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First impressions of BIG’s West 57th Street

United States Architecture News - Mar 07, 2016 - 10:35   4471 views

First impressions of BIG’s West 57th Street

Bjarke Ingels' West Side Pyramid is underconstruction. 

From certain perspectives — driving up the West Side Highway, say — the asymmetric structure looks vaguely pyramidal, an emblem of pharaonic self-aggrandizement. Actually, it’s a joyous rewrite of the partly affordable rental building, a type that for years has choked the skyline with invasive species of featureless glass. The façade does double duty as the roof, swooping up from the shoreline to the mountainous ridge of midtown. It follows a hyperbolic paraboloid, the curving, mathematically precise surface that gives us the Pringle and the swooping 1960s saddle roof. Albert Frey used the same type of bending plane in the 1965 Tramway Gas Station (now a visitor center) in Palm Springs. Le Corbusier bundled nine such shapes to sculpt the tentlike Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair......Continue Reading

image screenshot from the construction video 

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