Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Tall Towers”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

In the North American context, a high-rise project completed recently in 2011 and launched with much fanfare is 8 Spruce Street in New York City, also known as the Beekman Tower or New York by Gehry. Soaring to an impressive height of 267 meters and thus earning the accolade of being the ‘tallest residential tower in the western hemisphere’ at the time of its completion, this iconic addition to the Manhattan skyline was designed by Frank Gehry & Partners.[1]  Developed by Forest City Ratner, the 0.40-hectare site was one of the largest undeveloped parcels in Manhattan at the time, and was owned and used by the New York Downtown Hospital as an open-air parking lot.[2] Acknowledging the parcel’s development potential in the city’s Financial District, particularly since the site was not subjected to any design ordinances or neighborhood development jurisdictions, the Hospital issued a request for proposal, before selecting Forest City Ratner as the winner. Originally, a third of the mixed-use project was slated to accommodate classrooms, offices, and dormitories for Pace University but the partnership fell through due to dramatic increases in the projected costs. [3]
This opened up the possibility of incorporating other programs as part of the redesign, resulting in the kindergarten-to-8th-grade public elementary school occupying the first to fourth floors of the building’s podium. As an initiative put forward by the city, this offer would in return provide Forest City Ratner a pro-rata share of the property’s air rights, as well as US$190 million worth of Liberty Bonds and US$476.1 million in taxable bonds from the New York City Housing Development Corporation.[4]
Apart from increasing the height limits on the project, the taxable bonds exempted the development from the 80/20 affordable housing program in New York City, where 20 percent of the apartment units would have had to be reserved for low-income tenants, although Forest City Ratner was obliged to constrain its annual rent increases until the bonds are retired.

Besides the 9,290-square-meter public school, later named the Spruce Street School, the final design for the skyscraper also housed below-grade hospital parking, ground floor retail, a 2,323-square-meter ambulatory care center operated by the Hospital, residential amenities like a grilling terrace, swimming pool, fitness center, library, and children’s playroom on parts of the sixth to eighth floors, and a total of 903 rental units. These programs are stacked vertically on a T-shaped pedestal, creating a gradual zone of transition between the first and ninth floors from public to semi-private, and finally private space. This public/private differentiation is also expressed architecturally, with the five-storey podium of public programs clad in nondescript red bricks with at least double-height floors, beyond which the elaborate stainless-steel form of the residential tower and its communal amenities rises up to dizzying heights on the 76th floor. The industrial warehouse-styled masonry base deftly integrates the building with the Beaux-Arts structures in the vicinity, while the rippling curtain wall design cloaking seven sides of the eight-sided structure, the only exception being the flat southern façade, is a progressive statement heralding a new chapter in the city’s rich architectural history. Broken down into four volumes sitting above the podium, the residential tower conforms to the century-old building regulations and setback requirements, with each volume receding further back from the building envelope, much like the classic Woolworth Building and other skyscrapers emblematic of Lower Manhattan.

The soaring tower accommodating an impressive density of approximately 2,258 dwelling units per hectare asserts a remarkable presence among the bevy of high-rise beauties with its arresting, silky finish. Supposedly inspired by the ‘hard folds’ of Bernini and the ‘soft folds’ of Michelangelo, Gehry and his office designed an eye-catching façade that draped delicately over the angular T-shaped volumes, generating a masterful illusion of movement activated by the play of light and shadows upon the gentle ripples across the surface. To realize this unique, undulating form, Permasteelisa North America, a long-time collaborator of Gehry’s since 1992 when they created the Barcelona Fish sculpture, was brought into the design-assist phase. The façade was installed using a unitized curtain wall system, where rain screen panels of varying radii were fabricated to be attached to corresponding flat unitized curtain wall panels through interlocking male-female mullions and a mating hori­zontal stack. These rain screen panels producing the folds can curve out between six inches to six feet, and with a steel angel hair finish to diffuse light and reduce glare from the surface, the façade attains a visual softness and exuberance.[5]

This system effectively reduced the costs for this unorthodox façade, keeping it to no more than what it would have been for a basic equivalent of the same material and scope, while still attaining an aesthetically exceptional outcome. More importantly, it was the plethora of bay windows shaped by the multiple folds and ripples in this curtain wall that determined the unit ‘variation’ in the project. Apart from the desirability of panoramic views afforded by this architectural element from all the major rooms in each apartment, particularly for a high-rise residential project, the shifting bay windows that differed from floor to floor resulted in irregular floor plans for each floor. As a result, the project had purportedly hundreds of ‘unique’ unit plan types, spread across the studios, one-bedroom units, two-bedroom units, three-bedroom units, terrace residences, and penthouses. With the exception of the three distinct penthouses individually designed by Gehry, the actual variation of the unit plans though is perhaps open to question since it was driven by subtle modifications to the façade from floor to floor, whereas each one of the residential volumes was derived by a basic floor plate: one from the ninth to the 22nd floor, another from the 23rd to the 37th floor, a third from the 38th to the 50th floor, and the final one from the 51st to the 75th floor.[6] Nonetheless, together with the project’s coveted address, and its high-quality interior finishes and fixtures selected by the architect himself, this diversity in unit plans has become a successful selling point for the luxury residences.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.