Architecture

architecture ELEVATED THE TWIN 3 5 PLEASURES OF THE The High Line Building 459 West 18th Street 450 West 14th Street; Morris Adjmi Della Valle Bernheimer HIGH LINE: A PETITE A muscular former meatpacking A smaller and more successful plant that was always impaled companion piece to 245 Tenth NEW PARK, AND by the elevated tracks will, when it’s (seen on the following pages). finished, now also carry an office 4 The interlocking black and tower on its shoulders and white volumes suggest an A DISTRICT OF LIVELY shelter shopping in its base. Old The Caledonia M. C. Escher print, but there’s industrial buildings are generous and 450 West 17th Street; nothing impossible about the way ARCHITECTURE. strong, and it makes sense Handel Architects sunlight streams in one of the to reuse them rather than The High Line pioneer is penthouse’s mammoth windows by justin davidson tear them down. a big but surprisingly and out the other side. 1 retiring building, deftly Standard Hotel disguising its bulk and 7 848 Washington Street; leaving the limelight to its The IAC Building Polshek Partnership neighbors. 555 West 18th Street; The concrete-legged Gehry Partners brute offers its guests Frank Gehry’s glass prime views of the High schooner, one of the Line; its glassed-in few new workplaces in rooms will present park the area, set the visitors with equally 6 neighborhood standard stimulating spectacles. for fanciful design. 2 Chelsea Modern 447 West 18th Street; Diane Von Audrey Matlock Furstenberg The pursuit of personality headquarters is mostly a matter of 440 West 14th façades. Here, a stack of Street; Work AC zigzagging blue glass In a literally facets disguise the brilliant stroke, the ordinariness of what’s crystal tuber on behind them. the roof scoops up sunlight and A Walking Tour funnels it down a The High Line runs glittery hanging through an architectural staircase into theme park that’s still in the masonry development. At the building. Gansevoort Street end, the Whitney Museum dreams of a new branch; uptown, the park runs into the future Hudson Yards complex. In between, you’ll find New York’s densest thicket of ambitious early-21st-century design. L START THE TOUR W E S T 1 3 T H W E S T 1 4 T H W E S T 1 7 T H W E S T 1 8 T H L 134 new york | june 15–22, 2009 june 15–22, 2009 | new york 135 8 10 12 14 520 West Chelsea 100 Eleventh Avenue HL23 200 Eleventh Avenue 520 West 19th Street; Ateliers Jean Nouvel 515–517 West 23rd Street; Annabelle Selldorf Annabelle Selldorf This irresistible, Neil Denari Not even finished, and already The terra-cotta ostentatiously Adaptive, vaguely so 2007. Luxuriantly wavy window tiles at the base are so inventive tower, with retro, and undeniably cool, frames, terra-cotta with 9 sumptuously glazed its harlequin window the building balloons once a gunmetal glaze, and private they look edible, Metal Shutter Houses pattern and its it clears the High Line parking just outside the apartment but they’re really just 524 West 19th Street; observation-deck and holds itself together door. The marketing term for an accent on Shigeru Ban living rooms, is either with a pleasingly that perk—“en suite sky an otherwise The Hudson dispenses the last boom’s asymmetric web of struts garage”—could spark a class bland box. more stiff winds than aftershock or the next and leaning columns. war all on its own. balmy breezes, so it’s hard one’s portent. to know how regularly residents will raise the 13 glass garage doors or 245 Tenth Avenue their bodega-style Della Valle Bernheimer shutters and turn their Architectural apartments into open- ambitions collide with walled Caribbean a cumbersome site, cabanas. They’re 11 resulting in an ungainly certainly paying for the building clad in diamond- privilege. High Line 519 519 West 23rd Street; Lindy Roy pattern stamped The amoeboid shapes steel and windows that of perforated steel looked look haphazardly, rather pretty arbitrary hanging than inspirationally, on this skinny building’s arranged. glass façade—until its organic-looking neighbor HL23 came along to complete the biological motif. L W E S T 1 9 T H W E S T 2 3 R D W E S T 2 4 T H 136 new york | june 15–22, 2009 june 15–22, 2009 | new york 137.

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