architecture design: 30 in 30: #26

Thursday, January 25, 2007

30 in 30: #26

Back in the early days of these posts I featured two contemporary structures under construction though almost complete. While Nouvel's residential building veers from its context in terms of materials, its size and scale are commensurate with the area. Gehry's building, on the other hand, pops up above its context, almost to signal something new, to call attention to itself. The BLUE Condominium by Bernard Tschumi on Manhattan's Lower East Side is more aligned with Gehry's office building than Nouvel's residential one, as can be seen by the below image.

BLUE is not the first high-rise to puncture the low-rise skyline of "Loisada." It's predated by The Hotel on Rivington (THOR), a glassy building that angles away from the street as it rises, a common, contemporary response to the city's zoning ordinance. Likewise, Tschumi's design responds to the zoning, though before it tapers towards the top it actually leans out on the south and east sides (above). These moves do what I think Tschumi is trying to do overall: give the building a different presence from different views.

This view above is looking directly north above Delancey Street. Its presence is rather slim, elegant even, notching at the top to give the penthouse unit (PDF) a sizable roof terrace. But the top photo shows a much-less elegant side of the building. If anything it appears clunky, with the west-facing notches making abrupt changes that don't jibe with the angles of the rest of the design, as in the bottom photo.

Even though there's a strong consideration of the 360-degree views (important as it's such a large presence in the area, at least for now), the building still has a front. In its address on Norfolk (next to nARCHITECTS's Switch Building, above), we see the simplest side of the building, where a slight angle out gives way to a sharper angle back to the building's apex and the north side is a vertical, party-wall condition. The street side gives us a clearer reading of the design: each elevation responds in some way to the zoning requirements while Tschumi (perhaps subconsciously) incorporates the base-middle-top parti so predominant in high-rise architecture. The stepping of the top helps define this area as part of the tripartite, as the curtain wall makes no concession otherwise. The bottom is defined by the low corner building that the building integrates into itself. It's like Tschumi is trying to create an unconventional building within the conventional framework of the city and of architecture.