Daniel Libeskind Goes Green and Somewhat Restrained
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 3.08
Like every New York tower that is not yet up to the third floor, Daniel Libeskind's new 54 storey tower at One Madison Avenue will probably never see the light of day. Too bad; unlike so many of his other buildings, it has some green features and a few right angles.
Designboom says:
the 54-story condo building stands out from the crowd of glass towers by incorporating a series of ‘sky gardens’ at different parts of the building. the green spaces would be enclosed in cylindrical glass tubes at the centre of the building and cut-aways in the face would open them up to the outside. The openings also provide the condominiums in that part of the tower with balconies.
New York Magazine quotes the architect:
Initial designs show a glass-curtained tube with cutaways spiraling up and around the façade to reveal segments of terraced verdure, like cultivated patches on the side of a steep alpine slope. “We didn’t just fill up the tower,” the architect says. “We’ve taken space away [from the apartments] to create the gardens,” which are actually balconies tucked within the envelope. “It’s as if nature has come back into the city."
Right. New York also writes: "The whole project has an air of fantasy about it, but the developer is betting that the current fiscal misery will end before the approvals process does. “The assumption is that by the time construction starts, we’re going to be looking at a different economy,” Lloyd Kaplan, an Elad spokesman, says.
I suspect that different economy will recover much like the last one did- recycle empty office buildings into residential first, then start with modest, affordable buildings while people tiptoe back into the market, then have proposals like this at or just past the peak of the boom. It will be a while before we see projects like this again.
For the absolute apotheosis of architecture, the elevation of the New York Condo into a new, higher state of being, watch this movie. Just when we are out of money, out of jobs and out of energy, it drops from the heavens to save us. See also Condo Design Jumps the Shark
56 Leonard Street from david basulto on Vimeo.
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Interesting, and potentially innovative. Might be interesting to compare this to some of Ken Yeang's designs.
Also interesting to see what might also be gleaned by not including the green space in the building - and building a smaller building. You'd wind up using a lot less materials and have lower energy and servicing costs due to greater density and a lower perimeter ratio.
Also good to remember that the weather/microclimate at higher elevations is often much windier and harsher than that at ground level - so it's not as enjoyable for people to occupy, and plant species have to be reconsidered or risk die offs.
The real reason why this shouldn't ever see the light of day is because 1 Madison Avenue is the address of one of the iconic first generation of Manhattan 1913 zoning law skyscrapers. It's a beautiful and well-proportioned block with the iconic Madison park clock/office tower on the corner of the site. The rest of the base building is clad in vintage white marble and is a certifiable masterpiece of architecture that sits across the square complementing the brutal verticality of the Flatiron Building. Liebeskind's office would have to eviscerate this sublime building in order to build a flimsy, high-carbon-ebodied-energy-condo-slum-house on top of what is already a HUGE commercial office complex that goes from Madison over to Park. Plus, it would get value engineered down to some ugly PostModern crap-pile that has little to no environmental value whatsoever. Bottom line is that the most green is that which is not built and there is nothing less green than something that defaces an iconic hundred year old structure that is so solidly built that it is good for another hundred or two. This is not a case of re-habilitation of a defunct landmark like what was done with the Hearst tower; it is a case of developer greed and an architect willing to destroy the proportions of an iconic building in exchange for a Landmark Address Project.