The New York cityscape might get another tower from Bjarke Ingels. At 1,005 feet, "The Spiral" is a new office building proposed to fill up an entire block on 66 Hudson Boulevard in Manhattan's West Side. The concept was unveiled today.
The 65-story Spiral is set to be the fourth tallest tower in the rapidly redeveloping Hudson Yards neighborhood. The 2.85 million square-foot structure shows off a glass exterior and, most notably, cascading landscaped terraces and hanging gardens, akin to BIG's affinity for incorporating slopes and spirals into their designs. As its name describes, the Spiral's terraces will wrap around the tower in an ascending motion to create a continuous green pathway and give easy access to outdoor space on each floor.
Located at the intersection of the four-acre Hudson Boulevard Park and The High Line, the Spire "will punctuate the northern end of...the linear park [and it] will appear to carry through into the tower, forming an ascending ribbon of lively green spaces, extending the High Line to the skyline," Bjarke Ingels states. "The string of terraces wrapping around the building expand the daily life of the tenants to the outside air and light."
The building's concept of "revolutionizing the workspace" carries into its interior, featuring flexible, open floor plans. The interior will include double-height atriums, and spaces for multi-story tenants can be adapted to connect to multiple office floors — which will offer occupants an alternative to taking the elevator. The Spiral's 6-story base will have: the main entrance, a lobby with ceiling heights that soar up to 30 feet, about 27,000 square-feet of retail space, and an "amenity terrace" on the seventh floor.
Developer Tishman Speyer has already secured $1 billion from a group of international investors for the project's funding. The money will then be used to complete acquisition of additional development rights as well as for further design, engineering, and pre-construction costs. According to Curbed, Tishman Speyer is currently searching for the anchor tenant and is aiming to pre-lease about 30 percent of the tower.
UPDATE: You can watch a short video of the project right below.
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110 Comments
I'm wondering how much of this is eyewash/greenwash. What kind of plant material will thrive in this environment, and how much money will be put into its maintenance? Speculative development ...
revolutionizing the workspace with flexible, open floor plans
Now there's a novel idea.
Bjark is an asshat.
"What kind of plant material will thrive in this environment"
You used the word "thrive", so I suppose that could mean something like explosive growth. But I'm pretty sure that plants can be maintained at these heights. They don't necessarily need to thrive. My house plants don't really thrive.
The revolution will have terraces.
Why does BIG keep proposing to drop these gargantuan unimaginative bricks in the middle of NY? I am sorry... but they call it a "spiraling landscape?" It is not spiraling nor a landscape. Placing a few lonely trees on some balconies is a weak attempt at "green architecture." Frankly, the building looks like a giant dull brick with fuzz on top of it. The architectural community must start calling these monstrosities out for what they really are. Do not get me started on 2 World Trade Center. (equally void of any sort of vision) Skyscrapers in NY and Chicago should ascend, be beautiful, and innovative. These cities are the homes to the roots of skyscraper design and are being out-designed by the Middle East and China on a daily basis. It is time to move the United States into the 21st Century and shed the depression that ensued in the wake of 911.
Plants need nurturing. Water, fertilizer, sunlight, pruning, cleaning of leaves. They also attract birds who drop guano. Plants on the north side are going to have a considerably different environment than those on the south side.
see one of Trump's towers
BIG sucks. My 9 year old does more interesting shit in Minecraft.
BIG to architecture: drop dead.
Architecture to BIG: ditto.
what's the purpose of putting lettuce into the roof setbacks?at least in the trump example, the trees have an urban impact on that corner; these weeds scattered throughout those little ledgers are ridiculous.
A clue for Bjarke,
http://landscapeandurbanism.blogspot.com/2009/01/chilean-facades-consorcio-concepcion.html
Yes is Less: The Fart of the Deal.
Whether the trees grow or not seems beside the point--the building is also sold as a "spiral continuing the high line" But that's just a story. Look at the design. It's an ornamental private garden wrapping around a banal glass tower.
What more can be said? Both design and rhetoric matches Trump perfectly--bombastic, success oriented, fake-populism. That this developer garb is considered high design says more about the corrupt design media / academia / lack of serious criticism than anything.
What’s this the revival of ornamentation? Down around 5 stories is one thing, but above 500 feet the plants are toast…too much wind and heat off the glass…maybe this is the look they are after….
Once again Wagging the Dog--the gimmick garden is just a developer-marketing distraction, just like all of BIGs work. The insides looks just like any other development.
BIG seems to get one big idea and slap it onto a conventional glass tower. The Trump tower image is perfect. Bjarke is the Scandinavian version of Donald Trump. Much smoother, but essentially a hard core salesman.
I'd love to hear out a real design defense from the sympathizers other than "your jealous" or "they are changing the profession" stuff. The ball don't lie.
I wouldn't be surprised if Trump is already talking to Bjarke - "lets go for something huge - I mean the tallest in the world - really huge "
Nate, It seems like BIG is extremely well aware of how the public tends to reduce large and complex buildings to a single gesture (or a small number of gestures). Many of their large buildings seem to acknowledge that tendency and so they have only one or two unusual and easily describable design gestures that define their identities.
There have been several times when people have asked me who Bjarke Ingles is or what he has designed, and I will say that he is the one who did the pyramid-like building on the West Side. That description of the building usually works. By contrast, if I had to describe the NYTimes building by Renzo Piano, I might say a tall grayish tower with a bunch of louvers and screens, but it would be harder to describe to a non-architect. Bjarke's use of identity-forming gesture seems to relate to Koolhaas's personification of the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building and RCA Building.
But what does an easy explanation have to do with quality architecture? Perhaps it's good marketing... Going for the lowest common denominator. The pyramid looks nice from far away but it's very harsh and shed like close up. Seems like they have a grand project design every day now, and yet none have opened.... It stinks I tell you, stinks!
BIG is like a Eco-Trump, instead of gold plated windows it's green-washed windows, meant more to communicate an idea of something--in Trumps case it's a shallow wealth, in this case it's some gimmick concept (always a terrace!) wagging the dog. The product looks the same.
If a building can be described with a glib phrase, I assume it's awful. As opposed to the NYTimes building, one of the better new towers.
Nate. You are too eager to dismiss. There are lessons here, even if you don't like what they say about the public, the city or how we humans take in visual information.
So the lesson is, yay cynicism? I don't even think their buildings are necessarily bad--more relatively bad when there are many great architects out there that could deliver a meaningful project. But no, let's go with gimmick boy. Problem is the lessons they have to teach are somewhere between Madison Ave and Wall St--don't care what they are selling as long as somebody is buying it.
Developers are probably missing the good old days when architects stood for something--now they just want to be them.
The lesson is not about cynicism. Its about how the general public interprets the built environment. A skyline is experienced differently than a neighborhood. We experience the skyline from a distance. I'm not saying that BIG isn't using gimmicks. I'm just explaining why I think Bjarke does what he does and why people hire him and critics hold his work in high regard.
Also interesting that the New York Times doesn't have an architecture critic anymore. Coincidence?
Good point LiMX. Maybe its because so many observers are more interested in political optics or the cultural values behind a project rather than the actual design.
davvid the New York Times building is the New York Times building, that is all you would have to say to describe that one. nice try. The developer listens to the realtor/marketer who is critiqued by a tabloid. this is how if works in NYC. Developer X hires Architect Y because reality star realtor Z says so. Then Curbed provides high level architectural critique. The lesson learned? sell-out with me oh yeah sell-out with me oh yeah
I would love to see more dialogue around "actual design" architecture. Developers don't have to try very hard because public knowledge is at a low. Basically it's just, "this building looks like a ____." What a fun game! What critics are left, ones with integrity? The public used to have a solid grasp of design, now it doesn't. So NYC will slowly become Houston. Cool.
Curbed is a real estate PR junket. NYTimes doesnt value architecture enough to cover it. What else is there? Archinect....
LiMX we try to occassionally but BIG is BIG and that critical actual design talk discourages 9 year olds from transitioning from Minecraft to urban planners and master builders. then Richard Balkins comes in and kills the thread with googled ans wikipediad legal speaking on calling yourself and architect vs not being licensed.......sometimes a dialogue occurs BUT never around BIG, never
If we are looking at the renderings, the most impressive is the Spider-Man view. The most honest is the street view, while the interiors are interesting but leave out the majority of what's inside. So, the building is all about the terraces, it seems.
Still, BIGs projects all repeat similar traits., stacked banal glass volumes with roof gardens, cheaply made for developer satisfaction. If there's a critic that can explain the architectural value of this vs. craft-oriented talent (see any architect on Obamas shortlist), I'd love to read it.
LiMX you have to start at another "critical" viewpoint of society to get into BIG I guess. You start with Rem Koolhaas and then go straight to the source Douglas Coupland. The difference is, where Coupland loathes in his charming way the reality of recent decades and Rem is very cynical and critical of society as it is - Bjarke happily embraces it and works within it. that has to be accepted first before I think we can have a critical dialogue about it. its a hard fact to accept and an admitted dumbing down of the entire conversation, but that is where we would have to start. which as you can tell for the most part on Archinect no one is willing to do.
if the building gets built, it's not really going to look like the rendering
as a design option, it appears bjark is offering, as the big 'design concept,' to provide a big glass block with some terraces outside. the catchphrase here is, of course, that the terraces 'spiral.' it's a really broad-stroke rendering though, right? if stuff ends up growing on those terraces 10 or 20 years after it's built, i think that's great. as a concept, the idea of more green space is great. of course, as a concept, i also believe there is less direct light on the north side, and this is in a pretty far north climate. we'll see, but as noted above, this is very early in the design process.
if the project gets funded and designed, then there is a lot more work to be done. typically we don't take quick sketchup renderings, send them to the city, and call it a day. if it does move forward and get built, i bet it will be great. most buildings are. but then i like buildings. i guess if you're the sort that doesn't like buildings, maybe you won't like this one so much.
Perhaps the most clear thesis I see in this work is the (radical) view that a terrace is the most important architectural feature of a building... The only domain of an architect in the modern city. The architect pushed to the edge, forced to become marketer of a superficial surface treatment.
Isn't it strange that we claim to dislike slick renderings and marketing gimmicks, and yet we totally eat the shit up. We discuss exactly what the renderings encourage us to discuss. When realized, there will be much more to this building than its terraces, but the renderings make it seem like the terraces and plantings are the main idea.
What more? Do you really think it's "revolutionizing the workspace"? It's not the renderings, it's their website and the "narrative" pointing directly at the terraces as the main feature.
“Designed for the people that occupy it, The Spiral ensures that every floor of the tower opens up to the outdoors creating hanging gardens and cascading atria that connect the open floor plates from the ground floor to the summit into a single uninterrupted work space.”
Bjarke Ingels
if you are not familiar with the craft of architecture and building you can propose this with confidence.
Bjark is some salesman...Gotta give him that. It takes real nerve to market this shit as "revolutionary". What a joke. Marketecture.
So what you're saying is that BIG is all Bjarke and no Bjite?
If you told me in 1996 that this would be the best we could do in 2016 I would be disappointed.
Not blaming BIG, problem is perhaps much "bigger" ha. Culture, media, politics seem broken, have abandoned craft for narrative. Perhaps there are many other talented architects out there, just like there are honest politicians, journalists, etc. but you don't hear about them. BIG is perhaps just filling in the opening where culture used to exist, many more to follow.
here is a list of tall buildings in the us, courtesy of the fine folks at wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_the_United_States
basically nothing between 1992 and 1999.
so if we were talking to limx in 1996, limx would be in what was essentially a tall building drought in america. 2016 limx should have a better perspective.
i think the problem is misplaced expectation. architecture does not exist to be theoretical. nobody is designing buildings so that limx or anyone else can feel good about their artistic sensibility. buildings exist to provide a function; in this case it looks like mostly an office function. as JLC quoted above, "designed for the people that occupy it." i don't see any reason why, once you get past the fluffy marketing bullshit, we should believe at this point that the design won't be developed in a way that meets the functional requirements of the tenants.
perhaps this is why there are no more architecture critics at the new york times. they stopped looking at the architecture and focused on the marketing. now maybe you believe that once the design is flushed out, this will not be what you want the city to look like. as an extreme example, maybe you're one of those people who think an architect's only role is to choose between doric and ionic columns. if so, good for you. the takeaway is that it isn't your city, it isn't your building, you weren't chosen as the architect, so it isn't your choice. there is no reason to be upset with the design of this building based on the fact that you aren't the one designing it. someone else came up with something different, and that's ok. i'm sure there were a lot of programmatic requirements to work with, such as rentable square feet and the developer's ability to maintain positive cash flow, that aren't seen by the journalists and critics, but bjark and everyone else would have had to keep in mind.
so i guess we should stop and ask 1996 limx, 'what do you expect from architecture in 2016?" and then follow that up with 'why?' and 'why would the developer and design team and other stake holders have the same goal limx has?'
or we could as 2016 limx, 'considering this building exists because someone apparently needed a building, where does this building fall short?'
Culture, media, politics seem broken, have abandoned craft for narrative.
you aren't discussing the 'craft' of this building though, you're discussing the narrative. if you want to put craft above narrative, then do so. the building isn't even designed yet. the craft will show up, it's just too early.
BIG is perhaps just filling in the opening where culture used to exist, many more to follow.
einstein said: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” BIG does what BIG does. to judge them by what someone else does is not helpful for the critique or the dialogue.
if you want to focus on narrative then focus on narrative. if you want to focus on craft then focus on craft. saying you dislike the narrative because it isn't the craft doesn't make sense.
I was discussing before how the "design" of this building is primarily focused on the terraces, not the (purposely?) ordinary offices. The narrative is what the firm presents in their marketing... Which opens them up to this line of inquiry. How the narrative connects with the design is what I'm getting at. If renderings / narratives are emphasizing this terrace area as the most important feature, you take that for what it is.
In the design I see that in 2016 we are far away from the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk or the total work of art where the architect is responsible for everything from small to large scale. I wonder at what point this firm would consider themselves "architects" vs designers or Branders. Perhaps there are advantages to retaining the architect designation.
Developers will always choose McDonalds over Fillet Mignon. Especially now that the press now prefers McDonalds too.
i apologize for repeating myself, but this is the broad stroke general design concept an architect starts with, not the finished product. it looks all nice and finished because of the fancy rendering, but as architects who have been through this process (or architect journalists/critics who's livelihoods should depend on having at least this little bit of familiarity with the process) we should be able to see this rendering as equivalent to this:
so to say whether this broad stroke composition becomes something that reflects gesamtkustwerk or not has yet to be decided.
i would venture to guess that it will not. i think the process will work such that a large local firm will do a lot of the detailing without BIG's supervision, and the building will be filled with many tenants who each bring in their own designers. too many people pushing everything in too many directions for gesamtkustwerk to work on a project of this scale.
having said that, it is possible that once there is an office actually designed within the building, we shouldn't discount the possibility that it will be a very nice office. the office across the hall might really suck though.
buildings exist to provide a function; in this case it looks like mostly an office function.
Nope. Not to the providing function bit, just that you got the wrong one. Bjark wasn't hired for design skill, he was hired for branding and PR.
This project's primary function is marketing. The developers don't give a rat's ass about sustainability, energy use or tenant energy costs; all they care about is making it appear premium while getting a maxed-out envelope through the application process with minimal problems and getting it built as fast and cheap as possible.
It's odd that there are so many terrace towers suddenly going up.. Is that the only interesting feature of these buildings? It's a great substitute for quality, and one that might become associated with a higher suicide rate. Instead of building one and testing it, let's just build all of them!
i don't think that's true miles. any developer i've worked with was focused on signing leases. if bjarke's marketing helps you do that, then bring in bjarke. if sustainability helps you do that, then be sustainable. to fill leases, you still need your office spaces to function as offices. nitpicking details of course. it's more or less all the same i suppose.
i guess i've also worked with developer's whose goal is to flip the building, so get it built, get a few leases, then sell it right away. in that case, higher operating costs (such as less efficient mechanical units) are less of a concern.
also turnkey developers, who own the building up to the certificate of occupancy, then the building user owns the building. a smart tenant would be able to push at least some sustainable measures though.
also, a terrace isn't a substitute for quality. you can design and build a quality terrace.
When was the last time an architect was hired to design an office tower that didn't include the programmatic requirement of massive open floor plates? If BIG wasn't hired to reinvent the work space as a typology, why would they?
I'm not a huge fan of BIG, but slamming them because they designed an office tower with empty floor plates is a bit disingenuous.
Miles, you're always overblowing the PR side of Architecture. You, more than anyone, is so swept up in the illusion of imagery.
curtkram is exactly right. This will still be a real building with complexity and depth. These images are capturing only a slice of the reality of the process.
davvid - according to you, a building's programmatic function is irrelevant to how the public perceives it.
Different buildings have different purposes and different developers have different strategies, but in the end commercial development is about one thing: commerce. All else exists to serve that purpose. Unnecessary frills just decrease ROI.
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