Theres a dozen high profile towers I want to see built and filled before they build this generic techbro corporate slop anyway. They have a long path to construction here.
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Fixed it for ya 
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It’s Vornado.
Their previous design was Viñoly’s atrocious sky gardens.
I don’t think a redesign will get us anything better, simply because they themselves don’t have a coherent vision to ask architects to follow.
That wasn’t the case when SL Green spoke about their inspiration for One Vanderbilt and the idea they came up on jointly with the guys at KPF, for example, from which they asked to draw inspiration from the Burj Khalifa and Trump Tower Chicago, and other crowned buildings.
The original design here was top notch, so was foster’s 350 park design in 2019. Now they’re chasing generic designs and terrace trends.
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Each and every render showcases the proximity to a nearly 100 year old Empire State Building which gives them cache. It’s more than a little pathetic that they are so close to a classic and yet so far away from anything that even resembles one.
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Would’ve loved RAMSA to try a commercial neo art deco building for once of this size. Something unique.
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I’ve never heard this story, (which is odd), One Vanderbilt’s mass was influenced by its surroundings, it’s a contextual building.
But anyways in regards to this disaster of a tower, I’m very much in the minority when I say I only liked Pelli’s original/first design for the tower, though it was very massive and relatively simple, it was a beautiful design, like all the rest of Pelli’s works. Every F+P iteration from their first assignment to the job has been terrible. It basically is what ThreeWentDown said, it’s a blah design that just keeps getting more and more terrible with each iteration. There have been 0 redeeming qualities in any of the iterations.
Architects may be the ones who are hired by clients, but in more cases than not, it is the architects who present a design to the client, not the client telling the architect what to do at the beginning, otherwise, why hire an architect. Architects dont need a vision to follow, they are the ones who can generate a vision. Vornado has hired other architects before who have designed decent buildings, PENN 2 for example. That tells me it is not Vornado, it’s F+P who is unable to create a vision for them.
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Without any knowledge on the subject I always thought 1VB was a modern take on the ESB.
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That sounds more probable than the aforementioned examples, though I could always just ask any of the numerous people that worked on it (quite literally), what’s the fun in that, lol.
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…“SL Green executives clearly want to move forward. According to the transcript of an investor conference in December, Edward Piccinich, SL Green’s executive vice president of property management and construction, said the company plans to build “a spectacular trophy asset with designs inspiration from around the world,” drawing on iconic modern towers such as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the International Commerce Centre tower in Hong Kong”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303830204577444741379690350
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It says design inspiration, but it doesn’t seem like they meant actual design inspiration literally, especially considering that article was several years before the tower broke ground and it doesnt have any physical resemblance/or characteristics to Burj Khalifa or ICC(also a KPF project). It seems rather that they were more so just talking about the standout nature of the 2 examples. One Vanderbilt is still very much a contextual tower that was designed from its surroundings and thats directly from KPF.
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Someone with F+P must’ve gotten inspiration from “Ready Player One” to be building Stacks in Manhattan!
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Well in general, I meant the vision of the developer.
Of course it’s the architect’s job to come up with design and vision, but I just came to say that it looks like Vornado doesn’t care, while that’s probably something SL Green would’ve refused to go with, for example.
Another example is Harry Macklowe who’s 432 Park Avenue and Tower Fifth are atrocious in the eyes of most.
And i’ll add, that I’m specifically talking about their new supertalls (hey, 350 Park’s 2 redesigns! The original foster design was a masterpiece), not the renovations to existing PENN district buildings (PENN2 is great). The previous design we had was of Viñoly and it was terrible. I think that the blame falls on both sides here. After all, there are very capable people on F+P and surely they can pushed to something cohesive, but the studio is in a downward spiral since 2020.
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That’s why it should just go back to the original Pelli design, the first proposal.
Though like I said that it was a massive building and relatively simple, it was clearly not trying to call attention to itself and attention away from the ESB, whereas the current or any of the F+P iterations (as well as the middle Vinoly design) do both of those things in a poor manner/taste.
NYC doesnt have many “large” or tall curved buildings, the tallest one is 15 HY, Pelli’s design wouldve made a nice impact on the skyline with its gentle curvature as it rose.
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Unfortunately, that’s relatable to too many high profile towers these days, say 2wtc…
Depressing.
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That’s almost a sort of different situation though even, because F+P was always the one designing 2 WTC and it just got worse with every iteration after the initial masterplan tower proposal and the annoying/bad BIG blip.
Here the architects keep flip flopping everywhere where the original architect was the best proposal and “then” it starts to match the 2 WTC scenario that now because it is with F+P it is similarly bad with every changing iteration and immediately started off bad after Pelli changed to Vinoly to F+P.
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Thank you I forgot why I was craving Wynn’s hotel design at HY. It was because we lost this similar shaped proposal a while back.
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I’ve said it here before but I did not like this design at all. Fat, graceless, somehow looks stubby despite its massive height. It would immediately have been Pelli’s weakest skyscraper — and New York deserves his best.
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Thats understandable, but the same could be said of every single F+P iteration, which of all those things is much more graceless (also fatter) than Pelli’s proposal.
Now here we are over a decade later with a proposal that is extremely hideous, regardless of the viewpoint relative to Pelli’s design, it was much better than Vinoly’s and any of the current F+P ones.
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Just for reference 50 Hudson Yards and the Spiral are actually more ‘stubby’ than this building and they are generally not referred to as stubby. Each are about the same height and ~2.9M sf…700K sf more than 15 Penn.
I think the iteration made for Facebook was trash, but this version isn’t so horrible IMO. Conventional enough to get built if it weren’t for the neighborhood being so trashy.
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