a+u 2025:07 Feature: Manhattan Towers and Thresholds
Content
a+u’s July looks at how, even in a city such as New York, where projects are executed on a grand scale, designing spaces to walk, rest, work, and play centers the human experience. The selected projects from Midtown and Lower Manhattan provide but a small cross section of the varying typologies of differing scales currently enhancing the architecture of New York City. Projects such as the Moynihan Train Hall by Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) endeavor to preserve the fabric of the city while addressing the increased need for transportation hubs by the expansion of Pennsylvania station to the adjacent historic James A. Farley Building, while adaptive reuse projects such as
Gansevoort Peninsula Park by nArchitects are part of a decadeslong effort to transform the industrial waterfront into much needed green spaces and sports facilities. Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) addresses the shortage of residential space with projects that integrate the materiality of the building to its context and incorporate the human scale with the urban one. Amid the massive developments taking place, smaller practices such as Worrell Yeung and WORKac seek to preserve urban character, through surgical intervention in their renovation projects. (a+u)
Essay:
Beyond Buildings: Four Decades of City-Making on
Manhattan’s West Side
Keith P. O’Connor
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
East End Gateway and Long Island Rail Road Concourse Renovation
Moynihan Train Hall
Manhattan West
High Line – Moynihan Connector
Research:
Office-to-Residential Conversion Study: 1633 Broadway
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
Heatherwick Studio
Vessel
Little Island
nARCHITECTS
Gansevoort Peninsula Park
Snøhetta
550 Madison Avenue Garden
Essay:
The Legend of Avant-Garde Architecture and the Rise of
the Market-Fundamentalist City
Stephen Zacks
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Spur – High Line
Columbia Business School
Worrell Yeung
Canal Projects Renovation
Essay:
Revitalizing Midtown East
Andrew Cleary
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF)
One Vanderbilt
55 Hudson Yards
Essay:
Craft, Context, Performance:
Defining a Contemporary American Vernacular
James von Klemperer
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF)
64 University Place
WORKac
Stealth Building
Gensler
Pearl House