Foster + Partners completes Park Avenue's first full-block building in over 50 years
28/10/2022.
[NYC] USA
metalocus, ADELA BONAS
metalocus, ADELA BONAS
Foster + Partners have inaugurated the new tower at 425 Park Avenue that the firm has completed in Manhattan.
The 274-meter-high tower grows from its base with a 14-meter hall in the first of the three volumes in which the skyscraper is made up, which gradually recedes as it rises until it is finished off with a 12-meter-high penthouse , accompanied by three illuminated aluminum ornamental fins.
Each section is divided by two triple-height floors (in a diagrid or grid of beams that intersect diagonally, to improve the work of the structure) and the highest where The Diagrid Club restaurant and lounge is home to the prominent Alsatian chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.