Nouvel Building Makes Splash on West Side

French designer’s newest New York building features unique curtain wall. Also, a British designer now active in New York wins Pritzker Prize.

Work Begins on Nouvel “Vision Machine”

The redevelopment of West Chelsea is continuing with a flourish after work kicked off this spring on a 23-story residential tower at 100 11th Ave. designed by French architect Jean Nouvel.

The glass and steel building will feature nearly 1,700 uniquely sized panes of colored glass set at different angles to create a constantly sparkling and shimmering curtain wall. The building faces the new Frank Gehry-designed headquarters for IAC/InterActive Corp. on a redeveloped stretch of 11th Avenue near Chelsea Piers.

Nouvel describes the 140,000-sq-ft structure, designed with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners of New York, as a “vision machine.” The project is being developed by Cape Advisors of New York with Gotham Construction of New York helming the construction, which is expected to finish in 2008.

The 72 separate one-, two-, and three-bedroom units, including five penthouses, will range in size from 890 sq ft to 4,675 sq ft and cost between $1.6 million to $22 million. Each will be dominated on the inside by a floor-to-ceiling window wall on the building’s main façade.

Rogers Snags Pritzker Prize

London-based Richard Rogers, who now has four New York projects in the works, has been awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the discipline’s highest honor.

 In the award statement, Rogers was praised for his interest in “architectural clarity and transparency” and “integration of public and private spaces,” among other attributes. Rogers’s projects in New York stress the importance of access, parks, and natural lighting.

Rogers co-designed, with New York’s SHoP Architects and Ken Smith, the 2-mi-long East River Waterfront redevelopment. He also was tapped as the architect, along with Seattle-based NBBJ, for the planned $1 billion Silvercup West complex, which will feature 2.2 million sq ft of studios, office space, residential units, retail, cultural space, a waterfront esplanade, and a roof terrace in the Long Island City district of Queens. The complex, which will reserve 15% of its residential units for affordable housing, is scheduled for completion in 2010.

Also scheduled for completion that year – for now – is the $1.68 billion Jacob K. Javits Convention Center expansion and renovation project on Manhattan’s West Side, which broke ground last year. Along with Chicago’s A. Epstein Architects and New York’s FXFowle Architects, Rogers designed the complex with a 100-ft-tall glass lobby and a tree-lined concourse.

Under the plans they crafted, the expansion would add 340,000 sq ft of exhibition and convention space to bring the total at Javits to 1.1 million sq ft. But New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s administration has announced it is reviewing the current plans with an eye toward making major programmatic changes.

Rogers is also the designer of the 71-story, 2.1-million-sq-ft Tower 3 at 175 Greenwich St. at the World Trade Center site, where he is incorporating diamond-shaped bracing similar to Lord Norman Foster’s design of Manhattan’s Hearst Tower, which allows for column-free corners. The new tower is scheduled to open in 2012.

Rogers, 73, first gained international acclaim for his co-design of Centre Pompidou with fellow Pritzker-winner Renzo Piano of Italy. Piano also recently entered the New York landscape with his designs of the New York Times Building, which opens this year, >> and the reconfigured Morgan Library complex, which opened to the public last year.

Since 2004, New York has been a Pritzker playground of sorts, with various new projects designed by winners of the prize, which was first awarded to American architect Philip Johnson in 1979. Among the Pritzker winners active locally are:

• Manhattan’s Hearst Tower and the Avery Fisher Hall renovation, designed by Foster

• Tower 4 at the World Trade Center Site, designed by Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo

• a new Cooper Union building in Manhattan by Thomas Mayne of Santa Monica, Calif.

• the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., designed by the Swiss team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron

• and Cornell University’s Milstein Hall in Ithaca, N.Y., and 111 First St. in Jersey City, designed by Holland’s Rem Koolhaas. 

Catskills Casino Designs Unveiled

Plans for a new $600 million, Adirondack-style casino in the Catskills region of New York State are moving forward after Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe reached a compact earlier this year.

The St. Regis Mohawk Casino in Monticello, 90 mi north of New York City, was designed by Brennan Beer Gorman Architects of New York, which also planned Mohegan Sun in Connecticut and the Turning Stone Casino in Verona, N.Y. The Mohawk casino, built on two levels, will feature stone and natural wood, glassed-in pedestrian walkways, and a stone tower.

The 600,000-sq-ft complex will be surrounded by landscaped grounds and will include a 200,000-sq-ft gaming floor, several restaurants, and a night club. 

The project team also includes Langan Engineering & Environmental Services of Elmwood Park, N.J., as civil engineer, New York’s Thornton Tomasetti as structural engineer, New York’s Edward & Zuck as M-E-P engineer, EDSA of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as landscape designer, and Wilson & Associates of Dallas as lead interior designer.

Empire Resorts, which also owns the nearby Monticello Raceway, and the St. Regis Mohawk tribe are codevelopers on the casino, which is expected to bring 3,000 jobs to the region that decades ago thrived with resorts and entertainment venues. The development grew out of a 2001 deal between the Legislature and former Gov. George Pataki calling for the U.S. Department of the Interior to take tribal land into trust and develop three casinos in western New York and three in the Catskills.

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