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NEW YORK | Tower Verre - 53W53 | 320m | 1050ft | 77 fl | Com

2M views 5K replies 837 participants last post by  baronson 
#1 · (Edited by Moderator)




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53 West 53rd St.


Midtown skyline impact:



thanks to ebola for this bigger rendering


As of December 2012:
New Renderings For Tower Verre Revealed

The most recent redesign of Towe Verre, Jean Nouvel's MoMA tower, calls for a shorter building than originally planned, at 1,050 feet and 78 stories. The architectural drawings for the redesigned tower came to light in August; now, New York YIMBY spots some fresh renderings on the website of architects Adamson Associates. The archibabble explains: "The design features a faceted exterior that tapers to a set of three distinct asymmetrical crystalline peaks at the apex of the tower – each peak varying in height and shape." Inside, there will be 100 hotel rooms, 480,000 square feet of residential space, and 52,000 square feet of MoMA expansion.










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older renderings:

wired new york is pretty excited about this and so am i!






Old design with increased height:





Architecture

Next to MoMA, a Tower Will Reach for the Stars


By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 15, 2007
Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building.

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Jean Nouvel
A rendering of the Jean Nouvel-designed tower to be built adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art.


Jean Nouvel
The interior of Jean Nouvel’s building, which is to include a hotel and luxury apartments.


If New Yorkers once saw their skyline as the great citadel of capitalism, who could blame them? We had the best toys of all.

But for the last few decades or so, that honor has shifted to places like Singapore, Beijing and Dubai, while Manhattan settled for the predictable.

Perhaps that’s about to change.

A new 75-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel for a site next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown promises to be the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation. Its faceted exterior, tapering to a series of crystalline peaks, suggests an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights. It brings to mind John Ruskin’s praise for the irrationality of Gothic architecture: “It not only dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle.”

Commissioned by Hines, an international real estate developer, the tower will house a hotel, luxury apartments and three floors that will be used by MoMA to expand its exhibition space. The melding of cultural and commercial worlds offers further proof, if any were needed, that Mr. Nouvel is a master at balancing conflicting urban forces.

Yet the building raises a question: How did a profit-driven developer become more adventurous architecturally than MoMA, which has tended to make cautious choices in recent years?

Like many of Manhattan’s major architectural accomplishments, the tower is the result of a Byzantine real estate deal. Although MoMA completed an $858 million expansion three years ago, it sold the Midtown lot to Hines for $125 million earlier this year as part of an elaborate plan to grow still further.

Hines would benefit from the museum’s prestige; MoMA would get roughly 40,000 square feet of additional gallery space in the new tower, which will connect to its second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries just to the east. The $125 million would go toward its endowment.

To its credit the Modern pressed for a talented architect, insisting on veto power over the selection. Still, the sale seems shortsighted on the museum’s part. A 17,000-square-foot vacant lot next door to a renowned institution and tourist draw in Midtown is a rarity. And who knows what expansion needs MoMA may have in the distant future?

By contrast the developer seems remarkably astute. Hines asked Mr. Nouvel to come up with two possible designs for the site. A decade ago anyone who was about to invest hundreds of millions on a building would inevitably have chosen the more conservative of the two. But times have changed. Architecture is a form of marketing now, and Hines made the bolder choice.

Set on a narrow lot where the old City Athletic Club and some brownstones once stood, the soaring tower is rooted in the mythology of New York, in particular the work of Hugh Ferriss, whose dark, haunting renderings of an imaginary Manhattan helped define its dreamlike image as the early-20th-century metropolis.

But if Ferriss’s designs were expressionistic, Mr. Nouvel’s contorted forms are driven by their own peculiar logic. By pushing the structural frame to the exterior, for example, he was able to create big open floor plates for the museum’s second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. The tower’s form slopes back on one side to yield views past the residential Museum Tower; its northeast corner is cut away to conform to zoning regulations.

The irregular structural pattern is intended to bear the strains of the tower’s contortions. Mr. Nouvel echoes the pattern of crisscrossing beams on the building’s facade, giving the skin a taut, muscular look. A secondary system of mullions housing the ventilation system adds richness to the facade.

Mr. Nouvel anchors these soaring forms in Manhattan bedrock. The restaurant and lounge are submerged one level below ground, with the top sheathed entirely in glass so that pedestrians can peer downward into the belly of the building. A bridge on one side of the lobby links the 53rd and 54th Street entrances. Big concrete columns crisscross the spaces, their tilted forms rooting the structure deep into the ground.

As you ascend through the building, the floor plates shrink in size, which should give the upper stories an increasingly precarious feel. The top-floor apartment is arranged around such a massive elevator core that its inhabitants will feel pressed up against the glass exterior walls. (Mr. Nouvel compared the apartment to the pied-à-terre at the top of the Eiffel Tower from which Gustave Eiffel used to survey his handiwork below.)

The building’s brash forms are a sly commentary on the rationalist geometries of Edward Durell Stone and Philip L. Goodwin’s 1939 building for the Museum of Modern Art and Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 addition. Like many contemporary architects Mr. Nouvel sees the modern grid as confining and dogmatic. His tower’s contorted forms are a scream for freedom.

And what of the Modern? For some, the appearance of yet another luxury tower stamped with the museum’s imprimatur will induce wincing. But the more immediate issue is how it will affect the organization of the Modern’s vast collections.

The museum is only now beginning to come to grips with the strengths and weaknesses of Mr. Taniguchi’s addition. Many feel that the arrangement of the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries housing the permanent collection is confusing, and that the double-height second-floor galleries for contemporary art are too unwieldy. The architecture galleries, by comparison, are small and inflexible. There is no room for the medium-size exhibitions that were a staple of the architecture and design department in its heyday.

The additional gallery space is a chance for MoMA to rethink many of these spaces, by reordering the sequence of its permanent collection, for example, or considering how it might resituate the contemporary galleries in the new tower and gain more space for architecture shows in the old.

But to embark on such an ambitious undertaking the museum would first have to acknowledge that its Taniguchi-designed complex has posed new challenges. In short, it would have to embrace a fearlessness that it hasn’t shown in decades.

MoMA would do well to take a cue from Ruskin, who wrote that great art, whether expressed in “words, colors or stones, does not say the same thing over and over again.”



New York's MoMa Expansion by Jean Nouvel by Graham Hart, on Flickr
 
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#938 ·
That's true. This tower is a done deal. Moroever, their arguments are ridiculous because Extell has started one tower nearby that is over 300m and will start in a year or two another nearby tower that is over 300m.
 
#944 ·
Don't forget 5 WTC which will exceed 300m and 15 Penn Plaza which will be about 365m!

url]http://www.dnainfo.com/20100616/manh...l-pennsylvania[/url]

City Will Vote July 14 on Plan to Raze Hotel Pennsylvania
The City Planning Commission will vote on whether to allow Vornado to turn the Pennsylvania Hotel into a 67-story office tower.



By Jill Colvin
June 16, 2010


Quote:
The Hotel Pennsylvania, one of the most storied hotels in the city, where the Glenn Miller Orchestra and Duke Ellington once played, could soon be closing its doors to make way for office floors and trading space.

Despite fierce opposition to the plan by Community Board 5 and area residents, the City Planning Commission is set to make a decision on whether the project will move forward on July 14.

Under the plan, the 22-story, 1,700-room hotel, which stands around the corner from Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, would be razed to make way for a 67-story office tower.

The project, known as 15 Penn Plaza, would also include moving several subway entrances and re-opening an underground passageway under the south side of 33rd Street that would connect the Sixth and Seventh Ave. subway lines and the PATH trains.

The project is slated to be completed by 2014, according to an environmental impact statement filed with the planning commission.

Midtown resident Gregory Jones, who has spent more than three years fighting Vornado Realty Trust's plans, says that losing the hotel would be a huge blow to New York's history.

"I look around New York City and all I see is new buildings going up. What I don't see is New York of old, the old history, the old buildings," said Jones, who leads the Save The Hotel Pennsylvania Foundation.

"They don't care about our history," he said of Vornado, which acquired full rights to the hotel in 1999 and refused to comment on the project — its second attempt to develop the site.

When the hotel opened its doors in 1919, it was rumored to be the largest in the world. It boasted the world’s first “high rise” elevators and drew top entertainers, according to a Community Board 5 Landmarks Committee review.

In April, the board sent a letter to the Chair of the Department of City Planning urging the committee to vote against the project, citing concerns over overcrowding, traffic and noise.

They also maintained it would "set a troubling precedent and a tipping point for future development in the area."

But Borough President Scott Stringer overruled the Board, announcing his "conditional approval" of the project in May.

The site is "an excellent location for high density commercial growth," he maintained.

In 2007, the board's Landmarks Committee tried to landmark the building, but its petition was denied by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission in February the next year, the New York Observer reported at the time.

As of now, the building's fate is up in the air.

If the plan is approved by the City Planning Commission, it will then have to be reviewed by the City Council, Wally Rubin, district manager of Community Board 5, said.

But Jones is expecting the worst. "The outlook looks really bleak," he said. "This is a done deal, I think."
 
#946 ·
With this good news regarding the strong demand for high-end apartment sales, hopefully, this tower will start construction in 2011.

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ashDLS676rPE

Manhattan $10 Million Housing Market Has No Bargains
By Oshrat Carmiel and Ashley Lutz

June 24 (Bloomberg) -- It took Stephane Melloul three days to learn he’d need about $50 million for the New York home of his dreams: four bedrooms, a terrace and Central Park views.

Melloul, president of London-based credit rating company Notalia, started this week expecting to spend as little as $20 million. He raised his target after seeing just five Manhattan properties that met his criteria.

“I thought when I came here that the prices would be more compelling and more attractive, and actually they weren’t,” Melloul said, speaking in French in a telephone interview. Real estate broker Charlie Attias, a senior vice president of New York-based Corcoran Group, interpreted.

Manhattan’s super-luxury apartments, those sold for $10 million or more, outperformed the rest of the city’s housing market in the first quarter. The median price of the most expensive cooperatives and condominiums climbed 6.4 percent from a year earlier, compared with an 11 percent drop across all price ranges, according to an analysis of data provided to Bloomberg News by New York-based appraiser Miller Samuel Inc.

“There is always going to be demand for those units in the sense that they’re hard to come by,” said Gregory Heym, chief economist for Terra Holdings LLC, owner of property brokers Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead Property LLC. “Park and Fifth avenue buildings, the rarity of getting an availability in them, make them very desirable.”

New Neighborhoods

Leonard Steinberg, a managing director at New York-based Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate, said he sold two properties this year for more than $10 million and is working on another two. Buyers who once limited their search to the Upper East Side are now spending equivalent amounts in the city’s TriBeCa, Greenwich Village, SoHo and Chelsea neighborhoods, he said.

“The market has done a 180 from last year, when you had it drop pretty dramatically,” Steinberg said. “Buyers need confidence to buy, not money, and confidence has returned.”

The median price of 77 apartments sold for $10 million or more in 2009 was $12.8 million, according to the analysis of Miller’s data. So far in 2010, 28 units sold for a median of $13.2 million.

Two Buildings

The median price of apartments in the $10 million-plus range has been pretty steady, between about $12.5 million and $13.6 million since 2002, with the exception of 2007 and 2008. In those years, the median hit $14 million, an anomaly set by sales at the Plaza and 15 Central Park West, two buildings that opened at the same time and together more than doubled the typical number of $10-million-plus transactions in Manhattan.

Of the 240 sales above $10 million in 2008, 30 percent were at 15 Central Park West and 10 percent were at the Plaza, said Sofia Song, vice president of research at property website StreetEasy.com.

“There was nothing like it before those two projects and nothing like it after,” Song said.

Resales now make up the bulk of transactions above $10 million, she said.

At 15 Central Park West, the condominium towers that rock star Sting and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein call home, a 25th floor unit sold for $13.7 million in January. That’s more than double what the previous owner paid in 2007, according to city records.

Central Park Views

Apartments in the building, designed by architect Robert A.M. Stern, include some with panoramic views of Central Park and all originally featured herringbone wood floors and six- burner Thermador ranges.

At nearby Time Warner Center, where owners share services with the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a three-bedroom condo just went into contract for $5,400 a square foot. It marks the second-highest amount paid by that measure for any unit in the complex, said Elizabeth Lee Sample, president of the building’s board and a managing director at broker Brown Harris.

“We have nothing to sell,” Sample said. “It’s just completely limited inventory.”

Melloul, 43, is helping his company open a New York office and would like to move from Paris with his wife and two daughters as soon as possible, he said.

He saw a “perfect” unit at 15 Central Park West for about $50 million, he said. He declined to be more specific.

Inventory Drop

Inventory in the general luxury market, defined by Miller Samuel as apartments of more than $2.87 million from March 31 through June 15, declined 13 percent in that period to 1,302, company president Jonathan Miller said. Overall city inventory rose 1.6 percent to 8,157 properties.

“The first quarter of 2010 was when in my view the luxury market really woke up,” said Miller. “The pace of growth wasn’t because of appreciation, it was because of the shift in the mix to larger units.”

Leighton Candler, a senior vice president for Corcoran who works exclusively on the Upper East Side and around Central Park, said her 25 years in the business have taught her the key to a healthy high-end market is property owners being willing to list their homes.

“In a bad market, the buyers aren’t looking, but just as important, the owners aren’t selling,” she said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Oshrat Carmiel in New York at ocarmiel1@bloomberg.net; Ashley Lutz in New York at alutz8@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: June 24, 2010 15:46 EDT
 
#948 ·
According to the above-noted article and many others, strong demand for these units exists (and should continue to exist unless the worldwide economy plunges soon). Considering how unique this project is, it should find financing. Extell's first of its two 57th Street towers (i.e., Carnegie 57) is the first of the ultra-high-end projects to break ground. Presumably, Hines won't want to be the last one out of the gate considering that three other very high-end projects are planned for the area around Central Park: (1) Extell's other 57th Street tower; (2) the tower that will rise on East 57th and Park (i.e., the Drake site); and (3) Pelli's 220 Central Park South. Also, the Four Seasons Downtown and Herzog and de Meuron's TriBeCa tower, while somewhat cheaper, also will be pretty high end (e.g., $3,000/sf).
 
#959 ·
Exactly. Not only did Nouvel make that very point in an interview with him that I posted, but the City's order requires him to reproduce the same basic design but at the reduced height. See below:



The City Planning approvals that were enacted are based upon a design "which conform in all respects" to the plan as presented to CPC in 2009 ...

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#954 ·
^^ seconded. This is one of the just fev really good current designs for New York. As I can't see annything special in Carnegie 57 this is mindblowing and really says NY. I hope it will get build as like on these renders :cheers:
 
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