Proving that all press is good press when it comes to real estate, Rafael Viñoly — the architect behind two recent death-ray skyscrapers — revealed plans for a new super-tall tower in Lower Manhattan today. It’ll be his second supertall in NYC, and like the first, this one is conspicuously free of curved surfaces.
The tower will add 841 feet and 70 stories of luxury condos to Lower Manhattan when it opens in 2017 on the site of the former American Stock Exchange building, which was demolished this fall:
Image: Cristian on Flickr.
What’s going on with the design? Not terribly much, thankfully. The new renderings — which appeared on NY Yimby today — show a super-thin monolith hung with a glass curtain wall, lined with long vertical window louvres that look like pinstripes. On one side of the square extrusion, an opaque volume will probably contain the building’s services core and elevators, leaving the other three sides of the building open to views of the city.
One curious detail is the protrusion of the long white slab above the building’s top floors — it’s unclear what’s going on here, though this could be a way to push the building’s height up. At 841 feet, 22 Thames will already be the tallest residential building in downtown Manhattan. But a crown could add as much as a hundred feet to the building — and that could make a huge difference. After all, the recent decision to name One World Trade as the tallest building in the country came down to semantics: If the building’s spire was “architectural,” it counts towards the official height.
If that’s what’s going on here, 22 Thames could be an attempt to nab the title of the city’s tallest residential building (the current title-holder tops out at 1,004 feet). Though, really, the width of a building is quickly eclipsing its height in terms of bragging rights. [NY Yimby]