Hyatt Union SquareUnlike Paris, whose magistrates have enforced a general unity upon their architecture, especially as regards the height of contiguous buildings, the streets of New York tend to be a jagged tumult of two-story taxpayers vying with soaring high-rises.

Many of the locals insist that this clamorous variety is what gives the city is honky-tonk charm: in fact, the results more often than not are quite ugly. A case in point is 132 Fourth Avenue, a two-story classical structure clad in limestone and not a bad-looking building in itself. Its neighbor, at 77 East 12 Street, is a pallidly functional exercise in red-brick rationalism from the 1960s. Now a new, 12-story Hyatt Union Square hotel, designed by Gene Kaufman, has risen over the scrupulously preserved façade of the two-story classical structure at the corner of Fourth Avenue and 13th Street and is set to open in the fall of this year. [more]

The TouraineAbout a year and a half ago, I wrote an article in The Real Deal about 535 West End Avenue, a fine example of contextualism by the Chicago-based architect Lucien Lagrange. It was the architect’s first building in Manhattan and, I assumed, his last: citing a growing disenchantment with the profession, a downturn in the Chicago market, and impending bankruptcy, Lagrange had just announced his retirement at the relatively young age (for an architect) of 69. But, after Lagrange closed his own firm, he went on to join VOA Associates, also of Chicago, which describes itself as specializing in “luxury residential, hospitality and commercial mixed-use markets.” [more]

One does not usually speak of commercial real estate in terms of the miraculous, but as regards the Apple’s iconic flagship on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th streets — which just got an overhaul of its façade– the term is almost appropriate. For 40 years prior to Apple’s arrival in New York City in 2007, this area was a commercial disaster, first as a sunken pit whose varied businesses enticed few to descend, then, in developer Donald Trump’s reworking, as a marble-encased hole in the ground that no business could be induced to lease.

Only a business founded on the notion of “thinking outside the box” could possibly make a go of it, and no business fits that description better than Apple. [more]

The new addition to John Jay College
on 11th AvenueFrom the October issue: Bigness is back. By “bigness,” I do not mean height — rather, I refer to a kind of hulking squatness, an unapologetic, as-of-right occupancy of a plot of land — without any namby-pamby purchase of “air rights,” or any rising up in a zigguratted setback to heights made possible by the construction of some cynically insufficient, “privately owned public space.”

Two recent and conspicuous examples of this new bigness are the Lucida and the Brompton, which occupy the southeast corners of 86th Street at Lexington and Third Avenues, respectively. These structures hark back to the days before the 1916 legislation that mandated how high a building could rise in New York relative to its footprint.

But an even more striking instance of this upstart subgenre is on the West Side — the addition to John Jay College of Criminal Justice (part of the City University of New York) that has just opened in time for the beginning of the new school year. [more]

From left: The Park Avenue Armory and a rendering of its renovated interior

The Park Avenue Armory, which takes up the entire east side of Park Avenue between 66th and 67th streets, has just announced plans for a $200 million renovation of the site. This news is wonderful, but hardly unexpected. It has been quite clear for some time that this former military structure was meant for better things.

What is remarkable about the 643 Park Avenue structure’s resurrection — for it is nothing less than that — is that the building represents a typology that, like an abandoned bank or a deconsecrated church, would seem ill-suited to any function other than the one for which it was originally intended, a function no longer needed. The building, designed by Charles Clinton in the Gothic Revival style and opened in 1881, consists of a five-story front section along the avenue and, behind it, a cavernous 55,000-square-foot enclosed area, known as the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. [more]

From left: the destruction of Fiterman Hall after 9/11 and renderings for the new structure

One of the lesser known examples of collateral damage that resulted from the events of Sept. 11,
2001 was the destruction of Fiterman Hall, a 15-story building located at 30 West Broadway that
belonged to the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a City of New York school. Originally an
office building from the 1950s, it stood in the shadow of 7 World Trade Center. And when 7 WTC fell –
itself collateral damage of Tower One — it fell on top of Fiterman Hall, which was crushed under 7 WTC’s
falling debris.

Photographs of the damage at Fiterman Hall are astounding: all that chewed up glass and steel, an
icon of rationalism laid waste by the vindictive madness of the bombers. The building was not entirely
destroyed, however, and had to be demolished some years later and the site decontaminated. It is a sad
irony that the entire building had been largely renovated only a short time before Sept. 11, 2011. [more]

A rendering of the new Whitney MuseumFrom the July issue: All museums, like buildings in general, have a real estate dimension. From the simple act of purchasing the lot on which the museum will rise to the structure’s interaction with the buildings that surround it, a museum is part of the urban fabric. As such, it bespeaks the attitudes and acquisitiveness of the citizens whom it serves.

But the new $680 million Whitney Museum building, which broke ground on May 26 on Gansevoort Street between West and Washington streets along the High Line, seems more intimately and also more insistently in touch with this real estate element than perhaps is true of any other museum to date.

The Whitney — which this year celebrates its 80th anniversary — is moving from the granite citadel that Marcel Breuer designed on Madison Avenue and 75th Street, a Brutalist building that it has inhabited since 1966. [more]

The new Wyndham Garden Hotel

The 18-story Wyndham Garden Hotel is approaching completion at the intersection of the Bowery and Hester Street in Chinatown. Though the structure is already topped out and much of the glazing is in place, the renderings give a clearer idea of how it would ideally look, and that is none too promising.

The base of the building, at 91-93 Bowery Street, glazed and framed with masonry, occupies its lot completely. But then the structure rises up as a series of modest setbacks away from the Bowery and culminate in a fairly unimaginative summit defined by two balconies on different levels, as well as a sequence of columns, all cast in a stridently modernist idiom. This summit in turn is capped by a masonry-clad mechanical core.
[more]

From the June issue: Few blocks in Manhattan are changing as rapidly, or as fundamentally, as 102nd Street between Madison Avenue and Central Park, an area dominated by Mount Sinai Medical Center. The hospital, which currently occupies a superblock stretching from 98th to 102nd streets between Fifth and Madison avenues, has three simultaneous projects in the works. These include two striking, brand-new buildings that are eventful for the neighborhood: Mount Sinai’s new Center for Science and Medicine, a research building, and a 43-story residential tower at 4 East 102nd Street. Together with the third project — a 16-story prewar rental building at 1212 Fifth Avenue that’s being converted into condos — the changes considerably improve the quality of the area’s building stock. [more]

The High Line (courtesy of Architectural Record)

Phase 2 of the High Line opened yesterday, and it is a great advance on the already substantial achievement of Phase 1. While the latter, which opened in 2009, two years earlier to the day, stretched from Gansevoort to 20th streets, the new extension takes us half a mile further, all the way up to 30th Street. Much is the same and much is different.

The Mod aesthetic favored by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro is exemplified
in both cases by the grayish concrete pavers flanked by plantings and relieved by wooden
benches in odd shapes and a variety of coves. But while the earlier and more southern stage
generally stands apart from the large neighboring buildings, even as it passes under them, the
newly unveiled segment skirts so close to the generally diminutive buildings in its stretch that
the idle stroller can peer impertinently into the windows of the inhabitants [more]