Newsday from New York, New York • 116

18 96 Nation's First Escalator Installed at Coney Island Read about the SURPRISING and exciting things that have happened right here in New York. EVERY WEEKDAY Newsday IT HAPPENED IN NEW YORK LIPA VITA Long Island STATE Rail Road INSURANCE www.lipower.org IT HAPPENED IN NEW YORK IS A DAILY FEATURE PRODUCED BY THE NEWSDAY MARKETING DEPARTMENT. Jewels on the TOWER from C27 Hearst's cravings for boldness and modernity with a crystal box supported not, as in traditional skyscrapers, by a load-bearing concrete core, but by an external honeycomb of steel, which the architect calls a "diagrid" of beams. The relationship between the new and the old is one of polite separation. Foster has eviscerated Urban's building, and the new 42-story palace seems to float above and behind the original shell.

The setback pleased the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which amiably waved the project on when it came up for approval in 2001. The original has become all facade; the new one consists of naked structure. Where Urban emphasized the corners with exclamation points of fluted concrete columns, Foster marks them with geometric gaps, following a rigorous logic of triangles combining into hexagons: Look Ma, no vertical lines! Seen from the inside, these bird-beak corners will appear as breathtakingly canted glass walls. Urban's sidewalk setpiece will be relegated to a character role, while the real drama takes place above. The power of place The Hearst and Times projects will fill in a media corridor that runs from the Times Square agglomeration of Reuters, Nast and MTV, among others, to the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle.

There's an irony to this concentration of communicators. Even as the industry grapples with a nebulous, digital future, it is still reckoning with its masonry-and-paper past. Hearst and The Times both emerged from the 19th century to become informational behemoths in the 20th. While the millennium was supposed to herald the dispersal of media into cyberspace and suburban office parks, these two companies (like many others) have bet not just on real estate and location but on the galvanizing power of architecture. Place wasn't supposed to matter, but media architecture shows that place matters more than ever," says Aurora Wallace, an architectural historian at New York University and author of the forthcoming book "The Architecture of News." "If you're not on the skyline, you don't exist." The Times and Hearst buildings do more than proclaim the supremacy of their media brands.

They also represent a long tradition of magnanimous design, of private architecture as civic gesture. The 16th century palazzos of Florence provide one example, Rockefeller Center another. What makes these two new towers qualify as urban gifts is that they are better than the bottom line demands. Recent midtown architecture, expensive and flashy though it may be, has not risen to that standard. At Columbus Circle, the Time Warner Center throws open the doors of its luxury shopping mall to the throngs, but it has also crowned the West Side with two large, dark forms, like the shadows of a pair of gangsters in a classic film noir.

This building is all business. A dozen blocks south, a complicated coalition of public officials and private interests has transformed Times Square into a public gathering place at the base of a klatch of busy high-rises that are more collectively hyperactive than individually exhilarating. The most horizon recent of them, Times Square Tower, designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill, will open soon; like its neighbors, it aspires to jazz heat mixed with corporate cool. Like all skyscrapers, Foster's and Piano's must make economic sense. The Hearst corporation will take over its whole new location, bringing under one roof publications currently scattered across nine midtown addresses.

The Times will move from its location on West 43rd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues to just the lower portion of its new tower; the project's developer, Forest City Ratner, is trying to rent out the rest of the building. Yet, these structures are intended not only to squeeze a dollar out of every bolt but to make strong statements of collective aspiration. Laboratories for design Both are also architectural research facilities. They have been engineered to withstand our era's new range of nightmare scenarios and allow thousands of people to flee with maximum efficiency. They aim to consume as little energy as possible and set ambitious standards for green design.

Having dispensed with the traditional doughnut of cubicles wrapped around a central elevator core, their layouts strive to distribute soul-nourishing daylight and views to every rank of worker. The communal spaces have a magnificently unnecessary grandeur: The Times boasts a garden cloister on the ground floor; Hearst, a cafeteria in a lofty atrium. "The architects have made spaces for workers to relax and interact, which is a whole lot different than the American mentality of gathering around the water cooler," says architectural historian Carol Willis, who runs the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park City. "These buildings are a test case for New York. It's more expensive to build a new paradigm.

Will it be attractive enough for tenants to demand it and economical enough for developers to supply it? 1 I don't know, but they're certainly doing a lot of research and development, which is not exactly typical for an office building in New York." Architectural homage Designed for old-fashioned nies that perform fundamentally the same tasks they did more than 100 years ago, each tower also pays its own architectural homage. Foster's Hearst dwarves and detaches itself from Urban's, proclaiming how far the art has evolved in 75 years. And even in all its glittering modernity, the Times Tower gestures toward the 19th century impulse to decorate the city. Its heat-deflecting ceramic tubes recall the elegant terra cotta ornamentation on such civic monuments as the Woolworth Building, says Willis. "Whether Piano was conscious of it or not, it's really part of a New York At the moment, that tradition is partly in the hands of an Italian and a British lord, who bring to the Manhattan skyscraper sensibilities forged in Europe and honed around the globe.

For years, New York City has watched other megalopoli become skyscraper laboratories while it tolerated towers of modest distinction. With the planned rebirth of its downtown and this pair of midtown jewels in the offing, Manhattan is once again tending to its skyline silhouette..