Could This Deconstructivist Office Tower Be Coming to the Garment District?
The visualization wizzes at Hayes Davidson posted this image of a hyper-modern tower addition atop an imposing Verizon-owned building at 230 West 36th Street.
While few details are provided with the accompanying image, an article from the Times last year mentioned that the top two floors and some unused development rights of the 1924 building were being shopped around to developers as a potential hotel site. The rendered building appears to be a commercial office building, however. With the dearth of development sites suitable for large office floor plates east of Ninth Avenue, and a hot Midtown South office market where vacancy rates hover near 9 percent, the site could be a prime opportunity to construct new office space in the heart of the Times Square/Penn Station sub-market.
Brookfield Properties’ Manhattan West development rising nearby at 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue
Scheme for the Hotel Pennsylavania redevelopment by Pelli Clarke Pelli for Vornado Realty Trust
The area has been popular with big retail and fashion tenants as of late, with Nike inking a lease at Durst’s 855 Sixth Avenue and Foot Locker signing a 150,000-square-foot lease at 330 West 34th Street. Just across the street from this possible development, co-working space provider WeWork snagged all 140,000 square feet at 315 West 36th Street earlier this year. Other possible large blocks of new office space that may come online in the coming years are Brookfield’s Manhattan West development that will bring more than four million square feet of new office space to the district, as well as a possible 2.5 million-square-foot office redevelopment of the Hotel Pennsylvania by Vornado Realty Trust.
View of the current site
Hayes Davidson’s website lists VOA Architects as the designers of the concept. While the international firm has only designed a handful of buildings in the city, the company recently landed the commission to design the 40-story Virgin Hotel poised to rise a few blocks south and east at Broadway and 29th Street. Like that cutting edge tower, VOA references little of the area’s pre-war, wedding-cake architecture and instead proposes a refreshingly modern tower, thoroughly breaking away from the hulking masonry building below. It reminds us a bit of the cross-braced 170 Amsterdam Avenue uptown or Foster’s Hearst Tower, but here the structural diagrid unravels and melts away from the building’s facade. No permits or property transactions have been recorded for this address.
Future New York renderings courtesy of CityRealty
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