A Community Board 2 committee voted last night against approving a proposed 38-story mixed-use tower that New York University wants to erect at the Silver Towers Complex in Greenwich Village north of Houston Street.
The plan needs to be approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and has been opposed by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation that held a protest rally Sunday against the plan.
The tower, shown in the rendering at the right from Grimshaw Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, would contain a hotel and university housing.
According to an November 4, 2010 article at the architectsnewspaper.com by Julia Galef "The proposed tower mimics Pei's precast-concrete originals while addressing what the designers see as their relentless elevations, adding more articulation to the top and bottom of the structure."
"Trying to pay homage, not replicate the original buildings," the article continued, "Grimshaw's tower will be made of the same precast concrete, in a slightly lighter hue, finished with high performance glazing. Its footprint is composed of four quarters, whose heights alternate between 375 and 355 feet, staggered to echo the placement of the four towers on the site. They also mimic the distinctive vertical pattern of the original towers, in which sheer concrete walls and a deep punched-window facade alternated in vertical stripes around each building. 'We pushed pieces of the facade in, so they had more depth like the punched facades of Pei, and left some parts of the facade flush with the structure,' said Mark Husser, Grimshaw's lead architect on the project."
"The new tower," the article continued, "would also update the flat tops and bottoms and monotonous proportions of the pre-existing towers, features that hark back to midcentury Brutalism. 'The Pei towers have a fairly relentless articulation of the windows, that basically continues in the same proportions all the way up the building, and the building truncates at the ground and the sky,' Husser said. The articulated rooftop of the new tower would be paired with a bottom floor set back about four feet from the outer building envelope in a stepped pattern. Grimshaw also updated Pei's identically repeating rows of windows by designing the new tower in stacked modules that get taller as the building rises, lightening the building's form."
The plan needs to be approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission and has been opposed by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation that held a protest rally Sunday against the plan.
The tower, shown in the rendering at the right from Grimshaw Architects and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, would contain a hotel and university housing.
According to an November 4, 2010 article at the architectsnewspaper.com by Julia Galef "The proposed tower mimics Pei's precast-concrete originals while addressing what the designers see as their relentless elevations, adding more articulation to the top and bottom of the structure."
"Trying to pay homage, not replicate the original buildings," the article continued, "Grimshaw's tower will be made of the same precast concrete, in a slightly lighter hue, finished with high performance glazing. Its footprint is composed of four quarters, whose heights alternate between 375 and 355 feet, staggered to echo the placement of the four towers on the site. They also mimic the distinctive vertical pattern of the original towers, in which sheer concrete walls and a deep punched-window facade alternated in vertical stripes around each building. 'We pushed pieces of the facade in, so they had more depth like the punched facades of Pei, and left some parts of the facade flush with the structure,' said Mark Husser, Grimshaw's lead architect on the project."
"The new tower," the article continued, "would also update the flat tops and bottoms and monotonous proportions of the pre-existing towers, features that hark back to midcentury Brutalism. 'The Pei towers have a fairly relentless articulation of the windows, that basically continues in the same proportions all the way up the building, and the building truncates at the ground and the sky,' Husser said. The articulated rooftop of the new tower would be paired with a bottom floor set back about four feet from the outer building envelope in a stepped pattern. Grimshaw also updated Pei's identically repeating rows of windows by designing the new tower in stacked modules that get taller as the building rises, lightening the building's form."
Architecture Critic
Carter Horsley
Since 1997, Carter B. Horsley has been the editorial director of CityRealty. He began his journalistic career at The New York Times in 1961 where he spent 26 years as a reporter specializing in real estate & architectural news. In 1987, he became the architecture critic and real estate editor of The New York Post.
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