James Gardner — Son of the New Museum

The play of volumes at 15 Union Square West is very good indeed

alternate text15 Union Square West

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From the July issue:
Buildings beget more buildings, and some buildings have a far larger
progeny than others. Between them, for example, the East River
headquarters of the United Nations and the Seagram Building begat many,
if not most, of the postwar office towers in Midtown. Gordon Bunshaft’s
Manhattan House of 1950 engendered, for better or worse (mostly for
worse), all of those white-brick residential buildings that took over
Second and Third avenues in the 1960s. More recently, Christian de
Portzamparc’s LVMH Tower at 19 East 57th Street sired everything from
Daniel Libeskind’s initial plans for the Freedom Tower to the Bank of
America Building at One Bryant Park, as well as Kohn Pedersen Fox’s 505
Fifth Avenue. But who would have thought that the New Museum of
Contemporary Art, that silvery sequence of bento boxes at 235 Bowery,
though scarcely two years old, would already have brought forth
illustrious offspring? And yet it has done exactly that, in the form of
a newly clad and thoroughly reconceived structure at 15 Union Square
West, developed by Brack Capital. [more]