Turning the Bus Terminal Into a Skyscraper
By David W. Dunlap
From left to right: Proposal by the firm Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects of New Haven; Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners; Manhattan architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox. (Renderings: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) Enlarge this image.
The on-again, off-again plans to build an office tower over the Port Authority Bus Terminal took at least a conceptual step forward on Thursday afternoon with the unveiling of three possible designs by three leading architectural firms.
Easily the most striking of the three is a constructivist assemblage by the London firm Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, which is also designing Tower 3 at the World Trade Center site. It takes the form of four discrete boxes stacked atop one another and bound together by open diagonal trusswork that echoes the bold X-shaped steel braces girdling the main terminal below.
In complete contrast, for its suavity and lucidity, is a proposal by the Manhattan firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects. The central element of this plan is a sheer, glass-clad tower whose surface has an almost icy gleam. In this plan, the X braces would recede in importance behind a screen.
Somewhere between these two is the proposal by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects of New Haven, whose overall form is monolithic but accentuated with a curtain wall on the north and south sides in a kind of monumental basketweave pattern.
The 40-story, 1.3-million-square-foot office tower is to be developed by a joint venture of Vornado Realty Trust and the Lawrence Ruben Company, which is leasing the air rights over the terminal for 99 years.
Read an updated version of this article prepared for later editions.**************************************************************************************
For a Tower Atop the Buses, the British Are Coming
By David W. Dunlap
This design by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners Rendering has won a private competition to design a new office tower atop the Port Authority Bus Terminal. (Rendering: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)
Not that such a project would — or even could — happen in the ravaged economy of the foreseeable future, but the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced on Monday that it had chosen an architectural design for an office tower atop the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
The winning design is by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, a British firm whose projects include Tower 3 of the World Trade Center, at 175 Greenwich Street. Richard Rogers, the 2007 Pritzker Prize winner, is probably best known for the Centre Pompidou, designed with Renzo Piano.
The 1.3-million-square-foot office tower is to be developed by a joint venture of Vornado Realty Trust and affiliates of the Lawrence Ruben Company, which would lease the air rights over the north part of the terminal from the Port Authority for 99 years. The next-to-last round of the architectural competition came in July, when the three competitors were announced.
In July, the Rogers Stirk Harbour design was far less conventional and much more expressive. (Photo: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey)
At the time, the plan by Lord Rogers’s firm was considerably more expressive visually than the version that was chosen. But the explanation for the modification is more structural than aesthetic. The earlier version depended on eight massive columns that would have extended through the terminal building. (In the model, the first two of these columns can be seen as the lower legs of the vaguely H-shaped structure at the base of the tower.)
As the rendering above shows, the revised version is very likely to have more columns, perhaps as many as 12, but they will be smaller and less intrusive.
The Architects Journal carried the news on Nov. 5 that Lord Rogers’s firm had won the competition, but illustrated the post with the earlier, discarded design.
Because lease negotiations between the authority and the developers are still in progress, the announcement contained no word as to when construction would start or be finished.
Perhaps that’s just as well. It leaves one less thing that will have to be revised.
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