percent live? What’s their return for claiming the skyline that is our collective identity?

We need to be careful. Almost everybody hated the Chrysler Building at first. The Empire State Building once stuck out like a sore thumb. Those buildings along Central Park South used to be among the city’s tallest, intruding into the park over the treetops. Taste is tricky to legislate.

It's all summed up right there. Forget about blocking views from Central Park. View almost any photo taken from Central Park, and you will see the sky rising above the towers. That will be true, even when the taller towers are built. These skyscrapers aren't infinitely tall.

A common sense rebuttal to that last piece...

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmo...rk-skyscraper/

The new era of the New York skyscraper

By Felix Salmon
December 24, 2013

Quote:

The first time I ever visited New York, the bus from JFK dropped me off in front of Grand Central Terminal. I looked up, and up, and up, at the Chrysler Building towering above me, and I immediately fell in love with a city which so exuberantly celebrated its height and size and weight. Much as I love Chicago, New York will always be the home of the skyscraper for me; no other city has such spectacular examples from all eras, ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth and Flatiron buildings, through Lever House and the Seagram building, all the way to the newest towers rising both downtown, at the World Trade Center site, as well as uptown, along 57th Street. One of the most awe-inspiring architectural experiences in the world is to visit the little-known but truly amazing top room of the art deco BNY Mellon building at 1 Wall Street, with its three-storey-high silver ceilings and its unrivaled views to the north, south, east, and west.

In a sign of the times, that room — along with the rest of the building — might be for sale; one broker told Bloomberg that it “could be spectacular resi”. For corporations looking to squeeze a large number of people into a single building, super-tall towers don’t make a lot of sense: they waste too much space on service shafts. But for trophy-hunting billionaires, it seems that views are everything, these days — especially if the views in question are of Central Park. Build a high-ceilinged, full-floor, ultra-luxe apartment a thousand feet in the sky and even closer to Central Park South, and it seems that there’s almost no limit to how much you can charge for it.

From the point of view of skyscraper lovers, this is good news. The richest corporate tenants — the ones in the financial-services industry — tend to want large uninterrupted floor plates for their trading rooms, which often results in dull, uninspired architecture. The world’s plutocrats, by contrast, demand architecture of landmark status, something befitting any major new addition to the New York skyline. On top of that, the premium commanded by full-floor apartments means that the new towers tend to be very slender — and as a general rule, thinner towers tend to be more beautiful. That said, the owners buying into these new towers are pretty unsympathetic. For all their riches, they tend to pay very little in the way of taxes, they don’t interact much with the rest of the city (if they did, they’d never want to live on 57th Street), and they generally leave their apartments empty for nearly all of the year.

Jim Windolf spent 3,000 words and a very chilly day in Central Park bellyaching about the shadows these towers might cast in late fall; and now Michael Kimmelman has weighed in, saying that New York should not “consign its silhouette to private builders” and should instead force all new skyscrapers to run a gantlet of community groups and public review.

The fact is, of course, that all the best skyscrapers were built by private builders, often in the face of substantial public opposition. And public skyscrapers are generally worse, not better: just look at the original World Trade Center, built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, with its destruction of Radio Row and Greenwich Street, its forbidding windswept plaza, and its inability to attract tenants for decades after it was built. In general, if the public is asked whether they want any new skyscraper, the answer will always be “no” — even as they love the iconic tall buildings they’ve lived with for years. (There was a general consensus that something should restore the skyline after the World Trade Center was demolished, but that’s the exception that proves the rule.)

Kimmelman, in particular, seems to think — with no real evidence to support him — that public review would improve the quality of architecture built — that it would allow the towers he likes (111 West 57th Street, 432 Park Avenue) while disallowing the towers he doesn’t like. The Nordstrom Tower, for example, features a cantilever which, Kimmeleman says, turns it into “a giant with one foot raised, poised to squash a poodle”). That’s certainly not the way I would describe the renderings we’ve seen so far. But no one likes a massive new building project going ahead in their neighborhood, especially not when they can turn the whole thing into a zero-sum game of proles versus plutocrats, as Windolf does. (“It struck me as unfair that, sometime next year, someone who paid $90 million for a glass-walled, floor-through residence will lounge in full sunshine while the old man will have less light of his own.”)

Skyscrapers are a perfect emblem of capitalism — they destroy what came before, in order to create something new. Sometimes the change is for the better, and sometimes it’s for the worse — but a city where nothing new gets built is a dead city, which might have nostalgic value to tourists, but which is never going to be a driver of global commerce.

New York is a mature city, where it’s already extremely expensive to build — the barriers to constructing new buildings are high enough, especially considering all the (entirely reasonable) preservation rules. Kimmelman and Windolf would add further hurdles still, concerning such things as shadows and view corridors. But neither makes much sense, in New York — a city which has been building long canyons of tall buildings for the best part of a century now. The only view corridors which make any sense, in Manhattan, are the big avenues — and ever since the Pan Am building went up, no one’s going to build in the middle of an avenue. And the official statement from the Central Park Conservancy, on the subject of shadows, seems exactly right to me:

Since the Park’s 1857 creation, numerous buildings have been established on its perimeter. Depending on the time and day of season, those buildings sometimes cast shadows. In the Conservancy’s 33-year experience of Park restoration and maintenance, these shadows have not significantly affected either the Park’s horticulture, which we are responsible for maintaining, or significantly impacted the experience of more than 40 million people who visit the Park annually.

Yes, the Conservancy is conflicted, here — its board includes major property developers. Still, the views of the New York skyline from Central Park are a large part of its perennial appeal — the varied street walls along the four perimeters, as well as the range of buildings visible beyond them.

In a globalizing and homogenizing world, any kind of new architectural vernacular, unique to a certain city and a certain time, should in general be given the benefit of the doubt. I’m no great fan myself of Christian de Portzamparc’s One57 myself. But I do think that New York City is a city of skyscrapers; that it’s self-defeating for any city of skyscrapers to stop building such things; and that if you’re going to be building new skyscrapers, you’re never going to bat 1000. Better we have a living city with a couple of less-than-perfect buildings, than a stifled one governed by nostalgists and Nimbys.

not going to lie, I like the design .

Quote:

Originally Posted by supertallchaser (Post 6384928)

not going to lie, I like the design .

that's because you have no taste and haven't any love for new york. i totally agree with the notion that we need some sort of european-style review board for extremely tall buildings, and that the park needs to be protected from extreme shadowing. like, people come on these boards to cheer extreme development, it's not even engineers or architects or residents, but just people who like to measure human (or nationalist, if you're asian, russian or canadian) progress by the height of the towers built in the closest city to where you live. so moronic.

nyc midtown: let's knock down a fully, 100% of the year occupied 10 story building to get the same number of people into a building that's occupied at even 30% capactiy no more than 30% of the year. it's great if you're in the industry (like me), but i really don't see how there's any defense of supertalls that black out cp or look like the way 225 w57th does.

barnett got so greedy that he may have tipping-pointed another dozen developments into the oubliettes. cheering for a fuck like this is just idiotic. bad architecture, greedy trump-style "grab-it-all/leave-nothing-on-the-table"-ism, just won't work at this point. like watch all the reactionary anti-development stuff come up, almost exclusively because of how bad this tower is. bloomberg should have sat this guy down.

bah.

Quote:

Originally Posted by easy as pie (Post 6385029)

Right. So when a tower who's design you do like gets the thumbs down by the "review" board, because they find something not to their particular liking, so be it? I don't think so. The main reason we don't need any type of review board is because taste is so subjective. We didn't need a review board to get the Empire State, Chrysler, or even the Twin Towers of the WTC built. I don't like the design of this tower as has been shown, but I don't think any type of review board is going to make things better for the skyline. I look no further than the Tower Verre, one of my favorite proposals of all time.

As far as shadows over Central Park, well this is New York, and Central Park is no less amazing on cloudy days, snowy days, or even rainy days.

And as the Central Park Conservancy put it in the post above:

Quote:

Since the Park’s 1857 creation, numerous buildings have been established on its perimeter. Depending on the time and day of season, those buildings sometimes cast shadows. In the Conservancy’s 33-year experience of Park restoration and maintenance, these shadows have not significantly affected either the Park’s horticulture, which we are responsible for maintaining, or significantly impacted the experience of more than 40 million people who visit the Park annually.

It's a big city, with big buildings. And sometimes the buildings will cause big shadows.

The headline here itself is contradictory...

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-styl...icle-1.1557621

Developers are turning Central Park into Central Dark with mega-thin towers
A new wave of skyscrapers exceeds current zoning laws thanks to air rights. Shadows will cover the southern part of the park.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...adows25n-5.jpg

These before-and-after pictures show the potential skyline over Central Park with the proposed development of 57th St. mega-towers.

By Jan Ransom AND Matt Chaban
December 25, 2013

Quote:

Welcome to Central Dark.

A new generation of mega-tall skyscrapers being built along 57th St. for foreign billionaires will cast a long shadow over New York’s premier greenspace, a new report shows.

"It’s troubling that the sky's the limit when it comes to one of our most precious public spaces," said Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Art Society, which conducted the report to highlight the need for oversight of development around parks. "We need to protect these spaces," Cipolla added.

The shadow report reveals the worst-case scenario — every Dec. 21, the winter solstice, the sunless zone will extend 20 blocks into Central Park and reach the Lake and Ramble. Every Sept. 21 at 4 p.m., shadows would stretch a dozen blocks — as far as Sheep Meadow and the Naumburg Band Shell near the 72nd St. transverse.

The skyscrapers in question are rising “as of right,” meaning the public has no say over their size. Developers are able to build so high because they bought air rights from neighboring buildings — and technological advances now allow for the construction of super thin mega-towers on small footprints traditionally suited for 40 story buildings.

One of the studied towers, the Gary Barnett-designed One57 across from Carnegie Hall, reaches 1,004 feet. Just down the block is the proposed 1,350-foot minaret at 111 West 57th St., next door to the Steinway Building. It’s only 43 feet wide — the width of two townhouses — and it’s higher than the Empire State Building’s observation deck.

Nearby, Harry Macklowe is building the 1,397-foot 432 Park, taller than the World Trade Center minus its spire, and Barnett is working on a follow-up at 57th St. and Broadway that could reach 1,500-feet, making it the tallest apartment building in the Western Hemisphere.

The Municipal Art Society proposes that any project with significant shadow impacts on major public spaces should undergo public review. This would give public officials and the community board the opportunity to weigh in. "We should be studying these impacts before the buildings are going up, not after, when it's already too late," said Cipolla.

Skyscraper boosters disagree. “I don't think it's right to change the rules overnight," said Carol Willis, director of the Skyscraper Museum.

This is not the first time the Municipal Art Society has taken up the cause of shadows over Central Park. In the 1980s, the group led a campaign with former first lady Jackie Onassis to stop a pair of towers on Columbus Circle. The buildings were eventually build — but the resulting Time Warner Center was hundreds of feet shorter and set back from the park.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...adows-1124.jpg

Shadows will go creeping across Central Park as the day drags on, if a slew of mega-towers gets built along Central Park.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...s25n-1-web.jpg

Numerous Central Park amenities wouldn't be able to escape the shadows of proposed skyscrapers on and near W. 57th St.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...adows25n-4.jpg

'Accidental Skyline,' published by The Municipal Art Society of New York, outlines issues related to tall buildings and their influence on scarce open spaces in New York City.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...s25n-3-web.jpg

The Muncipal Art Society's report 'Accidental Skyline' reveals how the southern part of Central Park would be almost entirely covered by shadows in winter thanks to new mega-towers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by easy as pie (Post 6385029)

that's because you have no taste and haven't any love for new york.

You have no taste in dealing with other people. Regardless of whether I like the tower or not that was extremely rude.

Yes, let's stop the personal insults please. Especially on this day....:order::order::order:

Quote:

Originally Posted by NYguy (Post 6385075)

By Jan Ransom AND Matt Chaban
December 25, 2013

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopo...adows25n-4.jpg

'Accidental Skyline,' published by The Municipal Art Society of New York, outlines issues related to tall buildings and their influence on scarce open spaces in New York City.

That rendering is too cool! It's almost as if there's going to be 2 skylines... one from sea level and the other from midtown's plateau! Can't wait to see this evolve.

my question is ,can garry barnett come back to the 1550ft height ??

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