Unless you have business up in the tower, you don’t even get to go up the escalator. A guard stands at its foot and shoos you away. So the one experience that ought to matter—that of rising on the escalator from the old building into the new tower—is denied to the public. Photo ' Chuck Choi Invitation required: Access to the space carved out of the Deco building is restricted to Hearst employees and guests. We dined on the uppermost of the 40 floors. Here, where the program changes from office use to eating space, you’d think there’d be an
Now that it has been there for a year and I’ve had my chance to learn to love it, maybe it’s a good time to say why I dislike the Hearst Tower in Manhattan so much. The Hearst, which of course was designed by Foster + Partners, looks like a misplaced missile silo. It’s as if the Pentagon, with its usual deftness of touch, had confused its maps and located this chunk of military hardware in Manhattan instead of Florida. Photo ' Chuck Choi The new Hearst Tower sits on top of a six-story base built in the 1920s. It’s
Employing what they call a "research-and-diagram-based process," David Leven and Stella Betts, of New York City'based Leven Betts Studio, have been creating environments that are inventive, spare, and elegant for the past decade. Their method involves scrutiny of site, program, and material, to create an organizational framework and physical structure.
Sebastian Mariscal found his professors not in the halls of academe, but in the offices of practicing architects. Starting when he was 14, he spent afternoons and evenings after school working for his father, Raul Octavio Mariscal, a public-housing architect in Mexico City.
Like young architects everywhere, Japanese designers often get their first job from a family member or friend. Rarely, though, does the assignment involve a mental hospital in the middle of a remote, northern island buffeted by Siberian winds. But Sou Fujimoto's psychiatrist father runs a residential facility on Hokkaido.
Amid the rush to modernize, Chinese cities are becoming homogenized and losing their distinct identities, laments Pei Zhu, principal of the eponymous office, Studio Pei-Zhu, which he started in 2005, after leaving Urbanus [RECORD, December 2005, page 100], the firm he cofounded in 1999.