Showy Condos by Herzog & de Meuron, Koolhaas Remake NYC Skyline

Review by James S. Russell

Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) -- At the edge of TriBeCa, the Swiss superstar architects Herzog & de Meuron stack 145 luxe condo residences like crisscrossing glass-wrapped dominos. Uptown, Rem Koolhaas tilts a tower perilously over its neighbor.

These projects, both in construction, cement a gathering trend: the sculpting of a 21st-century Manhattan skyline by high- priced, high-rise condos.

In 56 Leonard, the Swiss partnership of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron -- architects of Beijing's ``Bird's Nest'' Olympic stadium -- have reimagined the New York apartment building.

Balconies and glass-wrapped rooms project from the shaft of this 57-story tower with corner recesses incised in shallow steps. The treatment is dramatically muscular on the lower floors, with a cantilevered volume appearing to pin an inflating polished-steel balloon sculpture by Anish Kapoor to the corner of Church and Leonard streets.

The projections and incisions become shallower as the tower rises, yet its surface is so richly variegated that it appears to be a skinny vertical city.

At the top eight floors, each a single large apartment, the floor shifts grow more jagged and gravity-defying. (Asking prices at these heights run upwards of $20 million. The top floor -- labeled 60 -- is offered at $33 million.)

50-Foot Rooms

The Alexico Group didn't engage Herzog & de Meuron just to devise a flashy wrapper. Most of the main living and dining areas (some longer than 50 feet and here rechristened great rooms) wrap corners where the champagne-tinted metal framing of the floor-to- ceiling glass wiggles to form shallow alcoves.

Throughout, the architects contrast a crystalline angularity with rounded edges and surfaces, from plumbing fixtures of their own design to curving shower compartments. Walls warp to form fireplace surrounds or enclose kitchen hoods.

Materials are equally sensuous: wavy-patterned stone tiles and sinks -- like cast caramel -- precisely match the oak flooring. Stainless-steel penny tiles glint from the ceiling above the 75-foot-long swimming pool.

New York developers almost never trust architects to design residential buildings as such a unified composition, yet that's the only way the identity of a great building truly emerges.

Miniscule Site

Koolhaas is an intellectual who is incidentally a designer. In his latest project, he teases a typically defining perversity out of an 18-unit condo project for a miniscule site at 23 E. 22nd St. for developer Slazer Enterprises. The $120 million, 24- story result inverts the wedding-cake setbacks of older New York City zoning. The building stairsteps sideways as it rises over an adjacent townhouse. Then Koolhaas stacks eight more floors that step back conventionally, forming terraces.

This looks like a stunt, yet in this way Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, his partner in the New York branch of his Rotterdam- based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, move the bulk of the building out from behind the 50-story One Madison Park, a tower that Slazer already has topped off. Views from both are thereby preserved.

Seen from Madison Square, Koolhaas's jagged silhouette peeks out from behind the sticklike, blearily gray-glassed One Madison like a kid making impish faces behind a stolid big brother. (Cetra/Ruddy is the perpetrating architect of One Madison.)

Together with the spire of the 1909 Metropolitan Life building that dominates the square, One Madison and 23 E. 22nd St. merge into an ensemble that tempers the Cetra/Ruddy tower's vandalism of the neighborhood.

Surreal Wedding Cake

The sidewalk view of Koolhaas's building is one of its best, presenting the tower's profile as a surreally distorted wedding- cake building laid over the sky.

Full-floor units starting at $7 million are mixed with duplexes. The units that cantilever feature picture windows set in the floor. The $50-million quadruplex penthouse is aimed at moguls who have always wanted to gaze up from their easy chairs 30 feet skyward through the clear acrylic bottom of a rooftop swimming pool at their happily paddling mates.

Though many fear the looming bulk of dozens of super-tall condos, they can only sprout where the developers are patient enough and cash-rich enough to scoop up the undeveloped air rights of nearby buildings. Alexico paid $150 million for the package of land and air rights offered by the New York Law School, which is building an expansion next to 56 Leonard with the proceeds.

The best of these new towers give a welcome jolt to a skyline afflicted by luxury-living poseurs in tinted-glass and pink-brick faux historicism.

Enough iconic towers are on the way to remake the city's image -- among them projects by Jean Nouvel, Ben van Berkel, Frank Gehry and a (not-yet-unveiled) Madison Square neighbor by Daniel Libeskind.

The city's 20th-century skyline expressed the power and energy of business. In the 21st century, we witness the rising of monuments to the gratification of desire and the troublesome stratification of wealth.