Historically the tower has served to communicate to the masses. Cathedrals, demonstrated the awe-inspiring power of God through their great height and structural disposition. They also marked the passage of time, through the ringing of their bells. The medieval tower, visible and audible from great distances, served as a communal focus and early form of mass media.
Contemporary towers, though built for different purposes, still communicate varied messages. Their dramatic scale and iconographic status allow them to communicate to a mass audience. At an urban scale they form visual markers and collective symbols. Their presence proliferates through images and icons, making them emblems of corporations, cities, and nations.
5 Times Square (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, New York, 2002)
Marking the corner of Seventh Avenue and the “New 42nd Street,” the 5 Times Square building forms a sleek new addition to the animated architecture of Times Square. The tower's angular massing and diagonal lines play off the visual cacophony of Times Square, generating a design that blends into the context by transforming the architecture into signage.
The mass of the tower is broken down through a series of cuts and folds in the façade, emphasizing a prismatic volume on the corner. The cladding accentuates the prow-shaped corner figure, employing taut silver glass on the corner, and a horizontally banded glass on the sides. A saw- tooth horizontal texture creates a radiating patterned overlay on the façade adjacent to the prow. The geometry of the tower avoids right angles, adding to the tower's angular appearance and camouflaging its mass.
Signage bands run up the side of the tower, reinforcing the diagonal peels, and animating the facades. Ernst and Young's illuminated corporate logo crowns the top, while at the base the lower floors are covered in a jumbled assortment of illuminated billboards.
The proliferation of billboards and illuminated signs in Times Square is the result of a zoning regulation, which is rooted in historic preservation and intended to recall the early days of Broadway glitter and neon. The law dictates that new buildings in the Times Square area incorporate a variety of illuminated signs into new designs. The billboards often obscure views from the interiors, but the vertical surfaces get a higher rent per square foot than the horizontal surfaces of the floor plate behind them. Buildings on Times Square act as an armature for the multistory animated billboards.
The explosive and animated graphics that splash across building facades in Times Square create an unprecedented neon landscape. Jumbo televisions and pixilated facades saturate the neighborhood. Buildings like 5 Times Square embrace the dynamic new media, transforming architecture into ecstatic iconographic images.
LVMH Tower (Christian de Portzamparc, New York, 1999)
This slender skyscraper is designed as the American headquarters for the fashion conglomerate Moet Henessey-Louis Vuitton. The twenty-story tower, occupying a slender site on 57th Street, distinguishes itself by departing from the city fabric in its geometry and materiality.
The tower transforms the set-back pyramidal building form derived from the New York City zoning envelope and camouflages it in a series of diaphanous layers of glass. The curtain wall seems to perform a sophisticated striptease with layer upon layer of glass concealing and revealing the building within. Portzamparc uses a combination of glass types and finishes to create the ephemeral effect. Clear, green, and low-iron glass are all used to differentiate the layers. Sand-blasted patterns on the glass create a diagonal pattern on the façade.
At night, the edge of the fold is illuminated with cold cathode lights that shift in color from violet to green to red. As the headquarters for a fashion empire, the LVMH Tower presents itself as an ephemeral, ever changing image.
In a city drive by orthogonal efficiency and price per square foot, this idiosyncratic jewel of a skyscraper embodies the luxury of geometric complexity in the service of high-style design.
AIA Tower (OMA Asia, Hong Kong, 1998)
Despite advances made in the realm of structures, materials, and systems, the stylistic evolution of the skyscraper has occurred primarily in its cladding. The design strategies employed by OMA Asia reflect a “skin-based” methodology, which acknowledges the commercial realities of building in the real-estate-drive context of Hong Kong. Their cladding design for the AIA Tower assumes a “site” that is ten inches deep-the thickness of the building envelope.
AIA Tower is a straightforward rectangular extrusion with chamfered corners. It distinguishes itself through its cladding, which consists of alternating vertical bands of two different shades of blue glass. The mullion spacing and width of glass panels varies to create a random striped pattern during the day. An array of cold cathode lights integrated into the façade transforms the building at night, creating a spiraling neon spectacle.
Phil