Re: 115 Winthrop Square | Financial District
I don’t particularly like the design either, but this and several other comments are way over the top. This will ruin Boston? Please the level of hyperbole regarding this design is ridiculous.
Not sure the extreme angst is bluster. Accordia at 702', South Station Tower at 677' and 1 Bromfield at 709' would have accomplished the near undoing of the ugly, brown fatness. The 3 skyscrapers would have had a wonderful balancing effect to make the ugly fat, 70's buildings look far better.
This thing effectively ends any hope of that; The current render for 115 Winthrop Sq spins its wide side twice (2 axes). There will be no escape from its massive fatness from any vantage point in the City.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/realestate/park-avenue-interrupted.html
Park Avenue, Interrupted
By CHRISTOPHER GRAY DEC. 19, 2014
One of the great preservation battles from the time before the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission was not about architecture at all, but about the views consumed by the Pan Am Building of 1963. The giant, defiantly modern octagonal tower blocked the view from upper Park Avenue past the filigree of the 1929 tower-topped New York Central Building at 46th Street. Now a new building is changing the Park Avenue skyline, the developer Harry Macklowe’s perfectly square apartment tower at 56th Street.
The view south on Park Avenue in the 1870s was of the open end of the huge train shed behind Grand Central, a vast, iron-arched thing that looked like a European train shed. By 1911, by which time the railroad had put its tracks underground and demolished the train shed, the north end of the new Grand Central was a plain-vanilla limestone facade, clearly anticipating development to the north.
That came in 1929, with the completion of the New York Central Building, now the Helmsley Building, at the foot of Park between East 45th and 46th Streets. Designed, as was the station, by Warren & Wetmore and now a beloved landmark, it was not particularly well received. In 1928, Harry F. Cunningham wrote in The American Yearbook that the lacy 34-story tower, 560 feet high, rejected modernism so thoroughly “it marks one of the greatest steps in the present backward tendency shown in American Architecture.”
Not much was said about the new tower’s profile along the otherwise low-rise skyline. In 1927 Vanity Fair noted noncommittally that once completed, it would “entirely shut off the long familiar view of Grand Central Terminal.” Two years later, the magazine Architecture and Building, in a long review of the building, remarked on “the beautiful tower closing the vista of this broad Avenue in an imposing way.” Otherwise, the new bulbous silhouette did not attract much attention at the time of construction.
By the 1950s the idea of eclipsing Grand Central was in the air, and among the proposals was to replace the back of the terminal from 44th to 45th Street with a tall rectangular structure next to the New York Central Building, which was renamed the New York General Building around 1960. Among the proposals for what became the Pan Am Building was one preserving the view to the south from upper Park Avenue. But final revisions reoriented the building so as to block even a slim view to the south.
The Pan Am Building, now the MetLife Building, was completed in 1963. The enormous office tower was the subject of one of the biggest and most bitter fights over a construction project in New York history, possibly greater than the battle over the demolition of Penn Station. Critics charged that the building would attract crowds and traffic, and planners and architects who might have been afraid to defend the old-fashioned Penn Station jumped into the discussion.
The new beanstalk 432 Park Avenue; the Pan Am Building, now MetLife, is in the distance. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Almost all went after the Pan Am Building because of its size and its height. But in 1962, The New Republic weighed in on its effect on the view, describing it as a “seven-league monster,” which, from the uptown side, “seems to take sadistic pleasure in dwarfing the rather cute gilded spire” of the Helmsley Building.
The writer, a fan of the modern architecture that had taken over Park Avenue below 57th Street, complained that “the vista is blocked; this is particularly sad for upper Park Avenue which, since the last war, has turned into the most exciting metropolitan thoroughfare modern architecture has yet created.”
But people become accustomed to things. For instance, Nathan Silver lamented the views blocked by the Pan Am Building in his 1967 book “Lost New York,” but emailed me the other day to say that, upon reflection, it “doesn’t louse up any views, particularly of the New York Central Building, which looks O.K. against it.”
Although Mr. Macklowe’s new 96-story apartment house at Park and 56th doesn’t block either the MetLife or Helmsley Buildings, its skinny shape is visible from the boroughs — and even neighboring states. Perhaps because the thing is so stunningly new and different, and still unfinished, it’s a little early for extended reviews by professional critics.
One exception is Aaron Betsky, writing in the magazine Architect in October. He likes it, even saying that although it oozes privilege and wealth, “it does so with an elegance, borne out of its simplicity as much as its height, that make it clear that it is still possible to make a beautiful skyscraper.”
On real estate and architecture blogs, opinion is not uniform, although a sizable number invoke the building as a vulgar gesture. That has some validity, but the sticking-up-in-the-middle quality of the building is also somehow reassuring, as were the World Trade Center towers, which, in their naked simplicity, could be seen for miles.
I see the Macklowe building down Park when I step out my front door at East 89th. In the morning, the pure square building, with its huge square windows, does have a Brutalist cast, but it also has a haunting aspect, like a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. Night is my favorite time, the deep blue of the protective film on the window glass giving the building a lonely, melancholy aspect, as if it were the only one of its type on Park Avenue. Which, for the moment, it is.
