Fresh Eyes

Constructing the New York Times Building through the Lens of Annie Leibovitz

It’s adventurous to build a skyscraper.

Sometimes in the thick of tower cranes in  Manhattan, that’s easy to forget. It’s compelling to build 746 ft into the sky out of the city’s bruising terrain, and fun to try it right across the street from the “world’s busiest bus terminal,” which fans hundreds of thousands of suburbanites out into Manhattan every morning and sucks them back in the evening.

It’s exciting to build an elaborate design from Renzo Piano, Italy’s Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect, who with his counterparts at New York’s FXFowle sketched out a façade with exposed steel members supporting 167,000 ceramic tubes that are intended to deflect sunlight and coax the building to change color with the sky.

It’s a tall order to build it for high-profile owners – the New York Times Co. and Brooklyn’s Forest City Ratner Cos. – that are spending $1 billion on the project, and maybe historic, too, as a last hurrah for London’s AMEC Construction Management, once a construction giant in the region, which after this assignment will take on no more contracts in the U.S. 

And it’s intriguing to have Annie Leibovitz, one of the world’s most famous portrait photographers, leave her studio to explore a construction site and create a visual diary of the 52 stories going up, from the first shovels of dirt to the last window wall panel set into place.

See a selection of Leibovitz’s shots of the New York Times Building on the rise in the slideshow link below.

Photos by Annie Leibovitz for Forest City Ratner Cos.

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Click here to view a slideshow for Leibowitz art on the NY Times Story >>