Four high-profile finalists will compete to design an office tower to rise at 425 Park Avenue. Norman Foster of Foster & Partners, Rem Koolhaas of OMA, Zaha Hadid of Zaha Hadid Architects and Richard Rogers of Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners have been selected to present their proposals to the developer, L&L Holdings, the New York Times reported. The finalists were chosen from 11 architects that L&L had reached out to in the spring.
“We wanted the broadest view,” Levinson, in an interview with the Times, said of the finalists. “It was important to select four architects that were very different.”
Levinson, along with an advisory committee — headed by Vishaan Chakrabarti of Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate — will pore over the designs this summer. A final selection is slated to be made this fall.
As previously reported, L&L Holdings has to wait until 2015 to begin the tower’s redevelopment. This is when the building’s original land lease and office leases will expire.
According to the Times, not all of the original 425 Park structure will be razed. Zoning regulations permit Levinson to keep the 18-to-1 floor ratio if 25 percent of the original structure gets preserved. [NYT]