http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6fb7bf8c-a...0779fd2ac.html
A dreaming spire for Manhattan
By Edwin Heathcote
December 4 2007
Manhattan had long lost its crown as the world’s skyscraper capital when Mohamed Atta smashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the first of the Twin Towers. Yet that dramatic, appalling moment triggered a defiant reaction. A slew of new towers is now appearing, on screens and on the ground.
Renzo Piano’s diaphanously corporate New York Times Tower has just opened to rapturous reviews; Ground Zero is hosting towers by Foster, Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, and slick condo towers are springing up everywhere like minimalist fungus. But
the latest proposal is by far the most surprising. French architect Jean Nouvel has proposed the most radical and striking skyscraper to trouble New York’s low-drifting clouds in a generation.
The design for the tower, neighbouring the Museum of Modern Art, is a piercing, dangerous-looking spike, an anorexic contemporary version of the soaring twin spires of St Patrick’s Cathedral, which dominated the city’s skyline until the advent of skyscrapers in the early 20th century.
The proposal, at 53 W. 53rd St, commissioned by real estate firm Hines, comprises 75 storeys of accommodation and, at 350m, pierces the skyline at a height between the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. It will embrace 5,000 square metres of extra accommodation for MoMA, which will expand into its lower floors, above retail provision, while the upper floors will house a seven-star hotel sharing services with the 120 or so (extremely) top-end condominiums above.
The form of the structure is dictated by the city’s famous zoning and light diagrams formulated in the early 20th century to ensure that some light reached the lower storeys of buildings and the streets below as early, blocky towers began to create a deep, dark canyon effect. It is a subtractive process, starting with a slab that is progressively carved away. It was these regulations that led to the distinctive stepped and set-back shapes of the city’s buildings. But rather than setting back, Nouvel has created sloping, intriguingly complex crystalline surfaces that follow the exact lines of the diagrams.
Talking in his stripped-down, post- industrial Paris Atelier, the architect tells me: “We stuck very closely to the abstract forms of the diagrams but that created a very complex and irregular form. Because of that strange shape we had to put all the structure around the perimeter. The result is a kind of net of random shapes and the idea was to live in the structure, to be conscious of it.
“The building changes shape as it ascends, it moves around. The shape,” he says, holding up his hand, “is like this, three fingers pointing into the sky.”
Nouvel runs through a presentation on his laptop, showing proposals for the night-time lighting of the building (“it will make it look like it has blood running through the veins of the structure,” he grins), the extraordinary interiors (“the structure becomes the space, we don’t need interior decorators here,” he grins again) and renderings of the pool and the gallery.
“MoMA itself will have an influence on the spirit of the building,” he tells me. This, I can’t help thinking, is a little mischievous. MoMA’s recent extension, by Japanese minimalist Yoshio Taniguchi, drew praise for its harsh, white elegance but criticism for its severity and inflexibility. Nouvel’s tower, with its structural, almost sci-fi expressionism, is a building in which the architecture pushes itself aggressively into the foreground.
Nouvel is one of the most consistent, challenging and charismatic of the contemporary international superstars. His office has no set house style and his oeuvre embraces the industrial toughness of Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre and the transparent clarity of the Fondation Cartier, but it is with myriad kinds of sensuous filigree surfaces that he has made his most startling and gorgeous buildings – from the exquisite Institut du Monde Arabe on the banks of the Seine (with which he made his name exactly 20 years ago) to the glorious, colour-saturated, pixellated shell of Barcelona’s Torre Agbar and his plans for the franchised Louvre outpost in Abu Dhabi, a city of art beneath a flat dome of intense complexity. The MoMA tower is a continuation of this experimentation but using structure as surface and on a supersized scale.
He is also working on a pair of enormous buildings in London, a new retail and office complex, 1 New Change (designed in a faceted, folded manner, which he calls “stealth architecture”) and Walbrook Square, a joint project with Foster & Partners.
The MoMA Tower, though, is something else. Its jagged profile, brash confidence, complex structure and almost gothic profile may well make it everything that the Freedom Tower (conceived by Daniel Libeskind, comprehensively neutered by David Childs of SOM) is proving not to be. Its structure is not unique – Chicago’s John Hancock Tower used less complex diagrid forms as did Foster in his Hearst Tower a few blocks away, while OMA is conducting similarly radical structural experiments in its theatrically weird headquarters for CCTV in Beijing. But, if it is built, it will arguably be the most radical skyscraper in New York since the Chrysler Building.
Not a bad commission, I suggest? “A big skyscraper in Manhattan, next to one of the most well-known spots in the city,” Nouvel sits down and leans back in his chair. He grins one final time. “It’s a dream,” he says.
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