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Virgin Hotel design will bring magnificent to NoMad

The Virgin Hotel New York that will soon rise at the corner of 30th Street and Broadway will change forever the stretch of Broadway that runs from Madison Square Park to Greeley Square. And, if the renderings are to be trusted, it will be a magnificent piece of work.

I am inclined, however, to hedge my bets. Two things can go wrong in a building like this. First, it can be so poorly made that, even if technically it conforms to all or most of the details of the rendering, the totality of the result will look surprisingly unimpressive.

Second, the skill of the artist who created the rendering may surpass the skill of the architects who designed the structure. The rendering looks wonderful, but in it the hotel is seen from below looking up — the sort of angle that cinematographers call an “epic shot,” pioneered in the early days of Soviet Cinema as a way to transform even the common man into a hero.
For now, however, I am optimistic, especially in the knowledge that however it turns out, this 38-story hotel will surely be better than what it replaces. Designed by VOA Architecture and developed by the Lam Group, it is destined to rise over the ghost of a featureless and unadorned three-story, mid-20th century building.

The Virgin Hotel arrives in an area that, likely because of zoning issues, has become far more welcoming of hotels than of the residential developments that have taken over the rest of the city. It is one block north of Ace New York (just off Broadway) and two blocks north of the Nomad Hotel at Broadway and 28th Street.

But whereas those hotels are distinctly boutique-y and were created by revamping preexisting Beaux-Arts structures, the Virgin will be an entirely new building. In fact, it promises to be one of the bigger hotels in the city, with 460 guest rooms, not including “concept suites.” Among its amenities will be a rooftop bar and swimming pool and a spa. At its base, it promises high-end retail, which, as of today, risks looking stunningly out of place across the street from the wholesale cosmetic and perfume stores and small-time importers that have defined the area for decades.

Surely this new hotel will stand out strikingly, perhaps awkwardly, among the far smaller and older buildings that will surround it. It is by no means a subtle or understated structure; rather, it announces itself with all the force of a polemic. It has a sort of “Mad Men”-era massing that revels in bulk and bullying presence, almost recalling the Pan Am (now MetLife) Building. In sartorial terms, this would be a zoot suit. If it were a car it would be — and I say this by way of praise — the sort that gets “really lousy mileage.” It might even have fins.

The hotel is conceived in two main parts. It has a five-story base, an intricate, transparent sequence of glassy squares and rectangles. By contrast, the upper levels (by far the bulk of the building), read as a shifting mass of deconstructed planes, such as can be seen in many developments around the city over the past 10 or so years. Yet if there is one building that serves as the direct antecedent to this work, I would suggest the excellent Standard Hotel on the High Line, designed by Todd Schliemann, now of Ennead Architects (at the time Polshek Partnership Architects) and completed in 2009. That much-praised building — although completely modernist in its vocabulary — was also aggressively historicist in its resuscitation of ’70s brutalism and in its domineering presence. It is hard to imagine that it was not fully present to the minds of the designers of the Virgin Hotel New York.

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