Must-see list of NYC's newest important architecture
Historian, lecturer and architectural biographer of Manhattan and Brooklyn, Francis Morrone returns to NewYorkology today with a list of the most important newish buildings to see in New York City. See the Flickr photo set and map.
Nine recent New York buildings the visiting architecture buff will not want to miss:
LVMH Building
19 W. 57th St. between Fifth and Madison avenues
1996-99, Christian de Portzamparc
I once described Ely Jacques Kahn's great Bricken Textile Building (1929) on Broadway and 41st Street as having "a bias-cut effect, like a Vionnet gown." I wonder what Kahn would have done if he had had access to the media with which Christian de Portzamparc created this dazzling building, perhaps more Comme des Garçons than Vionnet.
IAC Building
West Street and 19th Street
2005-07, Frank Gehry
A billowing white sail, people like to call it. It's in the right place: a nondescript stretch of West Street where an object building does not do battle with its surroundings. I hate hate hate hate hate hate Gehry's plans for "Atlantic Yards" in Brooklyn, but it's good to have smaller-scale, appropriately sited buildings, like this one, by him. It is said to have major constructional flaws and I suspect building a Gehry building is never a straightforward proposition.
Carhart Mansion
3 E. 95th St.
2003-06, Zivkovic Associates with John Simpson & Partners
New York's own Zivkovic firm, with some small input from Britain's esteemed classicist Simpson (of Queen's Gallery fame), created this splendid limestone town house. Note the thick walls, the deep window reveals -- this is the real thing, not some plasterboard knockoff. Also note how reverently, yet without relinquishing its own singularity, it plays off of Horace Trumbauer's majestic Marion Carhart house next door.
15 Central Park West
Between 61st and 62nd streets
Completed 2007, Robert A.M. Stern Architects
The first apartment tower since -- when? -- with an all-over limestone coating. This is a very elegant building with a brilliant roofline and neighborly gestures all around, as only Stern, a master of both traditional and modernist idioms, can pull off, thus making hodge-podgey parts of cities into coherent wholes.
Westin Hotel
43rd Street and Eighth Avenue
2002, Arquitectonica
It is perfect for Times Square. It would be a nightmare anywhere else. I love that this totally go-to-hell building is two blocks from Renzo Piano's oh-so-elegant NY Times Building.
173 and 176 Perry Street apartments
At West Street
2002, Richard Meier
Meier is the master of modernist pastiche and when his buildings are well-sited, as they are here (and as his On Prospect Park at Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, is not), the crispness and glassiness have a real allure.
Hearst Magazine Building
Eighth Avenue and 57th Street
2004, Norman Foster (atop the 1928 building by Joseph Urban)
Lord Norman Foster's faceted stack of glass triangles in metal frames forms such a striking image in an otherwise mostly tawdry part of Midtown that I get this weird, hard-to-describe feeling that I hate the building and am at the same time happy it's there. Weird. I would not want to use the lobby escalators if I were drunk.
New York Times Building
Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st streets
2001-07, Renzo Piano and FXFOWLE
The outside is a little fussily detailed, but inside he has the scope to make work some of his spatial conceptions that I (and apparently not a lot of other people) felt fell flat at the Morgan Library.
Rose Center for Earth and Space
81st St. just west of Central Park West
2000, James Stewart Polshek & Partners
The great sphere inside the glass box works so well precisely because of its siting, where the building may rest serenely screened by trees in a nook. Imagine if Polshek had placed this where the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial is -- well, that's just the sort of thing he did with that monstrous carbuncle on the face of the Brooklyn Museum.
Plus, a short video clip of the newest of the new, 15 CPW
