Carter Horsley’s Top 10 glass-clad Manhattan buildings: Carter Horsley is the editorial director of CityRealty.com and the former real estate editor and architecture critic of the New York Post. Previously, he was a reporter for the New York Times and architecture critic for the International Herald Tribune.
1. 100 Eleventh Avenue: (pictured above) Jean Nouvel is giving Frank O. Gehry and Herzog & deMeuron a run for the money for the design of the city’s most spectacular new building. At 100 Eleventh Avenue, he has designed a 23-story apartment building with a razzle-dazzle, curved corner with myriad, tilted window shapes and sizes.
2. Chelsea Modern 447 West 18th Street: Audrey Matlock’s design for this new and sleek, residential condominium building in Chelsea for Robert Gladstone not only has a façade of overlapping angled windows but also permits residents to open their windows by pushing out parallel from the building for ventilation.
3. Metropolitan Tower 136 East 57th Street: Harry Macklowe commissioned Schuman Claman Lichtenstein & Efron to design this dashing, forceful, dramatic, razor-sharp, angled, black, mid-block monolith. It resonates with the Post-Modern Carnegie Hall Tower designed by Cesar Pelli to the west and Citispire designed by Helmut Jahn across 56th Street in the city’s most vertiginous triple-tuning fork. The three close towers will soon be joined by a fourth “finger,” a taller, mixed-used tower across from Carnegie Hall by Extell Development.
4. 165 Charles Street: Richard Meier & Partners has the distinction of having had a developer commission him to build his third handsome glass apartment tower facing the Hudson River just to the south of two nearly identical towers he had just designed for a different developer at 173 and 176 Perry Street. This fractured trinity ushered in the new era of reflective residential buildings in the city and even got Meier a bigger commission for a larger, and still elegant, glass apartment building, On Prospect Park, at the entrance to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Meier, of course, is still the architect for Sheldon Solow’s enormous unbuilt complex south of the United Nations along the East River.
5. Trump Tower: This dark brown tower is notable for its excellent stepped plan that creates an interesting form even with a flat roof and for its lavish atrium with tall marble waterfall. Despite some glitz, this mixed-use tower has élan and swagger and the tree-ed terraces at the 56th Street corner host carolers at holiday time, a very suave and charming touch for Donald Trump, the developer. Trump would follow this with other very slick and handsome glass towers at Trump International Hotel & Tower at 1 Central Park West and Trump World on First Avenue.
6. Time-Warner Center: This is a whole lotta glass. The city’s most ambitious mixed-use building, its reflective glass facades conceal a marvelous Whole Foods in the basement, a curved four-story high atrium with several very deluxe restaurants, a jazz center, headquarters for Time-Warner, a Mandarin Oriental Hotel and a lot of not inexpensive condominium apartments in its thin, twin towers whose tops are illuminated at night. David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architectural chef.
7. 497 Greenwich Street: Winka Dubbeldam designed this rather small but smashing residential condominium project whose attractive glass façade ripples up the north side of the street frontage and over an adjoining smaller building on the south with tiny little balconies separating the two sections. This was the start of a new exciting era of façade experimentation in the city.
8. 40 Bond Street: Herzog & de Meuron took a gander at the cast-iron architecture of the surrounding neighborhoods and the graffiti-splattered facades of some nearby East Village tenements and, presto, blended one of the city’s most awesome small new residential projects for Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen. Above the second floor, the façade is formed by large, deep, rounded columns of wonderful richly colored green glass, but the icing at the bottom of this very urban “cake” is the looping, aluminum “scrawl” gate that organically conjures a beatific scroll of graffiti. Yazzer! Wow!
9. Atelier at 635 West 42nd Street: No list of glass-clad buildings in the city would be complete without mention of Costas Kondylis, the city’s most prolific residential tower architect. His projects are consistently good-looking and lately have begun to show some interesting experimentation. At the 42-story Atelier on West 42nd Street he introduced the motif of “abs” that show off proudly the building’s robust and fine proportions with a touch of sculptural, that is, protruding, grace across the street from his twin silver-glass-clad towers for Larry Silverstein.
10. One Astor Place/445 Lafayette Street: The world’s greatest glass residential building is Lake Point Tower in Chicago, a very sinuous, free-standing tower with no setbacks. At One Astor Place, Gwathmey Siegel & Associates borrowed the sinuosity for the torso of this free-standing apartment tower that is very prominently located between Lafayette Street and the Bowery and Cooper Union. At 26 stories, it became an instant landmark for the new emerging skyline of the East Village and Lower East Side.
1 comment:
It is really important for the people who clean windows, especially such as those on the Lake Point Tower in Chicago, to be fully trained and equipped as well!
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