Husband & Wife Picked for Harmony Atrium Design

NYTimes [11/1/06]

Listening to the husband-and-wife architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams talk about transforming Harmony Atrium into a magnet for Lincoln Center audiences is a little like, well, eavesdropping on any married couple’s conversation.

“To me it’s like a transportation hub,” Ms. Tsien said yesterday.
“Ooh, I can’t stand that ——” Mr. Williams said.
“It’s much more about commerce, selling something ——” she said.
“We are clearly in disagreement,” he said.
“I think we’re trying to make something that feels calm,” she said.
“She digs calm,” he said. “I love calm. That’s why I’m married to her.”
If Ms. Tsien and Mr. Williams have not exactly hashed out their ideas for the atrium yet, it is because they have just been selected as the architects; Lincoln Center announced their appointment yesterday.
Ms. Tsien and Mr. Williams were chosen after a competition that began with 24 teams of architects and was narrowed to two finalists, Thom Mayne’s Morphosis being the other.
Harmony Atrium, an indoor public space that extends from Broadway to Columbus Avenue between 62nd and 63rd Streets, is envisioned as a place where people will gather to buy day-of-show tickets or sip cocktails or coffee before or after Lincoln Center performances. In recent years, it has mainly attracted athletes who use its rock-climbing wall or homeless people seeking shelter from the elements.
The space, on the ground floor of the Harmony condominiums, has been leased by Lincoln Center as part of a comprehensive overhaul intended to make its campus just to the north more inviting.
Reynold Levy, president of Lincoln Center, said in an interview that the atrium renovation was part of a larger goal: “to be open, to be transparent, to be welcoming and make access to Lincoln Center easier and more innovative.” Plans call for the atrium to be completed by the fall of 2008.
For now it is a conceptual work in progress. Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien, who will work with the graphic designer Michael Bierut of Pentagram, were chosen not because of a design — they were asked for ideas, not plans — but because they seemed like people Lincoln Center could talk to, Mr. Levy said.
“Tod and Billie and Michael were terrific listeners,” he said. “We really loved the content of our conversation.”
That meeting of the minds is evidently in its preliminary stages. Asked about the architects’ expressed interest in closing down the atrium’s 62nd Street entrance, Mr. Levy said firmly: “They might like to do it, but it can’t be done. That’s an access to the building.”
Their notion of having members of the Lincoln Center staff roam the room helping people rather than having a central information desk or box office? “It sounds unviable to me,” Mr. Levy said. “I think a lot of work needs to be done.”
With an estimated budget of $10 million to $15 million, the project is modest compared with the architects’ previous work, which includes the American Folk Art Museum, an expansion of the Phoenix Art Museum and a recent commission to design a Hong Kong branch of the Asia Society. But Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien said it was an important project nonetheless.
“I see it as powerful and serene,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s the kind of space,” he added, that “you’d like to drop into to feel like you’re slightly separate from the intense flow of Broadway.”
The atrium is also in the architects’ neighborhood; they work on Central Park South and live in a Carnegie Hall apartment. They even have a son who used to climb the rock wall. “It’s part of our daily fabric,” Ms. Tsien said.
Although the atrium is located across the street from Lincoln Center’s main campus, Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien said they hoped to link the two in spirit.
“It should feel related in a positive way, but it shouldn’t feel of a piece,” Mr. Williams said. “This is a relative of Lincoln Center, and at the same time it wants to be something surprising and new.”
For now, their early ideas for the atrium include a stone platform that could serve both as a bench and as a stage for free performances by Juilliard students. They want to incorporate some of Lincoln Center’s signature materials, like bronze detailing and travertine.
Perhaps the heart of their initial proposal is a large Solari board, like the ones used for train announcements, that would provide information but also allow for video projections. “How can we deliver information in a way that’s beautiful and also flexible?” Ms. Tsien asked. “What we’re searching for is something you can connect to viscerally that is very much an experience. You’re not just sitting there. It causes you to pay attention.”
And the fate of the climbing wall? “If the climbing wall stays,” Mr. Williams said, “we go.”

Another 15 CPW buy

Curbed.com [10/30/06]
Another week, another high-profile 15 Central Park West buy. This time it's a Google guy, but we don't know which one. Either Larry Page or Sergey Brin plunked down nearly $30 million for a 5,500-square-foot, five-bedroom apartment in the building that will one day house other rich folk like Daniel Loeb, Sting and Denzel Washington. Maybe Larry and Sergey will bunk up and share the place. At least it's not a bad

Retail on the Lower Upper West Side

The Real Deal [10/30/06]
The Time Warner Center pushed the comeback of the foot of the Upper West Side to a whole new level. The complex's mall-like shopping atrium is filled with an underground gourmet grocery, chic shops like Hugo Boss and Coach, and expense-account restaurants.The next test of retail at the foot of the Upper West Side on Broadway will be at 15 Central Park West, where condos are setting record prices and where the retail component could be similarly higher-end. The condo project will also replicate the vertical retail approach of the Time Warner Center, a departure from the single-floor shopping experience most New Yorkers are used to.Detractors have sometimes derided the "lower Upper West Side" as the Manhattan neighborhood that most resembles an outdoor strip mall, a reaction to the success of retail like Loews Lincoln Square Theater, the Gap, Barnes & Noble, Pottery Barn and Victoria's Secret located between 65th and 68th streets on Broadway. Most of those stores first moved there in the mid-1990s.Fifteen Central Park West looks likely to raise the bar a bit while also drawing some of the same types of retailers. The complex, currently under construction between 61st and 62nd streets, will include two towers -- a residential building on Central Park West and a larger tower along Broadway with 85,000 square foot of retail in addition to condos on top. Bragging rights include design by architect Robert A.M. Stern and limestone quarried from the same pits used for the Empire State Building. A condo sale there for $45 million broke the Manhattan record for a single-family residence.Gene Spiegelman, an executive director at Cushman & Wakefield who is brokering the retail space, expects it will partly house stores similar to the downsized big-boxes that flourish a few blocks north.Spread over four levels, two of them underground, prime space at 15 Central Park West will command $300-plus a square foot, with blended rents for the entire building reaching over $75, said Spiegelman. Lease negotiations will begin at year's end; completion is expected in fall 2007."It will have high ceilings that are well-designed for vertical retail; they're not boutique-sized spaces," said Spiegelman. "We're looking for hard goods, apparel and table-top merchandise that is not represented in the market."While vertical retail was seen as a gamble when the Time Warner Center opened several years ago -- because it was thought that harried New Yorkers wouldn't want to take elevators or escalators to do their shopping -- the apparent success of that project so far makes the multiple-floor retail at 15 Central Park West seem less risky."This is becoming an area with destination retail," says Steve Kohn, president of real estate banker Sonnenblick-Goldman's New York office, who helped arrange the sale of a partner interest in the retail component of 15 Central Park West to Madison Capital of Manhattan. "The financing on this was completed before it was built, mainly because this kind of space does not come around often."Paul Smadbeck, sales director at Massey Knakal, said the project will make the neighborhood more exclusive."

They've created a new micro-neighborhood that will become even more of a destination when 15 Central Park West is completed," he said. "Some nearby properties are also ripe for change."

Still, there are impediments to bringing higher-end retail to the neighborhood. The blocks north of 15 Central Park West include mammoth 1970s apartment buildings that offer limited and sometimes uninviting retail space. Some former storefronts have been converted into long-standing restaurants, others into bank branches.Other recent retail changes on Broadway indicate more in the way of big-box proliferation.At Broadway and 64th Street, the Grand Tier, a 30-story luxury rental building, opened in 2004. The first major retail tenant in the building, Bed, Bath & Beyond, does little to raise the neighborhood's hipness quotient. An office of Brown Harris Stevens opened in another retail space in the building last year, though two prime corner lots are empty.Across the street, at West 63rd and Broadway, the Chetrit Group is renovating the Empire Hotel into 125 condominiums. Jeff Winick, president and CEO of Winick Realty Group, who is offering the space, is asking over $300 a square foot for some ground-floor stores. The property is fully leased, he said, but he was not at liberty to divulge the new tenants.Reaching farther south, activity in the neighborhood includes the recent completion of Norman Foster's Hearst Tower at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue and the converted Sheffield rental building, which began selling its 600 condos last month.After a bitter landmark battle, 2 Columbus Circle is covered with netting and awaits its renewal. The overhaul of the Columbus Circle subway station slogs on, but the circle itself, along with the statue of Christopher Columbus and the fountains that surround it, received a makeover that improved traffic and pedestrian flow to boot.

According to my sources

Ruth's Chris steakhouse will be coming to the second floor as a new tenant of the Empire Hotel.