Two new OMA-designed residential towers at Greenpoint Landing, Brooklyn were unveiled this morning by Brookfield Properties and Park Tower Group, the developers behind the endeavor. The towers, in conjunction with a lower seven-story building, will offer 745 housing units and are expected to accelerate the transformation of the post-industrial waterfront into a thriving residential community.
"By extending Eagle Street and Dupont Street, the towers will expand the existing public waterfront esplanade, creating a total of 2.5-acres of continuous public open space along the shoreline, and will add 8,600 sf of ground-floor retail to the neighborhood," explains OMA's project description.
"We have designed two towers—a ziggurat and its inverse—carefully calibrated to one another," said Jason Long, OMA Partner-in-Charge, about the twin tower ensemble's design which will include 30% affordable housing units. "Defined by the space between them, they frame a new view of Greenpoint and new vista from the neighborhood to Manhattan."
Jason Long designed the Greenpoint Landing Block D towers together with OMA project architects Yusef Ali Dennis and Christine Yoon, in collaboration with Beyer Blinder Belle (Executive Architect), Marmol Radziner (Interior Design/Building Landscape) and James Corner Field Operations (Waterfront Landscape).
Construction will start in August.
Look at all of the consultants on this project! Its amazing to me how the two options in buildings are: 10-consultants and a huge budget (for "quality" design -- which is debatable) or one crappy developer ....
Something has to be fixed .... you'd think we'd have a better way to deliver high quality design by now, but its only getting worse.
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agreed
What exactly is the esthetic merit of the stacked box design, aside from:
1. It is different, or used to be.
2. Everyone is doing it now.
And what are the ideas behind it that sustain this shift?
I suppose it could be argued such buildings present a picture of the world that is dynamic, that can transcend obstacles, that can rise above the force of gravity—a looking forward, an open-ended optimism.
Or they reflect a world of risk, peril, and instability, for better, or for worse, or who knows. I would think that living in the cantilevered parts would be unnerving, especially their first floors.
The pairing and space between, however, is arresting.
Cf:
Image via Metalocus
I think it reflects a lack of imagination in the architectural profession whereby the instability of structure is the main attraction, by being counter intuitive. My professors constantly pushed this theme of making people 're-think the idea of...' fill in the blank. Below is 'transparency'.
This building perhaps is more esthetically satisfactory than others that are randomly unstable, in its play between the break and the suggested whole. See the foam block demonstration above.
The question then becomes how far instability can be pushed. It exists largely as a way for architects to distinguish themselves from the crowd and get attention in a society obsessed with attention. Cf. drug addiction.
There's a built-in and accelerating obsolescence in being different for the sake of being different. Anything created necessarily will soon become passé. Instability, repeated, turns to mere fad.
Then imagine a whole cityscape of such buildings.
Lost is the idea of working together to create a beauty larger than the sum of its parts. Everybody for themselves!
These are mannerist times. Cf. the post-renaissance painting Madonna with the Long Neck:
Parmigianino, 1535-40
Look at all of the consultants on this project! Its amazing to me how the two options in buildings are: 10-consultants and a huge budget (for "quality" design -- which is debatable) or one crappy developer ....
Something has to be fixed .... you'd think we'd have a better way to deliver high quality design by now, but its only getting worse.
I'd be curious to know how such a design happens, what environment engenders and supports it, whether it passes genuine critical review. It's a common complaint in the literary and visual arts that the critical apparatus has broken down, that no one pays attention to it anyway.
Too many chefs in the kitchen.
Capital A-Architecture seems more possible at much smaller scales these days. The largeness of these projects has constraints that bogs them down beyond the point of usefulness to the architect.
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