NEW YORK CITY-Durst Fetner Residential has tapped Danish architectural firm Bjarke Ingels Group for a 600-unit 80/20 residential tower going up on Manhattan’s Far West Side. Known as West 57th, it will be BIG’s first project in North America. A Durst Fetner spokesman tells GlobeSt.com the entitlement process on the project should take about a year.
The project will be built on a Durst Organization-owned block of West 57th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues. It will be adjacent to the Helena, a 38-story DFR residential project completed in 2005. A private school planned for the site has been scrapped, the spokesman says.
BIG’s design for West 57th is described in a DFR release as “a hybrid between the European perimeter block and a traditional Manhattan high-rise.” Seen from the West Side Highway, the tower will appear to be “a warped pyramid,” according to the release, but it turns into “a slender spire” when viewed from West 58th Street.
The courtyard is designed to extend the adjacent greenery of Hudson River Park into West 57th, the release states. “The courtyard is to architecture what Central Park is to urbanism: a giant green garden surrounded by a dense wall of spaces for living,” BIG founder Bjarke Ingels says in the release.
DFR commissioned Copenhagen-based BIG in 2010 to come up with the design for the project. According to the New York Observer, a glimpse of the design first appeared last year in a graphic novel about Ingels on the Fast Company website. The architectural firm has just opened a New York City office to oversee the project.
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