At the closing reception for the 2012 Summit for New York City there was, set out right beside the bar, a site model showing a stretch of midtown Manhattan. One cartoonishly futuristic structure, stepped at the base and capped with four vertical fins, rose high above the fray of anonymous office buildings. “What is that?," a woman scowled as she walked by, heading for a refill. That, I found out later, was Norman Foster’s winning competition entry for a new office tower at 425 Park Avenue, which he’d unveiled just a few days earlier. The other architects invited to submit their designs for the plot, just a block north of the stately Villard Houses, were Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid.
Their entries are hearteningly different from one another. Rogers proposed a structure with open, intermediate floors planted with pine forests. Koolhaas proposed an enigmatic, worm-like tower that twists forty-five degrees as it rises. Hadid proposed a square, metal-clad tower that swells outward at the bottom to meet the street, like an upside-down mushroom cloud. It’s the slickest and most sophisticated of the entries, and also the most fitting. The tower, symmetrical on four sides, merges her personal, idiosyncratic formal vocabulary with that of a conventional office tower. It’s distinctive – a building that looks like no other building – without being aggressively avant-garde. It has a molten, organic feeling and yet it’s constructed from standard elements. In one simple volume, Hadid has shaped a structure that projects the modern, moneyed gloss of midtown Manhattan.
