05 October 2006

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80 South Street, Santiago Calatrava


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Over the last few decades the modern megalopolis has seen a huge increase in competition in the sector of residential building, and the big construction companies have suddenly woken up to the fact that by adding a famous name from the world of contemporary architecture to the project, at a relatively low additional cost to the overall price, enormous advantages can be accrued.
A well-known name not only makes for a canny marketing operation – it often makes life easier in terms of getting official approval for the project, as well as helping rake in substantial sums in investment. This manoeuvre is also seen as a productive investment since it means that with time the building will grow in value as a place of historic and artistic interest. More and more often therefore, thanks to the vast resources available, we are seeing daring new constructions rising over our skylines: sometimes controversial, sometimes staggering, but nearly always marvellously surprising, and with of course the names and reputations of the project designers –  starchitects or even archistars as they are now coming to be called – appropriately spotlighted and celebrated in international headlines.
And Valencian architect Santiago Calatrava, recently given the Leadership Award by the New York Building Congress, an association of 400 New York firms that aims to promote the construction sector in the Big Apple and its surrounding area, is proving to be one of the starchitect phenomenon’s most notable success stories.
His project for 80 South Street, the first residential building work carried out by this visionary genius of contemporary architecture, is one of the most innovative and extraordinary works to recently appear on the Lower Manhattan skyline.
251 metres high but as bright and as light as air, this skyscraper is a transposition into architectural terms of sculptures that Calatrava made in the 1980s using a series of identically-sized marble cubes suspended from wires in a variety of angles and positions.
The sensation of unexpected lightness produced by those pieces, despite the density of the material employed, fascinated the builder Mr. Sciame, and became the basis for this residential tower, which is composed of a series of glass-faced cubic modules placed in an alternating sequence of space and volume.
Each of these cubes emerges from an extremely high, reinforced-concrete, central parallelepiped which will contain the elevators, fire escapes and hydraulic and electric systems that serve the apartments. A tubular metallic structure connected to the outside of the cubes gives further support to the building. In this way, the interior living areas are free from the encumbrance of columns and pillars, and this only helps to add to the overwhelming impression of brightness and airiness that the tower conveys.

Every module is divided into four floors and will contain from two to four apartments, where, except for the one at the top, the roof of each cube provides a beautiful terrace for the one above, with breathtaking views over the Hudson River bay and the Brooklyn Bridge.  A super-luxury “residential stairway to the sky”, which also of course includes that inevitable touch of Italian style (Boffi, for example, supply some of the furnishings).  A paradise reserved for those few lucky folk who have a spare 29 million dollars to splash out on a mere 1,000 square metres of prime New York real estate.


Ripalta Borrelli