Far from being the expected obituary, the images and events of September 11 2001, still so vividly ingrained in our minds, seem to have given the skyscraper as a building type a much-needed kick in the pants. The month after the destruction of Manhattan’s tallest towers, the Hearst Corporation and Norman Foster announced the project to build a 46-storey tower on Eighth Avenue.
The result is about to open and it is something quite special. Lord Foster’s futuristic tower looms above an odd building designed in 1928 (the year the Chrysler Building was begun) for William Randolph Hearst, Orson Welles’s model for Citizen Kane, by the Austrian émigré Joseph Urban, a figure more famous for his extravagant stage sets than his few completed structures. It is a kind of Oz Deco concoction, with columns and classics and film-set finials that always lacked the tower that was conceived to sit atop it.
Foster’s skyscraper has been designed to house the Hearst Corporation in what had been intended as New York’s media mile, until plans were scuppered by the Depression. The building is unlike any other in the city, although its diagonal grid is familiar from Foster’s “Kissing Towers” proposal for Ground Zero.
Going by photographs, there is something primitive about the oversized diamond grid, reminiscent of some of the worst excesses of 1970s urban experimentation – I can think of at least one London multi-storey car park that employed it to hideous effect. So nothing had prepared me for what I saw when I encountered the building in situ. It was late afternoon and the low, sparkling sunlight was being reflected off the chamfered corners, illuminating the sidewalk below with an eerie pink champagne glow. I don’t know whether this effect was deliberate or serendipitous but it was wonderful, as wonderful as the amber tint of the glass on Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, which glows in the winter sun as if the light was being filtered through a bottle of the eponymous whisky. That “diagrid” structure creates intriguing corners in a city where for decades a new skyscraper has meant a dumb slab.
It is also fascinating to see how Foster’s building treats its base. There is no attempt to harmonise or grow organically from Urban’s oddity; instead it is used as a launch pad, the structure hovering slightly above the restored walls, deliberately divorced from the earth. On the other hand the old building has not been ignored – quite the opposite. The base has been dramatically gutted and becomes a grand hall more on the scale of the old railroad terminals than the city’s often stingy office lobbies, always overtly conscious of rentable floor area. An attenuated escalator rises up through the floors, surrounded by a sloping cascade of water evoking the diagonals that give the structure its external identity.
The most striking thing about the offices is those corners. Because of Manhattan’s grid structure, the views from conventional box-section towers tend to be more or less blocked out by the next big box along. The chamfered corners of the Hearst Tower open up whole new vistas across the city: suddenly theatrically visible across the grid are the park, the Statue of Liberty, the Hudson, all there in a hugely compelling panorama of what remains our archetype of the contemporary metropolis.
As well as being a striking new shape, the Hearst Tower is also an example of that oxymoronic genre, the green skyscraper. The building does take into account environmental factors, harvesting rainfall from the roof for its three-storey atrium cascade, which also helps to chill and humidify the interior in summer, while the efficiency of the diagrid apparently allowed a reduction of about 2,000 tons of structural steel. The floors are also kept very open (at least by US standards, where hierarchy and the private office remain deeply ingrained), which maximises the penetration of natural light and of views.
It can, albeit tenuously, also be argued that a skyscraper below 50 storeys is an economical form. Certainly it occupies less land, maximises and fully utilises existing infrastructure and transport and maintains a connection with the exterior, although there is always something slightly disingenuous about such arguments, as the lifts and services for even such a green structure ensure high energy consumption. Nevertheless, the occupant of this superb midtown site (the Met was nearly built next door) was always going to be a tower and, as Foster proved at the Swiss Re in London, that does not have to mean environmental crash and burn.
The Hearst Tower is the diamond geezer brother of the City slicker at 30 St Mary Axe in London. There is the same obsession with diagonals, although not here sensuously wrapped around a cigar, but rather biting into the corners of the box.
It is not perfect. There are issues with both the top (unlike the best skyscrapers it has no natural termination, no crown, it could just continue upwards) and the bottom (the way it fails to connect with its base) but it is a dazzling piece of work and it is extraordinary that another reinvention of the skyscraper form has emerged, not from Manhattan but from London. The competition to do something new is on again and it has the potential to reinvigorate that wonderful but slightly weary skyline.
