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Browsing the international architectural press recently, I came across a couple of American tall buildings from which local designers and we skyscraper fans can learn a thing or two. I thought you might be interested, so here they are.
One is Daniel Libeskind's typically (for him) eccentric Ascent in the Cincinnati suburb of Covington, Ky., near the Roebling Suspension Bridge over the Ohio River. It is the architect's first tall residential structure in the United States.
Rising and flaring from 14 to 22 storeys in a broad curve, this condominium tower is the kind of thing Toronto needs in very sparse amounts, if at all.
A note about the aesthetics. The building is clad, on two elevations, with large plank-like slabs of precast concrete interrupted by blue glass. The upthrust prow of this theologically named building has balconies, which, according to one report, are intended to open to views of downtown Cincinnati.
Top, A rendering of Five Franklin Place in Tribeca, New York City, a model of architectural citizenship that builders in Toronto should emulate. Below left, Daniel Libeskind’s Ascent; right: Absolute towers, Mississauga, designed by Beijing architect Yansong Ma (ARCHPARTNERS)
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Local pundits have lavished praise on the project, hailing it as a "landmark" akin to the Eiffel Tower, a "magnificent structure," and so on. Mr. Libeskind himself says of it: "The Ascent at Roebling's bridge is a living, breathing work that stirs the soul and lifts the spirit." It's a tall building designed quite obviously to knock the socks off Cincinnati and Covington residents.
I have argued elsewhere that look-at-me towers occasionally have a place in the urban fabric and in architectural thinking. The Toronto-area city of Mississauga, for example, could probably use a few marquee condo buildings to lend aesthetic spark to its humdrum expanse of rootless suburban sprawl. Beijing architect Yansong Ma's much-touted, curvaceous "Marilyn" towers, now under construction, may just do the trick.
While I won't presume to tell Cincinnati or Covington what they need, I wonder whether Ascent is it.
Most old, well-rooted American communities, especially in the vast heartland of the country, could stand much vigorous repair and restoration. Crowd-pleasing "icons" in such places can distract public attention from the difficult, serious work of city-building, or rebuilding. Flashy eye-poppers like Ascent are usually all about tourism, and contribute little or nothing to the mending of the frayed urban tapestry. As I suggested, they may have a small part to play in lending identity to a quick-built suburb like Mississauga. I don't see what good Ascent can do for elderly, self-possessed Cincinnati, other than make the city briefly feel better about its "progress" than perhaps it should.
Another American high-rise that deserves attention, this one exactly because of its city-building potential, will soon go up in the heart of New York's Tribeca neighbourhood.
The 20-storey luxury condominium building is called Five Franklin Place, and is the first important American project by architect and theorist Ben van Berkel, of the Dutch firm UNStudio. The structure will be situated among older neighbours on a recently restored 19th-century laneway. If renderings are anything to go on — the ones I found seem honest enough — Mr. van Berkel's project will be an excellent instance of sound, sensitive urbanism.
Interesting new architectural schemes destined for well-established areas in every city usually take one of two forms: appropriation of the best moves in the more mature architecture round about or a delineation of vivid contrasts between the new and old. Either approach can produce a fine building.
It's all to the good, however, if the architect can figure out a way to meld the two strategies into a single instrument of design.
Which is what Mr. van Berkel has accomplished in his proposal for Five Franklin Place. With a bow to the Victorian cast-metal facades for which Tribeca is famous, the architect has wrapped his building in horizontal metal straps that vary in width, creating a handsomely sculpted, urbane and lively front elevation. The edifice fits into its place in the city, reinforcing such admirable things about lower Manhattan as the streetscapes of building fronts pressed tight against sidewalks and the business-like atmosphere that has survived from the district's former career as a zone of workshops and warehouses.
At the same time, Five Franklin Place will be entirely a building of our era. The metal bands will alternate with expanses of glass, and step-backs in the facade respond to contemporary concerns about the need for sunlight at street level.
The whole composition is unmistakably modern, in the best sense of the word: efficient, serious, open-handed.
In its freshness and serene grace, and in its mindfulness about its new-kid-on-the block status in an enormously complex urban environment, Mr. van Berkel's design provides a model of architectural citizenship that architects in Toronto, Cincinnati and every other North American city would do well to adopt in their own work.
