Sky Gardens Coming to Madison Ave?

Architect Daniel Libeskind is taking a cue from the urban gardening minds and "has unveiled a proposal for his first New York building: a glass tower dripping with sky gardens." NY Mag reports that his vision for One Madison Avenue would surpass the 700-foot Met Life tower in height, and that "Initial designs show a glass-curtained tube with cutaways spiraling up and around the façade to reveal segments of terraced verdure, like cultivated patches on the side of a steep alpine slope." How poetic. Libeskind says that the gardens are balconies and that the design will make it "as if nature has come back into the city.” As Curbed notes, "very expensive and exclusive nature."

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By Jen Carlson in News on December 2, 2008 1:18 PM

Comments [rss]

NannyState

I hear David Childs has hijacked the project and will instead build an eight story blast shield surmounted with a grotesque slope-sided tower topped by a huge antenna and not so much as a sprig of parsley in sight.

Spirit of 76

[1] They can't. Not anymore. Once upon a time, but they took out the excess elevator banks in a renovation back in the 90s, so there wouldn't be enough elevators if they tried to turn it into a full skyscraper.

Innajunglestylee

And by "Met Life tower" I take it you mean Pan Am Building?

No, but thanks for playing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met_Life_Tower

Your NYC cred attempt has left you looking quite the fool.

wcoastpark

Notwithstanding the individual architectural merits of this building, I'm worried that its addition will unduly crowd the skyline at madison square park. You already have Koolhaas' building being built a block south, the almost completed slim One Madison Square Park, the Metropolitan Life building clock tower and the Flatiron building. Cramming Libeskind's tower in seems to be too much.

Wza

Not. Gonna. Happen.

:D

r1b2

Thank you, Jen, for including the Curbed comment. This is just another example of how there is a very real boundary that separates the lives of the very rich in NYC from the rest of us. It's bread and circuses; we get to look up and say "ooh, ahh," as do the tour buses full of Iowans, whilst the very rich get to live in it. As long as you've still got a job, there's a certain very real schadenfreude in watching the banking biggies get spanked by the market meltdown. Now, some of them won't be able to buy into Libeskind's folly.

MT

And I'm guessing you don't mean the Pan Am building, but rather the original Met Life tower that is right next door to the proposed site for this tower . . .