Construction is underway on a 216-metre skinny skyscraper designed by Foster + Partners for a site next door to Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York.

The project design by Foster + Partners, which has been ongoing since 2005, but was stalled by the 2008 recession, replaces the former YWCA building in Manhattan’s Midtown district. The building responds to two neighboring landmarks, Mies van der Rohe's 38-storey Seagram Building (build in 1958 by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson) and SOM's 21-storey Lever House (also, completed in the 1950s). Foster’s design continues Mies’ rational and clear philosophy with a slender geometric shape that forms a further addition to the city’s iconic skyline.

The new skyscraper's slender shape - and its entry- is intended by the architects to capture "Mies's philosophy of rationality, simplicity and clarity", and will feature a sheer glass facade that will stand in contrast to the dark bronze exterior of the Seagram. "It's not simply about our new building, but about the composition it creates together with one of the twentieth century's greatest," said Chris Connell, Foster + Partners architect . "In contrast to Seagram's dark bronze, our tower will have a pure white, undulating skin. Its proportions are almost impossibly slim and the views will be just incredible."
 

Ideas and description by architects

This 61-storey residential tower at 610 Lexington Avenue continues the practice’s investigations into the nature of the tall building in New York, exploring the dynamic between the city and its skyline. Located on the corner of Lexington and 53rd Street, it replaces the old YWCA building in Midtown Manhattan. Formally, it responds to the precedent set by two neighbouring twentieth-century Modernist icons – SOM’s 21-storey Lever House of 1952 and Mies van der Rohe’s 38-storey Seagram Building of 1958. In the spirit of Mies’s philosophy of rationality, simplicity and clarity, the tower has a slender, minimalist geometric form, designed to complement these distinguished neighbours.

The entrance is recessed beneath a canopy that sits harmoniously alongside the entrance and pavilion of the Seagram Building. The entry sequence continues on a single plane from the street to reveal a glazed atrium that joins the tower to a smaller building on the right. The smaller building houses a bar and restaurant, a spa and swimming pool, the tower contains lounge areas and apartment levels. From the floor of the atrium, the tower rises up like a soaring vertical blade, the view up creating a sense of drama and reinforcing the connection between the summit and the ground.

Some of the larger apartments occupy the entire floor area of the higher levels.

The tower’s slender form creates a narrow floor plate, allowing the interior spaces to be flooded with daylight and creating spectacular views across the city from every side. An innovative glazed skin wraps around the building, concealing the structural elements which are further masked beneath integrated shadow boxes. To preserve the smooth appearance of the facade, opening vents in the glazing flap discreetly inwards. The effect is a sheer envelope that shines in brilliant contrast to the dark bronze of the Seagram building.

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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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Published on: March 5, 2014
Cite: "Foster's skyscraper beside Mies' Seagram Building" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/fosters-skyscraper-beside-mies-seagram-building> ISSN 1139-6415
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