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New York Times unveils plan to create new Eighth Avenue home; Piano design hailed as breakthrough for Manhattan skyline.
By Alexandra Lange
April 2002
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Renzo Piano and Fox & Fowle Architects' design for the New York
Times headquarters may become as iconographic as the design of the
newspaper itself. Their plan leaves eye-level openings (below right) in
the barred curtain wall so occupants have unobstructed views. Made from
irregularly spaced ceramic rods (below left), the curtain wall bounces
some sunlight onto ceilings bringing light deep into the interior. The
building also has a rooftop garden (below left).
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Photos: Top, Evan Kafka, bottom left & right, Geto & deMilly
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NEW YORK, Feb. 4--A stylist of the skyline, Renzo Piano is suggesting a
wardrobe change for the skyscraper. "Normally you have to use tinted
glass, and your vision is not that clear," he says. "It's like
wearing sunglasses." But the 1998 Pritzker Prize winner's New York
Times building design (done in collaboration with Bruce Fowle of Fox &
Fowle Architects and unveiled late last year) dispenses with the dark glasses
and sports the other kind of shade: the chicest possible venetian blind--a
shimmering 800-foot curtain wall. "There is a wall that is glass and
in front of it we fly another layer that is like a "suncoat"--not
a raincoat," Mr. Piano says of the elegant white-on-white tower scheduled
for completion in 2006.
"The story I hope the building will tell is not one of arrogance, of
power," Mr. Piano says. "Quite often towers are not liked, and
I hope the story this will tell is one of lightness." Lightness--the
suggestion of flight--would also be a sartorial switch for Eighth Avenue
and 41st Street, the site of the building: the seedy area has always been
better known for the blacked-out windows of peep shows than for gleaming,
transparent facades.
From its first appearance, as winner of the Times headquarters competition,
Mr. Piano's building has floated serenely above the status quo. His original
proposal, which beat out entries by Norman Foster and Cesar Pelli (Frank
Gehry dropped out in the final weeks), included a larger building, off which
the tower appeared to cantilever, and recalled Lever House in silhouette.
The lower building, intended to house an atrium and topped by a reflect-ing
pool, looked like Mr. Piano's (with Richard Rogers) most famous building,
Paris's Centre Pompidou, bleached and beached in Midtown. But the new profile,
filling the block from 40th to 41st Streets with the 52-story tower, tucks
a reduced version of the low building in back (where the atrium has morphed
into a garden open to the sky) and looks more like the slab-and-bustle formation
of the Seagram Building. The latter tower was indeed on Mr. Piano's mind.
"I always thought the Seagram Building, with its purity and clarity,
was the best interpretation of the DNA of the city," he says, the DNA
being the gridiron plan. "But I also like the romantic skyscrapers--the
Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building. I love the idea that the tall
building is a romantic expression of power, of levitation--that it vibrates."
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The four-story structure (above) in the back of the building houses an
auditorium and a garden. The New York Times offices have been located in
this neo-Gothic building (below), on 43rd Street, since its construction
in 1913.
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Photos: Geto & deMilly
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Remembering Madelon Vriesendorp's painting for Delirious New York,
in which the Empire State and Chrysler buildings are surprised postcoitally
by the straitlaced RCA Building, one might imagine Mr. Piano's Times tower
as a new bride for the Seagram Building, waiting crosstown in a bronze tux.
(Little blue-haired Lever House waited too long to get her face-lift.) There
is something irresistibly feminine about a building that seems wrapped in
gauze. Mr. Piano refers to the skin as lace. Tower developer Bruce Ratner,
of Forest City Ratner, has said almost gleefully, "I'll use a word--it's
not an architectural word--to describe it: pretty."
This double skin is in fact sturdy, made of extruded white ceramic tubes
carried on an aluminum frame, and shields the building's glass walls from
the direct sunlight and energy-wasting heat gain that usually calls for
inhospitable tinted glass. The irregularly spaced horizontal rods bounce
daylight up to the ceilings, tossing it into the tower's interior. Partitions
will stop shy of the ceilings, set at loftlike heights, allowing even interior
offices to get some daylight. On each panel the rods are interrupted at
eye level, creating an open viewing space so those inside the building will
not be seeing the city behind bars.
The sunscreens are also pulled away at the building's corners, which are
ornamented with staircases sheathed in transparent panes. These stairs are
one of Mr. Piano's pet touches, an attempt to increase the sense of interoffice
community within the tower, as well as animate its edges. "The stair
is not a dull place, and it will give you a minute to look at the city,
to come back to reality," Mr. Piano says. "When you lift your
head up you will see a stair opposite you. It will be psychologically more
easy to move from floor to floor. You won't even think to take the lift."
The building's transparency also puts the employees on view, most notably
in the four-story bustle behind the tower, which contains the garden and
a 350-seat auditorium on the ground floor and the Times's newsroom operations
above. Mr. Piano calls these floors the "bakery." The architect
says, "it will be constantly lit; people will constantly be at work.
It will be like a magic lantern."
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