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Bruce Fowle (above left), principal of the New York firm Fox & Fowle
architects, collaborated with Piano on the proposed Times building, on
41st Street. Dan Kaplan (above right) is the project lead.
Photo by Fox & Fowle Architects
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Like his competitors, Mr. Piano spent a great deal of time in the current
Times building, a 1913 neo-Gothic fortress on 43rd Street two blocks from
the new site, studying the different needs of the newspaper's editorial
and business staff. He and Mr. Fowle make as much a point of the interior
environment as they do about the unique sunscreens, following a mandate
from the Times to make it both humane and ecoconscious. Daylight and ceiling
height are only part of the larger program, which includes a more efficient
underfloor air-conditioning system of a type already popular in Europe,
superior air filtration, and a commitment to nontoxic finishes and furniture.
(The specifics of the office spaces will be orchestrated by Gensler.) The
building will also have a cogeneration system that will allow the Times
to produce a portion of their electricity on-site via a natural gas turbine.
Other sustainable systems are still being considered.
"The green building concept isn't just doing things responsibly,"
says Times real-estate vice president David Thurm. "The employee experience
is better for being in this type of building. College Point [the company's
Queens printing plant, designed by Polshek Partnership] was formative for
us as a company. People really like working there. It's a better environment
and a great-looking building."
Stepping out from Port Authority, commuters will be confronted with a relentlessly
vertical wall rising 51 stories--as proud and soaring as Louis Sullivan
could have imagined. The sunscreen starts at the second floor, leaving the
first entirely transparent: one should be able to look straight through
the lobby to the birch forest planted at the rear. Two upscale retail spaces
sit at the site's Eighth Avenue corners. In the lower section, the developers
hope to place two open-kitchen restaurants beneath the newsroom, adding
to the visual play.
The architects had to fight to keep the people as decor, arguing against
those who hoped to wrap Times Square's neon belt down Eighth Avenue. "Why
should we submit to that kind of razzle-dazzle when we can create something
beautiful?" asks Mr. Fowle, whose firm has recently completed two blinking
towers--for Condé Nast and Reuters--along 42nd Street. "Port
Authority is not like Grand Central Station. Our feeling was, let's make
this a very sophisticated but also very lighthearted building. Let that
be the arrival point in New York City. Here was the opportunity to do something
that would change the flavor of a whole section of New York."
This sense of public purpose--replacing Port Authority as a symbolic gateway
to the city--has not wavered since September 11. The Times maintains that
"We cannot design against every possibility," says Catherine Mathis,
Times vice president of corporate communications. "If a building could
be built to withstand the impact of a large commercial jet loaded with fuel,
it would be an inhospitable fortress. We've reviewed our life-safety and
security after the tragic events of September, and believe that our building
will be safe and secure while still maintaining the open feel of the architecture."
Mr. Fowle sees the Times tower as the vanguard of a new conception of Eighth
Avenue, one that will tempt Madison Avenue-type office tenants ever
westward--just as Lever House spawned a series of stylish neighbors along
formerly residential Park Avenue. Mr. Piano's elegant facade says business,
as 42nd Street's neon says pleasure. "When you put this beautiful,
glorious building on our site it immediately begins to transform the way
you look at Eighth Avenue," says Forest City vice president of commercial
development MaryAnne Gilmartin, who is in charge of finding tenants for
the lobby's retail spaces. Because the Times will take only the bottom half
of the tower, Forest City is also in talks with banks and law firms to fill
the offices in the upper half (the ones with the views across half of New
Jersey). "Over the next three to five years there will be lots of changes,
so you're looking at a very different location than what you see today,"
Ms. Gilmartin says.
The transformation of Eighth Avenue has already begun. In the weeks before
the design was unveiled, the city's planning department published a proposal
to develop the area south and west of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue as a
business district, extending the Number 7 train to the Javits Center on
Eleventh Avenue. At Columbus Circle two mirrored steel-and-glass towers
designed by SOM's David Childs are under construction. One of them will
house the headquarters for AOL-Time Warner. At 56th Street Times competition
loser Lord Foster has designed a faceted space-frame tower to top Hearst
Corporation's Joseph Urban-designed headquarters.
Fox & Fowle has done preliminary studies of the block just north of
Mr. Piano's building, at 42nd and Eighth, for Milstein Properties, giving
them all the neon the Times tower eschewed. "As you enter 42nd Street,
two massive electronic displays would define that space," Mr. Fowle
says, "signaling that you are now in the entertainment world."
Even the dreary Port Authority building on 8th Avenue may be upgraded. Paula
Scher of Pentagram has proposed using supergraphics to cover the structure's
X-braces, and Port Authority officials have plans to top the terminal with
a tower of its own. But an elegant bus station may be just too much to ask
for. "In any city in the country, the bus station is in the seediest
part of town," Mr. Fowle says. The Times tower, he hopes, will simply
rise above the aspects of Eighth Avenue no amount of design can disguise.
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