Manhattan, September 2008

Jean Nouvel isn't lovable, but neither is New York. The 63-year-old French architect looks like a comic-book villain--bald head, mischievous (evil?) smirk, all-black wardrobe--and his audacious buildings beg to be hated. Paris's Quai Branly museum is a jagged, dried-blood-red beast and in the Dick House, Nouvel color-coded the parts that squeamish local building codes made him change. Let's be frank: the guy's a badass, but that's just what this city needs.

Midtown architecture is stagnant. The one new building worth talking about is the Bank of America tower on Bryant Park, and that's only because of how green it is. Take away the LEED rating and it's just another crystalline yawn factory. But there's hope. Nouvel has designed a tower for the empty lot next to MoMA and the criticisms hurled at it from a couple community board members and elected officials--"out of scale," "eccentric," "asymmetrical," "inconsistent," even "frightening"--are exactly why it's the best thing to happen in this neighborhood since Philip Johnson's Lipstick building went up down the street twenty years ago.

Hines real estate (the folks behind Johnson's building) bought the land from MoMA for $125 million last year, and the new tower's a bit of a joint effort. Hines gets a 100-room hotel and 120 luxury apartments; MoMA will have an extra 50,000 square feet of gallery space. The tower hasn't been officially approved yet--the plans need to pass through the City Planning Commission and City Council--so groundbreaking's a ways off, but drool-worthy archiporn (uh, I mean renderings) will keep us occupied until then.

Inches separate the tower from Yoshio Taniguchi's sedate (some would say comatose) 2004 addition next door, but it's miles away in attitude. These 75 stories of twisted concrete beams and angled glass are sexy and sinister. Nouvel said the tower riffs on work by Hugh Ferriss, the early 20th-century architectural illustrator whose drawings of the Manhattan skyline turned New York into Gotham. Ferriss drew brooding skyscrapers lit up against a coal-dark sky: a New York of shadows and spires, before clean-cut Modernism took the drama away. Ferriss popularized the setback rule that shaped the tapered profiles of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. Blocky Modernist icons like the Lever House fudged the law with big ground-level plazas, but Nouvel's tower is in a tight spot--only about 17,000 square feet--so a bloated footprint is out of the question. It's something he's used to. One of the architect's wildest schemes (it was never built) was a "tower without end." It would've been the world's thinnest building, tapering into a point so fine it looked like it simply bled into the sky.

Granted, the renderings don't make this new tower look as moody as Ferriss's icons. It seems that even Nouvel has fallen victim to the ubiquitous "facet," that trendy flourish of angled planes of glass and metal popularized by Daniel Libeskind that has new buildings glitzing and gleaming from Denver to Dubai. But here, Nouvel throws his weight around. Big, muscular beams slice through the façade as they push the tower up. The structure is on display, like Terminator with his skin pulled off. It's sharp, powerful, even intimidating. A product of its environment, it sneers, "what're you lookin' at?"