New Tower Project

We are a couple weeks in to our new studio project. This semester, we are designing a 60-storey skyscraper in west Manhattan on top of the Hudson Yards. The Hudson Yards is the end of the rail line in Manhattan and represents the last frontier of development on the island. The scope of the assignment is huge as it is integrated into a formal urban regeneration plan issued by the New York Planning Department. This is the kind of proposal that New York developers and architects dream of. There's more floorspace in this project than Ground Zero and the site footprint covers two full blocks. Each student for this studio will be primarily concerned with one of 11 towers on a designated plot of land on either the east or west yard for their site which can embrace or reject the NYC planning proposal. At the end of the semester, each of the towers will snap into place on a giant site model.

The project has already gone through an official open design competition, but the city is requiring a second review of new submissions based on the initial lack of interesting proposals. Steven Holl has submitted the most developed of the schemes, and the design seems quite logical. The other proposals are done mostly by major New York developers and haven't quite struck the right chord with the site's potential yet, hence the second review.

Steven Holl's proposal:

Brookfield Properties’ proposal, led by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill and Field Operations, with a large group of contributors including SHoP Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and SANAA:


The Tishman Speyer and Morgan Stanley proposal, designed by Helmut Jahn and Peter Walker:


Kohn Pedersen Fox, Arquitectonica, Robert A.M. Stern, and West 8 collaborated on the proposal from the Related Companies and Goldman Sachs:

From reading a number of different blog sources, New Yorkers can't stand any of the proposals. The general climate is a rejection of glass and steel buildings which are generally alien to New York, in place of the art-deco style masonry buildings. The reality is that concrete or masonry is way too expensive for this scale of project. At the very least, New Yorkers want to preserve the certain 'character' they know best, of which none of the proposals seems to grasp.

This studio term will be the heaviest yet. Not only is the breadth of this project immense, but our prof is the most demanding in the school by reputation. We have an integrated life drawing course as part of the tower study as well as a trip to New York city. As our first assignment, we have had to draw up a site plan that adds a bit more spice and flavour than the developers' projects. Our prof truly is a no bullshit kind of professor. The more theory or cerebral mumbo jumbo in a building, the harder he hits. If he heard a peep out of me from last semester's project, he would have triple dropkicked me in a heart beat. Instead, he favours the one-liner, or one-word concept. Ultimately, it's what you show, not what you say that gets the best critique. So, my concept for this term is colliding particles. I found the following images which are quite seductive and inspiring for the site plan. It seems to capture the site's axial arrangement really nicely. The concept of creation that emerges out of destruction has interesting possibilities for an architectural project. While a bit too image specific for my liking, the image of collided protons appears like a city arrangement in itself and the patterns produced are beautiful arrangements of circles and squares, which is right up my alley. With these ideas in mind, I'm planning to rip open the proposed deck over the rail yards rather than seal it completely underground. I want the gashes in the landscape to allowing the towers and people to come right up to the rails.

Here is an image of my site plan to date. Eleven represents my tower footprint, with ten other classmates aligning with my tower. The cultural centre is essentially a horizontal skyscraper which another student will design. Hopefully you can get the feeling of collision from this scheme. The dark scrapes represent openings in the landscape to the train yard below. In our pin-up on Monday, it was seen as being too "candy-ass" so I need to run them right through the buildings themselves, no holds bars. The surrounding buildings also look too much like "little wimpy muffins", so that's up for changes as well. For next week, we have to hash out a 1:200 section of the tower (which happens to be enormous), all on vellum.

Check out these other sources on the topic:
//Gothamist//
//Urban Toronto//
//Link to all 5 Proposals//