A new project that I’ll tell you about later on brings me back to New York, the city that never sleeps. Perhaps one of the few metropolises that I have visited with such a multi-faceted dynamism. Its aspect changes according to what you’re doing: one for tourism, one for business, another for those looking for cultural stimulus or a different lifestyle - and still another for a professional who is there to organize her own creativity.
In my case, Architecture is where I want to be in the “Big Apple”. There’s lots, and so concentrated that it’s not just about enormous quantities of gorgeous skyscrapers, each with its own story, record, philosophy and most prestigious designer and professional interpretation. And not even about the cultural leap – from Florence – apparent while admiring the natural ease with which these prodigious glories’ various stories and styles coexist. If anything, it’s a question of thinking about architecture in its capacity to create atmosphere, environment, and thus, life. And of how quickly this can all happen. Two or three years is enough for the significance and appearance of entire, enormous areas of the city to change.
The symbol of this dynamism is Manhattan, the island that seems limitless due to its verticality and where spectacular new visions are continually being constructed, such as the area of the new vertical park, Vessel, with its honeycomb shape, intersecting scales and broad vistas towards the Hudson River and distant New Jersey. A construction covering old railway warehouses, it softens the severity of the surrounding lofty towers, creating a magical atmosphere. At a stone’s throw but still in the Hudson Yards, the desire to amaze is well represented by The Shed, a theatre whose retractable canopy can be adapted to various theatre productions and sizes, to seat up to nearly four thousand. In Manhattan, the extraordinary verticality is underlined by new super-skinny skyscrapers: at 111 West 57th Street, the slimmest tower in the world – height to base ratio is 24:1 with a height of 433 meters – confirms the dynamism also of technology that strives to find construction solutions suitable for increasingly smaller spaces but rocketing heights. All this while at street level, life calmly continues on as ever, in the chaos of taxis, buses and hordes of people with enormous coffee cups in hand representing the maximum diversity of the four corners of the world crammed into a few blocks.
by Ilenia Girolami
