© Jean Nouvel
El City Council de New York concedió hace unos días la autorización para el inicio de las obras de construcción de la que será la nueva torre anexa al Museum of Modern Arts (MoMA), aún a pesar de las críticas que ha levantado entre los vecinos que ocupan edificios residenciales de media altura en el mismo barrio de la Avenida 53.
El edificio, diseñado por el arquitecto francés Jean Nouvel, es una torre acristalada cuyo volumen se estrecha hacia lo alto, y que alcanzará una altura de 1.025 pies (307,5 m), con un total de 82 pisos, tres de los cuales estarán destinados a ampliar los espacios de exposición del museo, reservando los restantes para un hotel, y numerosos departamentos de lujo.
La nueva construcción igualará en altura al Empire State Building, y promete ser la intervención más interesante en el perfil urbano neoyorquino en los últimos años.
La gestión de la obra ha sido conducida por la oficina internacional de bienes raíces Hines, la que ha adquirido los terrenos, y realizado el encargo de proyecto, demostrando cómo las decisiones de inspiración comercial pueden llegar a ser tanto o más audaces en lo estético que aquellas que pudieran tener un interés más centrado en lo artístico.
Al respecto, escribe Nicolai Ouroussoff para The New York Times:
Set on a narrow lot where the old City Athletic Club and some brownstones once stood, the soaring tower is rooted in the mythology of New York, in particular the work of Hugh Ferriss, whose dark, haunting renderings of an imaginary Manhattan helped define its dreamlike image as the early-20th-century metropolis.
But if Ferriss’s designs were expressionistic, Mr. Nouvel’s contorted forms are driven by their own peculiar logic. By pushing the structural frame to the exterior, for example, he was able to create big open floor plates for the museum’s second-, fourth- and fifth-floor galleries. The tower’s form slopes back on one side to yield views past the residential Museum Tower; its northeast corner is cut away to conform to zoning regulations.
The irregular structural pattern is intended to bear the strains of the tower’s contortions. Mr. Nouvel echoes the pattern of crisscrossing beams on the building’s facade, giving the skin a taut, muscular look. A secondary system of mullions housing the ventilation system adds richness to the facade.
Mr. Nouvel anchors these soaring forms in Manhattan bedrock. The restaurant and lounge are submerged one level below ground, with the top sheathed entirely in glass so that pedestrians can peer downward into the belly of the building. A bridge on one side of the lobby links the 53rd and 54th Street entrances. Big concrete columns crisscross the spaces, their tilted forms rooting the structure deep into the ground.
As you ascend through the building, the floor plates shrink in size, which should give the upper stories an increasingly precarious feel. The top-floor apartment is arranged around such a massive elevator core that its inhabitants will feel pressed up against the glass exterior walls. (Mr. Nouvel compared the apartment to the pied-à-terre at the top of the Eiffel Tower from which Gustave Eiffel used to survey his handiwork below.)
The building’s brash forms are a sly commentary on the rationalist geometries of Edward Durell Stone and Philip L. Goodwin’s 1939 building for the Museum of Modern Art and Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 addition. Like many contemporary architects Mr. Nouvel sees the modern grid as confining and dogmatic. His tower’s contorted forms are a scream for freedom.
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