NYC gets Dutch treat with new condo tower

From the May issue: Next April will mark 400 years since the Dutch, a people obsessed with architecture, set sail from Amsterdam, a city lined with single-family homes, to seek a place to build luxury high-rise condominiums. So it seems fitting that the first major American building by acclaimed visionary Dutch architect Ben van Berkel — and the first residential high-rise for an important Dutch designer — will be opening in 2009, the quadricentennial of the original Dutch settlement of Manhattan. Van Berkel’s new building, Five Franklin Place, is a stunningly articulated, 20-story glass-and-aluminum-banded condominium nestled on a one-block cobbled side street on the outskirts of Tribeca, a large-scale urbanized revision of the design he created a decade ago in his famous Mobius House, a private residence in Amsterdam. 

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