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Home » News Highlights of the Week: May 24 ' May 30, 2008
A crane collapsed at a Manhattan construction site this morning, killing at least two workers, The New York Times reports. The accident occurred on the Upper East Side, at 91st Street and First Avenue, where a new 34-story condominium tower, the Azure, is rising. The building, designed by SLCE Architects, is being developed by The DeMatteis Organizations and The Mattone Group, according to the Azure Web site. The crane allegedly snapped apart and crashed into a building across the street, a law enforcement official told the Times. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told USA Today, “This is just unacceptable and we’ve got to figure out what happened here.” The accident comes ten weeks after another crane collapsed at a Midtown Manhattan construction site, killing seven people and leading to the resignation of the New York City building commissioner, Patricia Lancaster.
Jean Nouvel was selected Tuesday to design a Paris skyscraper that will rival the Eiffel Tower in height, Agence France-Presse reports. Nouvel, winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize, beat out Foster & Partners and Daniel Libeskind in a competition to design the landmark 71-story, mixed-use building in the city’s La Defense district. At 988 feet tall, Nouvel’s Signal Tower will be only 75 feet shorter than the Eiffel Tower, according to Building Design. The project, scheduled for completion in 2014, calls for nearly 540,000 square feet of office space and 355,000 square feet of residential space, in addition to shops, restaurants, public space, and a hotel. Two other skyscrapers are planned for La Defense, an aging business district the city hopes to revitalize: The Lighthouse by Thom Mayne and the Generali Tower by Valode & Pistre, both expected to be finished in 2012. According to Agence France-Presse, Nouvel designed a skyscraper— “Tower Without End”—for the area in the early 1990s that was never built.