NEW YORK | 111 W 57th St | 1,428 FT | 85 FLOORS

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by JayPro

To rooftop I think they mean?

It's probably an accurate height, but its the first I've seen it anywhere...



http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/05/condo-towers-architecture-new-york-city

Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?




Michael Stern is the head of JDS Development Group, one of the companies building 111 West 57th Street.


By Paul Goldberger
May 2014

And then there is 111 West 57th Street, designed by the architectural firm SHoP, which will be the thinnest tower of all, and quite possibly the most elegant: 1,397 feet, balanced on a base only 60 feet wide. The builders of 111 West 57th are Kevin Maloney of Property Markets Group and Michael Stern, the head of JDS Development Group. Stern broke into the Manhattan luxury market just recently by converting an old Art Deco telephone-exchange building on West 18th Street into the exceptionally sophisticated—and exceptionally successful—Walker Tower. Stern is a passionate enthusiast of New York architectural history (he named the 18th Street building for its original architect, Ralph Walker), and he seems genuinely eager to add to that history.

His tower, which will be sheathed mostly in glass on its north and south sides and will have supporting walls covered in bronze and terra-cotta on the east and west, will be slipped beside, and rise above, another landmark, the handsome, limestone-clad office building that houses Steinway Hall, the ornate piano showroom, at its base. SHoP’s design partners, Gregg Pasquarelli and Vishaan Chakrabarti, said that what they wanted most of all was to design a building that would feel as if it belonged in New York and no other place—that “has the DNA of New York, so you will know it wasn’t plucked off the skyline of Shanghai or Hong Kong,” as Pasquarelli said to me.

The building will rise straight up on its northern side, facing the park, but on the south it will gently set back in a series of steps so that the north-south dimension of the tower gradually gets thinner and thinner until it has no depth at all at the top and becomes just a glass wall at the building’s crown. It is a subtle and graceful re-interpretation in modern form of the stepped-back, “wedding cake” towers of New York’s past, seasoned by a sprinkling of a classic New York material, terra-cotta, all put together in a way that makes deft use of today’s technology. Of all the new towers, it is the only one that gets ever more delicate as it rises, ending not with a climactic crown but by almost disappearing into the sky.