A trio of reviews of Herzog & de Meuron's 56 Leonard Street condo project: NYSun. | Triple Mint | NYMag | prev.
from Triple Mint: The long awaited design for 56 Leonard Street in Tribeca by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron has been revealed. Above you can see the upper floors, where a stack of cantilevered condo lofts will tower over the once charming neighborhood. The 57 story tower, to be completed in 2010, will have 145 apartments, each with a unique layout. It is worth noting that on the same day this project is revealed another major Wall Street bank has gone under - Lehman Brothers - and with it thousands of high paying New York City jobs. This project could be the capstone to an era. One thing is for sure: it is another step in the transformation of Tribeca into Triburbia, where nannies push strollers by day and black towncars idle at night. Manhattan as stage set for wealthy foreigners and tourists.

from Justin Davidson's piece for NYMag: ...Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street, which, at 821 feet, will be a gangly outlier in the low-slung skyline north of the financial district...wears its solitude well. Any single floor evokes Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece of almost-nothingness, the 1951 Farnsworth House, in Plano, Illinois—a transparent slice of space sandwiched between slender white slabs. Here, the architects offer a hectic revision of Miesian asceticism, adapted for a site where the Manhattan grid slackens into Tribeca’s loose weave of streets. They churn out dozens of variations on the Farnsworth idea, then take all those horizontal nests and pile them giddily toward the clouds. The shaft bristles with irregularly arranged balconies. Floor heights vary and the corners keep cutting away. The tower appears to get simultaneously narrower and wider toward the top, where the blocks are fewer but bigger and set more askew. It has a purposefully haphazard look, like a stack of books of different sizes that haven’t been aligned.

from James Gardner's piece for NYSun: Part of the plan of 56 Leonard St., according to the press material, is to design each of its units, or at least each of its 57 floors, as though it were a distinct one-story suburban house, but of a specific kind. We are talking about the sort of California houses designed by Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler in the 1950s and '60s. The renderings seem roughly to bear out that association. And yet, the overall conception of the tower on Leonard Street is entirely different from anything that either of these architects, or any other 20th-century architect, would or could have designed. It is the logical consequence of the introduction of computers into the design process, and with it the ability to spin far more elaborate and fantastical forms than were ever dreamed of by the modular architects of the mid-20th century.