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.

Great place to live, if you're a goldfish.

Ingenious. Keep the terrorists away by making it look like someone ALREADY crashed a plane into it.

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.

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?

Who exactly will have money to buy those places?

Personally, I think it's neat, but I wouldn't want to live in it.

A disaster waiting to happen.

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".

Yeah. I'm going to be staring at this thing from my office window. Thanks.

Shantytown 2050

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...

remember when the "empire state building" was nicknamed the "empty state building".....

Looks like a trailer park after a hurricane.

Uhh... no.

NYC deserves better design than that. Maybe if they built it on the moon, it might be interesting.

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!

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?

Hideous.

It's not my cup of tea, but still a lot better than any Gehry garbage.

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.

Timing: awful, Design: thumbs up.