Nouvel’s World: 1,250-Foot-High Glass Tower "Not a Huge Building"

Jean Nouvel at NY City Planning Commission's MoMA/Hines hearing

"Three minutes for ME?" lamented Jean Nouvel, when the speaker's cut-off bell had tolled for him at the NY City Planning Commission's recent hearing on the proposed MoMA/Hines tower. [Previous CultureGrrl posts on that hearing are here and here.]

The French architect had just flown in to lend his Pritzker Prize-winning prestige to the proceedings, but was accorded no more time to discuss his project than any of the other speakers, pro and con, who overflowed the meeting room at 22 Reade St. and also filled the large anteroom. Fortunately, the commissioners' subsequent questions allowed Nouvel some room to expand upon his comments.



The commission's chic chairperson, Amanda Burden (center, above), uncharacteristically reached for her eyeglasses for Nouvel's presentation---the better to see the various photos and drawings assembled on the board behind him.

Like the project's lawyer, Michael Sillerman, who had spoken directly before Nouvel (see second link above), the architect seemed intent on making a very tall structure (the same 1,250-foot height as the Empire State Building without its antenna) seem diminutive:

Height is [only] one parameter of the scale....It's a small building---650,000 square feet. It's not a huge building....In the skyline of the city, it doesn't have the same importance as the other one [the Empire State]. It's slimmer. It's modest, in a way, because it's only a needle.

When one of the commissioners inquired whether there would be any area for public access at the top of the tower, Nouvel first mentioned the Museum of Modern Art's gallery space at the base. Then he answered:

It's very important to have this needle at the end and this immateriality at the end. So we cannot go to the top of every tower. But I think this building will be important in the skyline.

He also touched on the building's "immateriality" when he described the experience within it:

What I proposed here is to have a kind of skeleton. [The information packet for the project calls it a "dynamic structural steel diagrid."]...We arrived very naturally at a kind of random system, a kind of net....When you are inside you have the feeling that there are no mullions. You are really in the sky.

Here's one image of sky dwellers, from the project's information packet:



Chairperson Burden expressed a desire to view a model of the project, whereupon this very schematic one came out of hiding:


100 Eleventh Avenue, describe by Nouvel as "a vision machine"

To its right of this building, just across the street, you can glimpse the edge of Frank Gehry's IAC headquarters (formerly the backdrop for the "boyfriend trousers").

There's something of artistic interest just to the other side of Nouvel's building-in-progress, but it's suffered construction-obstruction. The elderly artist whose 1970 mural is now largely obscured by Nouvel's "vision machine" made his displeasure known in a most unusual, provocative way.

COMING SOON: Knox Nixes Nouvel.