Reply With Quote#1 resembles metlife tower, well to me anyway...
#1: It appears to be complimentary to the potato chip, which I think is nice work by Childs.
#3 is boring and #4 is awful (but it also is the worst rendering).
#1 resembles metlife tower, well to me anyway...
#2 looks like kind of like Goldman Sachs in Jersey City.
indeed
I vote for #4, but with a few suggested changes:
1. Scrap the glass. Substitute limestone.
2. Add 50 stories to each tower.
3. Keep the deco-like setbacks.
Very true, that is his way of designing buildings. It looks like 30 hudson as well as the other tower in Hong Kong (i'm forgetting both the architect's and the building's names)Originally Posted by James Kovata
Cesar Pelli & Associates, 2 IFC.
Exactly
But is #2 a Pelli design? I didn't recall reading Pelli was designing for the project. (Also, let's not forget that Pelli designed Bloomberg.)
Norman, is that you?
F for no effort. I mean, don't overwork yourselves, architects! Who said recycling in New York is dead?
1. While Foster usually responds well to the challenge of new buildings over older landmarks, this one has a "phoned in" quality that doesn't rise to his "top drawer."
It looks like a bland version of his Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank. Still the best of the bunch (and there might yet be be some tasty details inside) but it leaves me wishing: More diagrid! More birdsmouths! More geometric play if you please, Lord Foster.
2. O.K., Caesar, that form is getting old. One Goldman Sachs-type building PER metro area! Time to do something new (and if it's NOT Pelli, then it's a shameless rip-off!).
3. Possibly the most insidious building(s) of them all, because it's so "inoffensive."
4. Like addicts shooting junk into their hideously bruised arms, so architects return to brutalism. They know it's bad. They know it's ugly, and they just can't STOP themselves!
"Paging Senior Calatrava, your services are needed......?"
^
I always enjoy your over-the-top annotations.
LOL, that is classic
Well, they say everybody's a critic.
Anyway, more from the NY POST
THE 'NEW PENN'
By JAMES GARDNER
March 13, 2005 -- COMPARING the old Penn Station, torn down in 1963, to the new, Vincent Scully of Yale famously re marked that, "Through it, one entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat."
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked tirelessly to heal this wound, by turning the Farley Post Office at 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue into a new Penn Station. That dream inches toward fruition as a new Moynihan Station. Unfortunately, the plans are being considered mainly in secret, raising fears that the project could inflict a fresh scar on the city.
For the station design, the state has narrowed the field to three prominent architectural firms. But with the plans are being kept pretty much under wraps, it is all but impossible to pass judgment on the details.
The only images that have been released, by the firms of Robert Stern, Sir Norman Foster and Kohn, Pedersen and Fox, have been vague reworkings of the center of the Farley site, recently designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill. All three seem to be in agreement that this design element will be preserved intact. Nevertheless, in a matter of this importance, the public should be given a far better idea of what they are about to pay for.
What we can say is that the new station will stand one block west of where the old Penn Station opened 100 years before, in 1910.
According to Charles Gargano, chairman of the Empire State Development Corp. (EDC), which is responsible for the project, the new station will supplement, without supplanting, the station that now lies under Madison Square Garden. (The doubling is appropriate, since that facility was intended for 200,000 travelers a day, but now receives almost three times that number.)
YOU could make the case that the destruction of the old Penn Station was a massive act of bureaucratic vandalism that engendered a million smaller acts of vandalism over the ensuing generation. The graffiti, the shattered windows, the filth and broken bottles of the far West Side were, and in some measure remain, a consequence of the debasing and coarsening of our urban fabric that was represented and fostered by this single titanic act of demolition.
Almost at once, the city understood that it had done a terrible thing. The whole Landmarks Preservation Movement was launched as a consequence and there quickly evolved in New Yorkers a new sense of how they interacted with their urban history.
The façade of the original Penn — the three great vaults of whose central chamber were based on the Baths of Caracalla in Rome — had a richly articulated colonnade that was designed by the great turn-of-the-century firm of McKim Mead and White. Indeed, it may well have been the most splendid colonnade in America. The Farley Post Office was designed by the same firm and also has an extensive colonnade for a façade.
Still, it is a very different kind of building in both feeling and function. As Professor Scully understood so well, the original Penn Station was an attempt not only to awe visitors to New York — at a time when most of them arrived by train — but to elevate and ennoble them by receiving them in such an opulent setting.
It possessed the wonder of foreign travel: You felt you were transported to another continent and another age. Its architectural language was all energetic volumes and curves and a thousand ingenious details.
The Farley Building, by contrast, was originally intended to be . . . a federal post office. Stretching from Eighth to Ninth avenues, it consists of two large squarish buildings, each with an expansive courtyard and, separating the two, a so-called internodal zone (see below). Inspired more by Greek than Roman models, its long colonnade suggests harmonious regularity and dependability.
It is, in a word, about as exciting as the U.S. postal system itself.
SURELY this, like everything else in existence, is better than the Penn Station we have now, but, if the truth be told, it does not have quite the quality that the old Penn possessed.
In order to supply a sense of drama, Skidmore Owings and Merrill (under the direction of David Childs, the Freedom Tower architect) has conceived a bold plan for the "internodal zone" — the area between the two halves of the Farley Building, that is, midway between Eighth and Ninth Avenues: an attractive envelope of swirling glass that will rise irregularly to over twice the height of the main building.
This is a very clever conception. It exploits and plays off the four-square conservatism of the present structure, until that very stodginess, by being subverted, becomes a key element of the drama.
During the day, the space will be flooded with light. By night, it will brilliantly illuminate the entire neighborhood.
Yet one must have grave reservations about Albany's decision to use this space as the main entrance. The building's main entrance was, and remains, the one on Eighth Avenue. And present plans call for the Post Office to continue operating at the front of the building, facing Eighth.
This idea may be a catastrophic mistake. If it is allowed to stand, we will never shake the impression that we are entering Moynihan Station through a side door. Though I understand the temptation to preserve all the exquisite old windows and grills of the Post Office, that central location on Eighth Avenue must be made to serve as a royal road that leads travelers directly into the heart of the building.
ANOTHER cause of concern are the as-yet-unclear in tentions of several private developers to whom the state will lease those parts of the building not claimed by the Post Office or the station.
There is some talk of building a high-rise above either or both halves of the Farley Building. Unless such a building looks very good, it is almost certain to look very bad, especially when it starts to clash not only with McKim Mead and White's building, but also with Skidmore Owings and Merrill's addition.
The last thing we want or need is a repetition of what happened at Grand Central around the very time that Penn Station was being demolished: The Pan Am (now the Met Life) Building — one of the most detested structures in the city — rose up just to the north of the terminal, and has forever after bullied and degraded all the other buildings in its vicinity.
Whether Albany will allow this to happen again is one of the great, unanswered questions of the new Penn Station. We should have an answer in three months.
I guess Cesar Pelli's team who I speculate was Vornado/Related either dropped out or were removed from the competition.The only images that have been released, by the firms of Robert Stern, Sir Norman Foster and Kohn, Pedersen and Fox, have been vague reworkings of the center of the Farley site, recently designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill. All three seem to be in agreement that this design element will be preserved intact. Nevertheless, in a matter of this importance, the public should be given a far better idea of what they are about to pay for.
This column really speaks for my opinion on this issue. Why are these people so hair-brained, as to let a developer build an office building over what could be the next great landmark or New York.
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