Results tagged “James Gardner”

It's been a busy month for NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. After tackling Jean Nouvel's skyscraper, Renzo Piano's Times building and the West Side Rail Yards designs, today he turns to the feverishly celebrated New Museum, previewed yesterday by Gothamist. Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japan-based SANAA, the highly refined seven-story, 174-foot building succeeds, says Ouroussoff, on a "spectacular range of levels: as a hypnotic urban object, as a subtle...

With September at a near close, we hereby pronounce it the month of 40 Bond. While stories on hotelier Ian Schrager's second foray into residential development started appearing in 2006, interest ratcheted up this month with a slew of closings (Ricky Martin's moving in). Then this week, NY Magazine and The New York Sun devoted even more ink to it.

Designer Michael Bierut has details over at the Pentagram blog on how he and his team created the recently installed sign at The New York Times Building, the 52-story tower designed by Renzo Piano and FXFowle.

If you've ever wondered what the big deal is with fear-mongering over "big-box stores" and anonymous-looking architecture, The New York Sun directs your attention to Union Square. Once an aesthetically vibrant town point of commercial assembly, and it will probably always remain as such, the square is developing a severe style deficiency with all the warmth of a mall food court. James Gardner assesses the latest development around 14th Street:

The larger of the two, which is slightly less bad, is 8 Union Square South, which rises above what was once a four-story glass stair tower that Morris Lapidus designed for Crawford Clothes, a building whose survival was being debated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission even as the structure was undergoing demolition two years back.

Continue reading "Union Square Boxes"

The unveiling of the new buildings - Towers 2, 3, 4 - that will accompany the Freedom Tower at the redeveloped World Trade Center was met with excitement yesterday, proving there's nothing that beautiful computer renderings, a who's who of architects, and a healthy dose of optimism can't do. The NY Times updated its article about the announcement yesterday and also has an article about the pink elephant in the room: How slow progress has been at Ground Zero, thanks to battling egos and dollars on all sides.

The Biennial runs through May 30.