[NYguy]

https://www.building.co.uk/news/wsp-...127860.article

WSP working on plans for Manhattan towers next door to UN building





By Tom Lowe
16 February 2024

Bjarke Ingels Group has unveiled plans for a pair of towers in New York which will be connected at the top by a cantilevered skybridge 168m above a public park.

The Freedom Plaza scheme, which features four towers in total, would include one of North America’s largest rooftop swimming pools on the cantilevered element with views across Midtown Manhattan.

As well as WSP, the project team also includes Adamson Associates Architects and OJB Landscape Architecture.

BIG’s plans, designed for Soloviev Group and Mohegan, feature two residential towers of 50 and 60 storeys which will contain 1,325 apartments, 40% of which will be affordable.

The other two towers, with the cantilevered skybridge, would house the five-star Banyan Tree hotel and a Mohegan hotel, plus a conference and entertainment centre.

The 150,000-gallon infinity pool would sit alongside a multi-storey viewing platform with both a glass floor and a glass ceiling, an art gallery for the Soloviev Foundation, a five-star hotel spa and wellness centre, restaurants and bars.

The 6.7-acre waterfront site, located next to Oscar Niemeyer, Wallace Harrison and Le Corbusier’s United Nations headquarters building, is the largest undeveloped plot of land in Manhattan.

At ground level would be a standalone Museum of Freedom and Democracy in a building taking the shape of a spiralling Möbius strip, a design intended as a symbol of unity.

The four towers with their vertically striped glass facades have been designed to pay homage to the United Nations building and other modernist towers in the city from the 1950s and 1960s.

BIG founder and creative director Bjarke Ingels said the scheme would be a major new public space in the city and contribute to Manhattan’s iconic riverfront skyline.