Will New Yorkers finally be gifted with a host of eye-filling, mind-bending post-millennial buildings? I hope so, but if we're in for an architectural renaissance, it's been slow in coming. For too long our city has been notorious for its grey-bearded attitude towards architecture. In the late 90s there were some intimations of a new openness-- one thinks, for instance, of Christian de Portzamparc's anti-perspectival LVMH building on 57th Street. More recently, we've had Santiago Calatrava's soaring designs, Norman Foster's multi-faceted Hearst Magazine tower, and, in the past year, Frank Gehry's wind-blown InterActive Corporation in Chelsea and Bernard Tschumi's bulging Blue Building on the Lower East Side.
I was excited when I first learned that Jean Nouvel was about to begin building in New York. Since he emerged in the 1980s in Mitterrand's France, the innovative Nouvel had been creating wonderful architecture everywhere else in the world, it seemed, and he's even gone on, this year, to win the Pritzker! His first two projects for our city were a bit disappointing, but now there's the Tower Verre-- Nouvel's thrilling design for an unconventional 75-story skyscraper.
Located at 53 West 53rd Street, adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art, the Tower Verre would provide three floors of much-needed expansion galleries for MOMA. A residential condo and a hotel would sit atop the galleries. The developers might have avoided controversy and satisfied cranky neighbors if they'd opted for a dull glass box, another midtown mediocrity, for the site. Nouvel's design is anything but dull. The Tower Verre is electric, eccentric-- it torques and turns, it makes lively theater out of its revealed criss-crossing elements, and it exploits the required zoning setbacks to narrow upwards to a dramatic, ethereal spire. Community members complain that the tower reaches too high, that it would be 100 feet taller than the Chrysler Building. But that's part of the design's interest. The height and shape of Nouvel's tower would cleverly complement Chrysler, playing against that building's Art Deco crown to create a provocative 21st-century addition to Manhattan's skyline.
But will the Tower Verre get built? Right now the project's chances seem less than brilliant. Nouvel's design is under attack by the usual forces of reaction-- the stodgy defenders of architectural banality, vociferous NIMBY community members, and even a few nervous public officials. Since the building would involve the transfer of air rights from St. Thomas Church and the University Club, the Landmarks Preservation Commission must approve the project. At a recent commission meeting, most of those speaking out were reportedly negative. It would be a shame-- and a loss for the city-- if the nay-sayers succeed in killing Nouvel's splendid tower.
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