Calatrava's tower of cubes

[paul h]

http://www.80southstreettower.com

what are the thoughts on this? personally it would be great for downtown an amazing adddition
to a rather boring skyline. A lot of those boring post war boxes should be levelled!
the asking price of 29 million (to start) is a little outrageous
I think they need a certain number of deposits before it can actually start
my fingers are crossed

[a boyle]

most of new york should be levelled, as it is plain ugly. That design looks very interesting , although i am not sure how it would turn out once the engineers got to it. This building would be a step towards emulating chicagos beautifull city, with so many left to go.

[paul h]

chicago is a beautiful city
we went there last summer only for a long weekend, i know you cant tell much from a city in a weekend
but initially i wasn't too impressed.
The downtown loop and central areas whilst walking around are quite barren with a lot of empty lots and car parks and a lack of people. It wasn't until we took the boat ride and i saw chicago from out on the lake and holy shit it was feckin beautiful. there does seem to be a higher standard of skyscraper in chicago.
The great thing about nyc is the intensity of the city while walking around the extreme concentration of people, buildings, cars - life!

[a boyle]

i can quite assure you that there is life in chicago!!!

[paul h]

No doubting that a boyle. Chicago is a world class place and i would easily live there
but it just didn't seem to have the same buzz or energy as the big A (edit) at street level

[ctesiphon]

On first impression, it's a disappointing building. I'd imagined from the title of the thread that it'd be like one of his cube sculptures - and it is, in a way - but I'm not convinced that something that works at the sculpture scale will work at the skyscraper scale.

http://faculty.philau.edu/oakleyd/Structures_1/calatrava_sculptures.htm I particularly like the one towards the bottom of the page with the five cubes on the diagonal, but I think what makes the sculptures interesting - the poise, balance, harmony, etc. - gets lost when it is scaled up.

On the other issue, New York mightn't be a particularly beautiful city, and parts of it might indeed be pretty ugly, but to me that's a significant part of its charm. I lived there for a few months in early 2001 (yes, I know it's a very different city now from how it was then, for obvious reasons) and it took me a while to understand how a city with so many vacant lots and such a general air of shabbiness (I was just at the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge) could be loved by so many people. But I think you hit the nail on the head, paul h- it's the life in the place. It's trite, perhaps, to state that a city is so much more than its physical fabric, but equally it's sometimes worth repeating.

Chicago, where I stayed for a week, also impressed me, but for different reasons- the town-ness of much of it (as opposed to city-ness), the greenery, the freshness, the historic areas. But the downtown area outside office hours was one of the most boring urban experiences I've had anywhere.

[jayluna]

looks great .... at last a building by Calatrava I like .... more restrainted. Generally his stuff is "look at me', over the top and simply gross.

regarding .....

That design looks very interesting , although i am not sure how it would turn out once the engineers got to it.

Calatrava is an Engineer, not an Architect last time I checked. Maybe he's got a honorary degree in architecture by now.