Worldwide Plaza
TO OMUCH complexity and contradiction can be exhausting. The mind, like a classicist, seeks integrated patterns in the world, and the task of breaking down patterns into their component pieces in order to decode them can be frustrating. Parts of Skidmore,
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STREETS , BETWEEN EIGHTH AND NINTH AVENUES
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OFFICE TOWER , DAVID CHILDS ; CONDOMINIUMS , FRANK WILLIAMS ; BOTH OF SKIDMORE , OWINGS
o o m u c h complexity and contradiction can be exhausting. The mind, like a classicist, seeks integrated patterns in the world, and the task of breaking down patterns into their component pieces in order to decode them can be frustrating. Parts of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s stoneclad, retro, 48-story, 770-foot-tall Worldwide Plaza are very good; the silhouette, too, is good, but it does not necessarily make as good a whole. The tower has a splashy base and crown and a bloated shaft that looks better from far away on the skyline than close up. David Childs, the design architect, said he wanted to make his tower “the perfect example of what we all imagine around the world to be the great American classical skyscraper.” Rather than just a highrise, he wanted his building to have the panache of “the drum major in the Rockefeller band.” The tower lacks Rockefeller Center’s sweetly naïve spirit, yet still manages to be a distinctive presence on the midtown skyline. The chief difference between Art Deco spires and their postmodern cousins is in the amount of sheer floor space. The Cities Service
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[ 1 ] The Worldwide’s shaft is proportionally broader than in eclectic skyscrapers. [ 2] An overscaled Renaissance rotunda, bottom, is one of the site’s best features. [ 3] The crown reflects the glamour of earlier eras.
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MERRILL ,
1989
Building, with its wasp-waisted shaft was truly the last of its kind before the Depression; after World War II, the squat 100 Park Avenue became the model. Postmodernists synthesized the two, to make fat, blocky, setback skyscrapers that do not sacrifice any floor space for the sake of design. Childs’s Worldwide Plaza contains acres of space, from the vacuous, Mussolini-scaled lobby to the fatuous subway “improvement” that provides picture windows with nothing more to show than the tiled hole of the subway entrance three stories below grade. The building’s best feature is its elliptical, barrel-vaulted pedestrian loggia at the base, evocative of the Renaissance, although on a grander scale. The shaft of maize- and rustcolored patterned brick above the granitesheathed platform is organized into an overly fussy rhythm of one and two window bays, but the setbacks are appealingly decorated with lighter brick, like snowcaps. The payoff comes at the last setback, when the double bays are deeply recessed to form an arcade reminiscent of Trowbridge & Livingston’s monumental Bankers Trust Company Building (1912), and especially Cass Gilbert’s stout New York Life Insurance Company Building (1928), which served as an overall inspiration for Childs. It appears that the designers took real joy in the ornamental, internally lit, glazed pyramid atop a steeply sloped copper crown. At night, with the carminative mists emanating from the HVAC system, the building has the drama of a rocket ready for liftoff. The complementing, 38-story condo
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