Archinect - News

New Yorkers are still pissed about disrupted view sheds and 262 Fifth Avenue

2024-03-10T08:00:00-04:00

“It really pisses me off,” Clark said while standing in the plaza in front of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks south of the dueling skyscrapers. “The whole New York skyline has been destroyed. When I moved here I was thrilled with it, and now it’s just getting disgusting. These new buildings have no identity, no design to them. We’ve lost the character of New York, and it breaks my heart.”

The Guardian goes inside some locals' struggle against the new 262 Fifth Avenue condo tower by Meganom and SLCE Architects. The East Siders protesting their obstructed view sheds are also not in favor of its appearance or the design for 432 Park Avenue, including several inspired teen critics on TikTok.

NYT critic Michael Kimmelman also wrote of their plight last year, declaring theirs and other opposition attempts a noble attempt at restoring the city’s history in an era defined by zoning manipulation and visible inequality.

A preservationist named Jorge Otero-Pailos told Kimmelman last October that new regulations are needed to “guarantee a collective experience, a sense of shared identity and civic meaning, which can bind New Yorkers across generations and centuries.”

Michael Kimmelman again asks: 'Should New York regulate its skyline?'

2023-10-25T15:11:00-04:00

A generation ago, the New York skyline was a global icon, shaped more or less like a suspension bridge stretched between the Empire State and the Twin Towers, making it possible to, say, pop out of some unfamiliar subway station, gaze up toward the clouds and orient oneself along the skyline’s north-south axis. Today, the skyline is vastly more complex, far-flung and difficult to picture, and it’s common to hear complaints that the city has lost its bearings.

The addition of Meganom and SLCE’s 860-foot 262 Fifth Avenue tower to New York’s accidental skyline also raises questions about legislating ‘view sheds’ and historic sightlines around the city, Michael Kimmelman writes. The city currently only has one protected vista overlooking the Financial District from Brooklyn Heights. Developers have famously been manipulating the local zoning code governing allowable height in order to receive approvals, an issue Kimmelman has preached about in earnest for the past decade.

“It’s time to rethink our assumptions,” preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos tells him, before adding his opinion that regulations would “guarantee a collective experience, a sense of shared identity and civic meaning, which can bind New Yorkers across generations and centuries.”

Construction of 262 Fifth Avenue is expected to wrap up by the end of 2024.

Moscow-based Meganom reveals designs for 1,001-foot skinny supertall in Nomad

2017-05-31T16:15:00-04:00

According to the architects, “The form of the skyscraper is inspired by a unique structural system that separates the building’s functioning core from its living spaces, creating expansive, unobstructed, column-free and [customizable] full-floor residences – an inventive design solution unprecedented in a New York high-rise.”

For their first U.S. project, Moscow-based architecture firm Meganom has designed a 1,001-foot-tall skinny supertall at 262 Fifth Avenue in Nomad.

When complete, the residential tower will be the tallest building between the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center, and it will boast a striking top-floor observation deck and a slew of sustainable elements.