^ Well, maybe the name of their style says it all, and says it true: beaux arts, "beautiful arts."
Why can't we put another one of these on the DB site.
Just enjoy this one while you can. Between the high cost of construction and materials and the miserable cheap greedy developers in this city we will never get anything that gets remotely close to its grandiosity. The only thing in the last 50 some odd years that came close to this in terms of impact is the MoMA tower --which is unlikely to happen.
Beekman Tower is going to be extremely impactful in a positive way.
Can of worms. Open.
For the love of god, how did people think that tearing down Singer was a good idea.
T'was a beautiful building, but One Liberty Plaza easily has floorplates with five times the rentable area (and that figure is probably waaay higher than that). Plus, who doesn't love a big black box??
On the Singer: Did it have copper cladding / spandrels on the inset part of the tower (similar to what is seen on THIS old beauty on West 54th)?
Make that ~ NINE X as largeOriginally Posted by kz1000ps
From http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GON/GON003.htm
... the tower portion of the Singer Building was about 65 feet square - thus the total area per floor was a little more than 4,200 square feet. The 2.1 million square feet of One Liberty Plaza is laid out on floors that measure about 37,000 square feet ...
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The window frames, trim and ornamentation turns out to have been rolled steel and wrought & cast iron, something that architect Ernest Flagg also used on his famous and still-standing "Little Singer" building at 561 Broadway.
Everything you could want to know (and more) about the early days of the Singer Building as it was built (from Google Books -- go to Page 42 & 43 for details on the windows -- and some great pictures of the same):
A History of the Singer Building Construction
I think my goal in life is to acquire the capital to eventually rebuild A) The Singer Building, and B) Penn Station
That would, at least, put a lot of people to work.
But first you'd have to school the workers, as the re-construction of either masterwork would require those who have knowledge and experience in now-lost trades & crafts.
The de-evolution of the human species: we used to be able to build stuff like this with ease and regularity:
Now, we regularly put this type of stuff up, congratulate ourselves, cash the check and call it a day:
All this in the span of less than one hundred years. What's going on?
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks