Madison Square Park- ogling city’s newest skyscrapers.

New York’s Madison Square Park is the latest place to go ogling some of the city’s newest skyscrapers.

Cetra Rudy and OMA have each designed new towers on the park. Now the area is to get a forward-looking gleaming glass and green residential tower designed by Studio Libeskind, with spiraling gardens in the sky. The dramatic 54-storey tower will sit atop a 14-storey masonry structure that is an annex for the Metropolitan Life building, making it the city’s tallest residential tower.

The design of the building was kept under wraps until recently when it was made public on the Architects Newspaper Blog, which scanned the images to the web from Daniel Libeskind’s new monograph. While the design of the New York Tower is in the embryonic stage, Libeskind said the following today via statement: “The design features a series of spiraling gardens extending the green of Madison Square along the facade of the tower. The tower is set back from its neighbors—maintaining views and maximizing light and air.” “We look forward to a continuing dialogue when the proposal enters the public review process”, he added.

Sharon McHugh
US Correspondent
worldarchitecturenews.com

Above- the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, North Building (the base for the new tower).
Below- the original, unbuilt scheme.
See- http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/GRP019A.htm

Green Dreams on Madison Square

Six years after Daniel Libeskind alighted in the middle of the World Trade Center circus, bearing images of glass towers dripping with sky gardens, the architect has unveiled a proposal for his first New York building: a glass tower dripping with sky gardens. Libeskind’s One Madison Avenue would swoop up next to, and past, the 700-foot Met Life tower. One diagram in Libeskind’s new book, Counterpoint, suggests that the 54-story condo, hovering on columns over an existing building, could top out just shy of 937 feet (Rem Koolhaas’s proposed 23 East 22nd Street is a block away.) Initial designs show a glass-curtained tube with cutaways spiraling up and around the façade to reveal segments of terraced verdure, like cultivated patches on the side of a steep alpine slope. “We didn’t just fill up the tower,” the architect says. “We’ve taken space away [from the apartments] to create the gardens,” which are actually balconies tucked within the envelope. “It’s as if nature has come back into the city,” he says. The whole project has an air of fantasy about it, but the developer is betting that the current fiscal misery will end before the approvals process does. “The assumption is that by the time construction starts, we’re going to be looking at a different economy,” Lloyd Kaplan, an Elad spokesman, says.