On the threshold of its fourth decade, Herzog & de Meuron is poised to reinvent another great architectural prototype as construction begins in New York City on the first hi-rise tower of the firm’s career. 56 Leonard Street will be a 57-story residential condominium building at the intersection of Church Street and Leonard Street in the Tribeca Historic District of downtown Manhattan, where it will rise above cobbled streets and historic 19th century neighbors. Curbed
The tower will house 145 residences, each with its own unique floor plan and private outdoor space, in a veritable cascade of individual homes that the architects describe as “houses stacked in the sky,” blending indoors and outdoors seamlessly together.
With its articulated surfaces, dramatic cantilevers, profiled slab edges, profusion of balconies, expanses of glass, and views from downtown Manhattan to as far as the Atlantic Ocean, Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street breaks down the old image of the high-rise as a sleek, hermetically sealed urban object to propose instead a thoughtful, daring and ultimately dazzling new alternative — the iconic American skyscraper re-envisioned as a pixilated vertical layering of individually sculpted, highly customized, graceful private residences opening to the atmosphere.
The architects’ design for 56 Leonard Street also updates the relationship between private tower and public streetscape with an articulated base whose cantilevers generate a sense of movement and permeability. Here, the building’s defining corner will be the site of a major commissioned sculpture by internationally celebrated London-based artist Anish Kapoor.
Fully integrated into the architecture itself as if to say that culture and the city are indivisible, Kapoor’s massive, reflective stainless steel piece – an enigmatic balloon-like form that appears to be combating compression from above – will be a new cultural landmark in Tribeca and the artist’s first permanent public work in New York City.
Kapoor’s sculptural contribution to 56 Leonard Street extends his ongoing exploration of physical and psychological space, as in such works as the “Cloud Gate” in Chicago’s Millennium Park and the recent mammoth temporary installation “Sky Mirror” at Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan.
4 Comments
It looks like the buildings sat on a whoopee cushion...
what makes anish kapoor farting?
^ ..public art couples with property sales and marketing. art loses. sculpture with cubic yard value or something like that. or, art as decoration, as package deal, as 'it comes with it'... on your corner, on your face. see your reflection and size yourself against the million dollar dwellings...
titled and updated commentary elseplace, directed to 'public art and culture' component of this real estate venture.
i didn't know new york was situated next to a desert.
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