https://www.archpaper.com/2023/10/sh...oogle_vignette
Tower of Brooklyn
SHoP’s latest supertall delivers Gilded Age spectacle
By Jack Murphy
October 31, 2023
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Like a painting with eyes that follow, I can’t escape The Brooklyn Tower. I typically see it twice on my daily commute. It looms over picnics in Fort Green Park, pokes up during site visits, doubles in the iridescent waters of the Gowanus Canal, and hovers in the back of photos taken from my roof. I see it from near and far; it is part of my life whether I like it or not. Unlike art, architecture in the city is unavoidable.
For better or worse, the tower is the tallest building in Brooklyn, and its coloration sets it in contrast against the sky and surrounding towers, which are lighter, more reflective. It is a constant reminder of the realities of wealth accumulation: A “crescendo” of the downtown skyline, it also parallels a bar graph of income inequality. Its golden, Trump Tower–like darkness makes its grandeur that much more in-your-face. Rather than polite attempts made by skyscrapers to disappear via all manner of glassy manipulations, this one’s shape, lavishly articulated, is on full display.
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Designed by SHoP and led by founding principal Gregg Pasquarelli for JDS Development Group, the Brooklyn Tower stylistically combines Gothic Revival with an art deco sensibility. Perhaps one precedent is Midtown’s American Radiator Building, completed in 1924 and designed by Raymond Hood and André Fouilhoux, which sports dark brick and gold accents.
The Brooklyn Tower’s geometric flourishes are largely a response to its neighbor, the Dime Savings Bank, a neoclassical structure designed by Mowbray & Uffinger that opened in 1908. The hexagons inscribed in the floor and ceiling of its landmarked interior, in addition to the dome’s six-sided drum, provided geometric references that are symphonically deployed at multiple scales: Both the floor plates and the apartment plans are hexagonal.
The new building rises from the north corner of the bank’s triangular block, whose east point is occupied by Junior’s, a diner that has been here since 1950. Like SHoP’s prior supertall for JDS, 111 West 57th, which sprouted like a yucca bloom from the historic Steinway factory, this tower mines the historic structure from which it springs for ornamental uses.
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Up close, the facade breaks down into a variety of metallic extrusions—fluted, cylindrical, triangular—of varying colors, even white. The shapes pile up in the corners, making for a heavier outline that conveys solidity; they become shallower toward the middle of the elevation, giving overall faces a sense of concavity. These textures create turbulence as wind moves around the tower, which reduces strain on the core. (Smooth, all-glass towers are bad at this; at times they behave like airplane wings, creating lift across opposite sides of the structure.) At this point, the design of supertalls is limited less by what is structurally possible and more by how much sway occupants can tolerate. The stepped faces host 5-foot-deep balconies from which residents can gaze out over the city.
The tower’s podium is partially faced in marble “convexacave” columns and includes amenities like a hexagonal outdoor pool that rings the historic Dime Savings Bank’s dome. The bank’s name meant that one could open an account with just a dime in 1859 ($3.70 in today’s money). Upon full completion of the tower’s interiors, Brooklynites will once again be able to use the bank’s lobby, which may become a culinary destination, though it is doubtful that anything hearty will be on the menu for less than four dollars.
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The tower’s design revives a romantic era of early-20th-century New York appropriate for today’s new Gilded Age. The tower would comfortably fit into Batman’s Gotham, but not Superman’s Metropolis. But who would live here, the hero or the villain? (Like Palpatine, perhaps some conversion would take place.) As presented in The Black Skyscraper by Adrienne Brown, New York’s early towers reshaped not only the skyline but the racial and societal relations of those who built, occupied, walked by, and witnessed these technical feats. The skyscraper precipitated a new type of urban spectator; more recently, the supertall has had a similar effect.
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