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Everyone is talking about the Herzog & de Meuron's 56 Leonard reveal, the apartment complex that looks like it was designed by a Gehry-influenced Dr. Seuss. The building will be a 57-story residential complex in Tribeca, housing 145 residences, each with its own unique floor plan and private outdoor space. The architects describe the units as “houses stacked in the sky,” but they aren't for those scared of heights.
Come Fall 2010, residents will start calling the $650 million luxury building home, and Curbed reports that residences, all 2 to 5-bedrooms, will range from $3.5 million to $33 million.
Even with floor-to-ceiling fireplace hearths, a library, a 75-foot swimming pool, a screening room, a yoga studio and a "Tribeca Tot Room" for the kiddies...would you live in such a vertigo-inducing building?
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Good thing it's not already built. It looks like a $650 million diving board for financial suicides.
Ahh 56 Leonard. Home of the soon-to-be-famous Silver Turd!
someone lost at tetris building.
that's a lot of glass. do you think some office roughhousing could break it? like what happened on st. patrick's day between co-workers at the GM building.
from the NYT,
A software salesman who plunged to his death from the 13th floor of his Fifth Avenue office Wednesday night was pushed by a colleague during a rowdy evening of horseplay and crashed through a plate glass window, according to the police and the software company's chief executive.
It's really pushing the frontiers of bad taste to all new heights!
Looks like Jenga to me.
I can see what they were trying to achieve: stacking blocks on top of each other (like the New Museum?) to a point where eventually it would all like one cohesive unit. Except they failed and the end product ends up looking like an eyesore.
Quite grotesque and such a shame since the firm designed the Bird's Nest in Beijing.
Something tells me that Tribeca would welcome the design with open arms. And, so will the Paparazzi who will rent out the roofs of neighboring buildings so they can stalk celebrity residents!
JENGA~!
Yeah what is this weird architecture obsession with every new building looking like jenga or lego blocks
doesn't anyone have any taste anymore?
I like the mini Chicago bean.
so what are the chances of one of these pieces of shit standing up to that earthquake we're supposedly due for?
looks like a terrible place to live for when you're trying to get that good jerk.
just in time for a devastating recession!
3.5 Million to 33 MIllion to live in this shit? The country is in the toilet but this needs to be built? How out of touch are developers? I hope it stands unoccupied with bird shit all over it
That is.... disgusting.
Wayside School!
Timing: awful, Design: thumbs up.
the "elected officials" are not the government. their just chumps and stooges for the real government: Banks and Insurance Companies who fund the Developers who serve the real citizens: The Rich.
Rich People need and deserve $650 million luxury buildings.
to quote Three Penny Opera: "one must live well to know what living is".
the rest of us guilty until proven guilty criminal scum can go to hell in a boat.
It's not my cup of tea, but still a lot better than any Gehry garbage.
Hideous.
It's an interesting design, but it looks the open spaces give it a very sparse and cold feel. After a hard day's work, who wants to come home and feel like they're living in a fishbowl?
They always wait until the economic crash before rolling out the cool stuff. That said, Tribeca? Build it in the L.E.S. instead. That way if there's an earthquake, it could fall over on its side and voila! A new Tenement row!
Uhh... no.
NYC deserves better design than that. Maybe if they built it on the moon, it might be interesting.
Looks like a trailer park after a hurricane.
remember when the "empire state building" was nicknamed the "empty state building".....
No one can afford it, but its a dope building. Most of the new NY architecture is for pussies, but this one is taking some chances like Tschumi Building on the LES.
I'm sure most of the haters are out of towners...
Shantytown 2050
Yeah. I'm going to be staring at this thing from my office window. Thanks.
Architecture is dead. In it's place are people with a box of crayons and no idea whatsoever about how to design a proper building.
This thing is absolutely hideous. It's time to stop these disgusting crimes comitted under the guise of "pushing the envelope".
A disaster waiting to happen.
Who exactly will have money to buy those places?
Personally, I think it's neat, but I wouldn't want to live in it.
Oh the pigeons will love this building. Pigeon poop everywhere. Pigeons cooing all over the place at all hours of the night. Any irregularities on the surface of the roof tops and voila, instant mosquito breeding grounds in the puddles!
All these glass-walled residential buildings remind me of the disposable culture we live in. Whatever happened to the gravity that proper brick and stone and masonry brought to architecture and the skyline?
You're overreacting. Those aren't rooftops. They're balconies. Like you've never seen balconies in NYC? They're all over the place and they're not especially pigeon magnets or mosquito ponds. Give the architects some credit that they might actually know something about drainage. As for masonry, that's too expensive nowadays. Union stonemasons aren't cheap and stone costs a lot more than glass. Like I wrote, I'm not especially fond of the design, which reminds me of old ramshackle buildings in places like India or old Hong Kong, but a little bit of variety adds spice to NYC, as long as it's not outright lunacy like Gehry's designs. I bet the structural engineers in Gehry's firm curse his name every night.
so what are the chances of one of these pieces of shit standing up to that earthquake we're supposedly due for?
Pretty good, actually. NYC building codes do have earthquake specs nowadays. Modern high-rises have strong but flexible frames that can absorb S-waves. The glass would shatter, but the building would keep standing. Those nice, old low-rise brownstones and walk-ups people like would be much more liable to collapse on top of you because there's nothing holding those walls together except some weak mortar. Just ask the people at the seismology department up at Columbia.
Ingenious. Keep the terrorists away by making it look like someone ALREADY crashed a plane into it.
Great place to live, if you're a goldfish.
Looks like a win/lose situation for the birds.
They'll have plenty of nooks to nest in, and the building will be covered in bird shit. And then it could also kill a lot of birds if they don't use the right kind of glass.