[NYguy]

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,3268732.story
Architecture review: HL23 in Manhattan
Los Angeles architect Neil Denari's design yields a West Side building of drama and cunning that rises over the High Line elevated park.




By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic
April 4, 2011

Los Angeles architect Neil Denari's new residential tower on the West Side of Manhattan is a standout building in ways that begin with — but aren't limited to — its gymnastic form.

Known as HL23, for its site where 23rd Street meets the High Line elevated park, the 14-story tower is among the most ambitious of the many buildings spawned by the opening of the wildly popular park in 2009. And in a reversal of the architectural setbacks for which New York has long been famous, HL23 doesn't get narrower as it goes up; it rises from a small footprint in the shadow of the High Line and grows opportunistically wider, so that portions of its upper half lean out over the park itself.

But the most surprising thing about the building is how it turns on its ear one of the most stubborn assumptions about the differences between architecture in New York and in Los Angeles. It used to be that for young, experimental or otherwise untested architects, L.A. was the place to get an unorthodox design built. In New York, on the other hand, opportunities for those architects tended to be limited to residential or commercial interiors that had no impact on the skyline.

...For all its dynamism, precision and intelligence, there has always been something a bit antiseptic about Denari's work, as if it were hermetically sealed against emotion as well as imperfection. The New York building, with its fluid, digitally derived profile and facade of glass and panels of embossed stainless steel, won't dramatically change that impression. Its design personality is closer to robotic than balletic.

But the design has without a doubt yielded a building of drama and cunning — particularly in its relationship with the High Line. Thanks in part to seven separate zoning waivers from New York's planning commission, which sanctioned its unusual bulging form, HL23 behaves like a flower planted along the park's underside that manages to grow up and out over its urban host. That connects it in spirit with the small number of other Manhattan buildings that either lean out over public space or grow wider as they rise, including Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum, from 1966, and Raimund Abraham's 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum.

The tower's visual prominence — along with the Standard Hotel a bit farther south by Todd Schliemann of Ennead Architects, it is the only building allowed by the city to occupy the airspace above the High Line — means that users of the park will be able to consider it at a distance and up close and from a number of angles. Denari took full advantage of that visibility, crafting complex elevations on the north, south and east sides of the building (to the west it shares a wall with an earlier building by Lindy Roy) that give the design a shifting, even mercurial aesthetic personality. There are perspectives from which HL23 seems to shrink as it grows, while from others the way that the apartments become larger on the upper floors is easy to grasp.