Reply With QuoteThey look good from a distance but this part of Manhattan isn't about the skyline, its about the streetlevel, and they fail in the cityscape.
Originally Posted by Kris
I like that photo!Those new towers look fine.
They look good from a distance but this part of Manhattan isn't about the skyline, its about the streetlevel, and they fail in the cityscape.
Looks like a Christos art project using Reynolds Wrap.
West v. East
http://www.nysun.com/article/48107
This article echoes my thoughts exactly. West will be a welcome and acceptable addition to the neighborhood. East, however, is a monstrosity that should have never been built.
Two Ariels Rise Up On the Upper West
Architecture
BY JAMES GARDNER
February 6, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/48107
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Have Ariel East and Ariel West, both on 99th Street, destroyed the scale of Upper Broadway? Or was that accomplished as long ago as 1980, with the arrival of the Columbia three blocks south on 96th Street?
Whichever the culprit, there was an intense outcry from the locals when these two latest developments were announced, for the obvious reason that their great height would belittle everything in their vicinity. Their 30-plus stories constitute an even greater aggression in that their immediate neighbors are low-lying, a fact that underscores the jagged unevenness of Broadway's skyline. Unfortunately for the neighborhood, which fought so doggedly and so successfully against an extension of the Westside Highway and against a CVS pharmacy only a few years ago, it lost this latest battle, and the two towers, now topped out, represent a fait accompli.
And yet, for all that, I cannot bring myself to believe that the spirit of the neighborhood, that etherous abstraction the locals always invoke to thwart development, has been significantly compromised by the new intruders. Its scale was already compromised early on, and scale in general was never as important on Upper Broadway, with its fairly uneven building stock, as on, say, Park Avenue. You could even argue that Broadway and 99th Street would be improved if the two-story movie theater just south of Ariel East were developed so that it did not look, as now, like a gaping hole in the streetscape.
Beyond the controversy surrounding them, the two projects manage, by the standards of New York real estate, to be fairly distinguished. Both are the work of the Extell Development Company. Ariel West, designed by Cookplusfox, is 31 stories, while Ariel East, the work of Cetra/Ruddy Incorporated, is 37. As it happens, the two buildings are strikingly different in conception and in the specifics of their designs.
Ariel West is the more conventional, being a slab upon a base — there is no more polite way of saying it. What redeems it from banality is the sensitive detailing that has always been a hallmark of Cookplusfox, who are also the force behind the Bank of America Building now rising on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. In the Broadway building, the dominant formal conception — which is not especially challenging at this late date — consists in what has been called the collage aesthetic, the forming of a building through a composite of slightly or greatly discordant parts. It is interesting to consider that this aesthetic was largely formulated by one of the principles, Robert Fox, in the Condé Nast and Reuters Buildings on West 42nd Street.
In the late 1990s, when this idiom was in the ascendant, there was a whiff of daring to it. It grew out of deconstructivist style and was supposed to say something about the fractured epistemology of the world we live in. But how tame it has become in this latest project. Ariel West behaves itself with exemplary poise, a largely bipartite structure with a lower, detached component growing out of its southern side. There is also a hint of traditional contextualism to the building in the reddish, bricklike cladding that accounts for much of the façade. Still, there is no mistaking this for a Neo-Preo building (one of the many designed to look old or pre-war). It's reverence for modernism's rectalinearity is as fastidious as that of the Seagram Building.
The detailing of Ariel East, directly across the street is not as chaste and not as good, though the massing of the building is more daring and interesting. By my count, it rises in a series of seven setbacks from the street, all of them oddly flush to north and south, creating a jagged effect only in profile. It may be my imagination, but that effect, somewhat totemic and forbidding, recalls Raimund Abraham's Austrian Cultural Forum on East 52nd Street. On Broadway, however, it serves to accentuate the height of the structure. It just keeps rising and rising in a way that belies its 37 stories and seems to be rubbing the neighborhood's collective nose in the fact that it got itself built in the first place.
Nor is accommodation of the neighborhood's sensibilities in any way fostered by the detailing of the façade, which is striped and skewed at ground level and causes the sides of the building to resemble the interior of an integrated circuit.
Ultimately, the sum total of these two buildings is probably somewhere in the middle, as so often in Manhattan. They are not as awful as the neighbors feared, but they are also not as distinguished as they might have been. And while the honor and integrity of Upper Broadway have not been dealt a death blow, one must hope that such lofty towers continue to be the exception rather than the rule.
jgardner@nysun.com
February 6, 2007 Edition > Section: Arts and Letters > Printer-Friendly Version
A plausible assessment.
It's bad enough that these buildings are tall (and therefore, out of place), but they should have had stone facades. The gaudy, Gershon-esque facades stick out like sore thumbs. This is a preview of what shiny glass would have looked like on Rosen's Madison Ave. proposal. I love glass towers, but they don't fit in in certain areas.
Last edited by londonlawyer; February 7th, 2007 at 04:04 PM.
Well the Ariels won't be alone too long. 808 Columbus (29 stories) is going at full steam. I'll see if I can get a look at it tomorrow and post a pic in it's thread.
The nail that sticks up must be hammered down? I don't think so.
I kind of like the way they stand out. It breaks up the monotony a bit.
Yeah, for too long this stretch of Broadway has been mummified.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...t6s&refer=muse
As Godzilla Condos Loom Over West Side, Zoning Arrives Too Late
By James S. Russell
March 29 (Bloomberg) -- The Ariel Condominiums, a pair of shiny glass towers nearing completion on Manhattan's Upper West Side, add a bloated presence to this mid-rise neighborhood. Rising to more than twice the height of the apartment buildings that line Broadway at West 99th Street, they disfigure the view for miles around.
Outsized towers are popping up everywhere, galvanizing neighborhood protests. Until now, activists have successfully defended Manhattan's urbane boulevards on the Upper West Side -- modeled on 19th-century Paris -- and their leafy, family-scaled side streets.
These two lunks could rise to defile the neighborhood because Extell Development Co. carefully avoided the kinds of maneuvers that trigger public hearings and local outcry.
Manipulating one of New York's many zoning peculiarities, Extell bought air rights -- the blob of unbuilt space that floats above existing buildings within the zoning envelope -- from a church and Art Deco movie theater. The city permits those rights to be transferred to an adjacent building without public fanfare. That's how the developer built Ariel East, the taller of the pair, to 38 stories where 15-story heights prevail.
This lunk rises in traditional Manhattan wedding-cake style. Yet instead of telescoping upward in gentle tiers, architectural firm Cetra/Ruddy Inc. produced seven eyeball-jarring setbacks. The tower unceremoniously tops out at about 400 feet.
`Pathetic Attempt'
Ariel East's frameless, semi-reflective glass looks so insubstantial that the 64 units might as well be filmed in shiny Mylar gift wrap. In a pathetic attempt to compensate, the designers have added stripes of red terra cotta that zip aimlessly across the surface.
I should not be mystified that Extell would build a design that would earn the creator an F in any self-respecting architecture school. Hotshot developers love to crow over drinks about how little they managed to spend, conning buyers with glitzy lobbies and posh model units that obscure the graceless, white drywall boxes on offer.
You don't have to work too hard to please buyers in a city that's been a sellers' market for half a century.
Certainly, Ariel East isn't the most architecturally gruesome of the new crop of Manhattan condos. This one boils the blood because it could have merited its prominent position on the skyline. Though neighbors fought its height, the slim profile actually makes it less obtrusive than people feared. Had it been squat, as many older buildings are, it would have cast the street and adjacent properties into deeper shadow. A design of finesse could have made that silhouette soar.
Lunk No. 2
Across the street, the sins of lunk No. 2, 73-unit Ariel West, are less egregious. Extell also obtained air rights for this site, but not enough to match lunk No. 1's height. At 32 stories, it's thicker than Ariel East and so looms more incongruously over neighboring brownstones, even though it's slimmed with a nicely formed setback.
Architect Cook & Fox -- better known for office towers like the Bank of America headquarters, now under construction in midtown Manhattan -- clad the exterior in gridded metal, glass and two-toned terra cotta. The result looks both more substantial and more suave than Ariel East. Still, it's a perfunctory performance, considering the asking prices of $1,200 and more per square foot.
When citizens complain about Manhattan's ridiculous real estate prices, developers retort that it's because of New York's maze of regulations and approvals. In fact, Extell got its approvals expeditiously.
Missed Opportunity
It may never again. Now that the tall-building horse has left the barn, citizen watchdogs have persuaded the city's planning department to reduce permitted heights to less than half what was granted for Ariel East and will prohibit the air-rights gimmickry.
The new zoning will almost certainly be approved, drastically curtailing the possibilities to creatively engage the neighborhood's rich context in a way that would work for neighbors and developers alike.
Extell, and most other city developers, fully deserve such punishment for abusing the regulatory freedom they had. The irony, of course, is that it may become impossible to build inventive designs to obscure these mediocrities.
(James S. Russell is Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Can't say I agree with his interpretation.
What not to like?
I walked by this area yesterday - the terracotta (I think thats what it is) stone trim on the building on the west side of the street came-off well.
Both buildings are nice additions to the streetscape - as the saying goes "whats not like".
Yep, thats just what stately Upper Broadway needed: Mylar
If these things had been built in Tribeca or Soho people would be screaming with rage.
Notice how those areas are getting the good stuff thanks to concerned citizens and high standards.
BTW: that "terra cotta trim" is about as decorative as drain-pipes.
Terrra cotta drain-pipes
Yes, but only where it was put on the side of the Ariel (east) it looks like an afterthought (drainpipe) the way it zig zags along the side of the building - not nice - but I promise you will not find me cringing in horror at the sight of it as I walk by the on the street.
P.S. Anyone got a pick of the side of Ariel East, the zig-zag terracotta detail - if so please post. Oh, and btw I noticed that this 'trim; is a similar stone detail used on the Visonaire - possibly the very same (precast) type of product.
Last edited by infoshare; April 2nd, 2007 at 11:48 AM.
Pic posted by Krulltime on SkyscraperPage. Originally taken by NewYorker2005 of SkyscraperCity.
I agree with the author. They don't fit in not because they are tall but because they are poorly designed. Riverside Church is tall and wonderful.
Maybe a combination of economics, archaic zoning rules, and a poor job done by the architects is the cause. Typical of the city and the community to only see height as the problem.
How many of these hideous piles must rise, both tall and squat, until the city takes notice that design oversight is just as important as bulk regulation.
Rowhouse blocks of Clinton Hill and Bedstuy are being destroyed by 2 story crap-boxes yet no-one seems to take notice...
planners and the community sit around helplessly or mull over down-zoning the neighborhood into the subway...
R-Negative districts here we come.
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