Reply With QuoteIt's totally distorted. The building will have a regular rectangular base, then two rectangular segments atop that (with a few set backs and stuff up top).
Here's a pic I took 6 months ago of the rendering they had tacked up at the site ...
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From curbed.com:
Despite the pleas of some in the neighborhood, the 18-story Wyndham Hotel at 93 Bowery is finally rising, EV Grieve reports. The, um, glassy (and really, how else to put it?) 108-room hotel at Hester Street in Chinatown has drawn the ire of neighborhood residents worried about a wave of development driving them out of the area. But to be fair, that's probably only one reason why they hate this thing.
PS: I wonder if this is a distorted photo of a box or if the hotel will jut out as it appears to in the rendering.
Last edited by londonlawyer; May 20th, 2009 at 09:31 PM.
It's totally distorted. The building will have a regular rectangular base, then two rectangular segments atop that (with a few set backs and stuff up top).
Here's a pic I took 6 months ago of the rendering they had tacked up at the site ...
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Thanks, Lofter.
Re: 40 Kenmare at Elizabeth
CURBED has an update on this one, now a hotel to be called called The Nolitan.Originally Posted by RHL
Seems there are no renders of what the facade will look like
I looked at the architect's website, and his work is horrible.
Avert your eyes if you ever go to Flushing then.
Today's Bowery
Some listings!
http://www.corcoran.com/property/sea...949&Region=NYC
Restless
Architect’s Challenge: A Sliver of a Space
BLOCKBUSTER: Norman Foster Plans Bowery Gallery Building
NY TIMES
By ROBIN POGREBIN
October 21, 2009
257 Bowery SLIDE SHOW
It is difficult to fathom at first why a famous architect with one of the largest practices in the world would personally want to take on a sliver of a building on the Bowery.
This is Norman Foster, after all, who redesigned the Reichstag in Berlin and the British Museum and created Beijing’s new airport. He has already made his mark on Manhattan, with the bold Hearst Building on Eighth Avenue at 57th Street, and has also designed three other major projects not yet under construction: the expansion of the main branch of the New York Public Library, Tower 2 at the World Trade Center site and Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.
But architects often say the possibilities of a building lie in its limitations, and Mr. Foster was drawn to the challenge of designing what is essentially a vertical art gallery on New York City’s former skid row, a landscape dominated by restaurant supply stores. The building, at 257 Bowery, just south of Houston Street and one block away from the New Museum of Contemporary Art, will be the new Lower East Side home for Sperone Westwater. The gallery, now on West 13th Street in the West Village, represents artists like Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Guillermo Kuitca and William Wegman. At its new address it will rise eight stories on a site of just 25 by 100 feet.
The gallery, which began life in SoHo in 1975, moved to its current 10,000-square-foot location in 2002; plans for the new building arose out of a desire for more visibility and space.
The Bowery location will offer a “street presence” that “we had longed for,” said Angela Westwater, one of the gallery’s founders, adding that the building’s multiple floors would make it “more flexible than other galleries we’ve had.”
Ms. Westwater and her husband, David Meitus —who owns an interior design showroom — knew Mr. Foster through the Tate in London; Mr. Meitus and Mr. Foster’s wife, Elena, are both members of an international group of patrons of the museum. At a holiday lunch at the end of 2007 in St. Moritz, Switzerland, Ms. Westwater and her husband showed the architect pictures of the new gallery site, a lot they had just bought for $8.5 million.
“We said: ‘Would you be interested in this? It’s much smaller than your other projects,’ ” Ms. Westwater recalled. “He took out paper and pencil and started sketching.”
The new building is now under construction and due to open this spring. (Ms. Westwater would not disclose the cost of the project.) It will essentially double the gallery’s current space to 20,000 square feet. Three of the floors will be for public galleries, two for private showings, two for offices and one for a library. The useable area is only about 1,900 square feet on each floor, so the mandate was to maximize column-free exhibition space.
Mr. Foster’s solution was a giant elevator, measuring 12 by 20 feet, that would not only transport art and visitors from floor to floor but serve as an exhibition space as well.
“Once you look at putting in an elevator able to move significant works of art, the next stage is to say, ‘Why doesn’t the major gallery become the elevator?’ ” Mr. Foster said in a recent interview in Madrid, where an exhibition of his sketches had just opened.
While the elevator could fit up to 240 people, only a few are expected to occupy it at a time. It will move more at a rate of 50 feet per minute, rather than the more typical speed of 150, to allow time for people to admire the art inside.
“We want it to move very slowly, so you’re not interrupted in seeing the artwork,” said Michael Wurzel, the Foster architect in charge of the project in New York. “It’s not a 20-floor office building where everybody is impatient.”
He added, “The whole concept is, you almost don’t realize you’re in an elevator.”
Indeed, the elevator will have the same polished concrete floors and white walls as the stationary galleries, and it will be possible to park it on one or another of the floors to extend its space. (People needing to get from floor to floor would then use the back elevator or the stairs.)
Because the building will be sheathed in milled glass and the elevator exterior walls colored a shocking Ferrari red, the moving gallery will be visible from outside, a “dynamic element of the facade inside this translucent tube,” Mr. Foster said.
Ms. Westwater sees this feature as “like a beacon, like a lighthouse,” she said.
“It’s obviously unconventional,” she added. “We hope it challenges artists to come up with new kinds of work, prompting them to do things they might not have done before.”
As an artist, Mr. Kuitca, for one, has already begun brainstorming about how to use the space. “I’m always concerned with how much time people spend in front of the work,” he said. “The time of the piece would in a way be proposed by the gallery. It’s not that you are locked, but the time you spend there is set by a third voice.”
The man behind that voice said he had managed not to be daunted by the notion of stacking galleries with such a circumscribed footprint on top of one another; instead, Mr. Foster said, “it’s a case of the constraints finally becoming the inspiration.”
“To be an architect, you have to be an optimist,” he said. “You have to be a realist, but you have to be an optimist.”
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
This area's redevelopment can be compared to Williamsburg. It's a friggin mess.
I love this area and regard it as quite attractive.
However, it sucks that a beautiful little building was razed to accomodate this, and yet that bland POS on the south corner of this block remains. I assume that it is market-regulated housing which cannot be emptied.
DBox
DBox
DBox
If that's true, good.I assume that it is market-regulated housing which cannot be emptied.
Bond Street Beauty Adds Pool to Penthouse
November 20, 2009, by Sara
(click thumbnails to enlarge)
This isn't the first time we've drooled over 54 Bond Street, the landmark Bouwerie Lane Theater now carved up into three condos. But this is the first time we're seeing the building's new website, which gives us another opportunity to ogle Bond Street emperor Adam Gordon and architect Steven Harris's work on the beauty. The two smaller apartments' floorplans are narrow and still asking over $2,000 per square foot. But oh, that triplex penthouse! It's now asking a slightly slimmer $15.45 million (still more than the $15 million Gordon paid for the whole building in 2007). And the lowest floor can be either storage space (boring!) or a 1,510-square-foot lap pool.
54 Bond Street [54bond.com]
54 Bond Street [StreetEasy]
Bouwerie Lane Theater Gutted, Chopped Up & On the Market [Curbed]
http://curbed.com/archives/2009/11/2...thouse.php?o=1
Fantastic spaces there.
Actually the theater space is now a store: ROGAN
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