Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 106

I aJA'M I laagjSMB Mini-City Under One Roof Icons In the Sky ICONS from 4 By Alan Wax STAFF WHITER here is no other building quite like it in New York City AOL Time Warner Center rising at Columbus Circle will bring together entertainment retail commercial and living all under one roof In development parlance a mixed-use project something that urban planners have been encouraging throughout Manhattan because they help create 247 communities Time Warner Center will undoubtedly be a landmark destination to visit Bhop dine and emoy world-class Kenneth Himmel president of Palladium Co one of the development partners said earlier this year The $17-billion complex the most expensive real estate development now under way in the country is scheduled to be complete in the fall of 2003 Mixed-use projects such as this make for more exciting buildings said Frank Sanchez executive director of the Municipal Arts Society a Manhattan-based nonprofit organization that promotes good urban design not just a megalith of one particular kind of thing he said noting that this particular prqject will be especially vibrant because it will house Jazz at Lincoln Center The prqject is a venture of AOL and four other development partners: Related Cos a developer of luxury apartments and office buildings with properties worth $7 billion in 40 states financier Leon Manhattan-based Apollo Real Estate Advisors Palladium Co co-founded by Himmel and Stephen Ross to develop entertainment retail properties such as Copley Place and Mandarin Oriental International Ltd an operator of swank hotels based in Hong Kong The partners bought the site in 1998 from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for $345 million Designed largely by a team led by super-star architect David Childs of Skidmore Owings Merrill the 21-million-square-foot complex is topped by twin towers rising 750 feet on the site that once was Newadijr Tin AOL Tima Canter under the New York Coliseum It is half as tall as the Empire State Building (measured to its antenna top) but contains almost as much space The Columbus Circle complex is anchored by AOL Time Warner whose international headquarters will use 864000 square feet more than a third of the complex The 11-story base will include broadcast studios and digital production facilities for live transmission of CNN Another 210000 square feet of prime office space also will be housed in the base some for offices of the development partners A 347000-square-foot retail complex called The Palladium will be a mecca for upscale shoppers featuring such luxury goods retailers as Hugo Boss Cartier Joseph Abboud and AX Armani Exchange There also will be a half-dozen top-tier restaurants including a steak-house run by Jean -George Vongerichten and another overseen by Thomas Keller of Napa highly regarded French Laundry The complex includes a 249-room Mandarin Oriental Hotel which will occupy part of the north tower 198 condominium units in the rest of the north tower and most of the south tower Then Jazz at Lincoln Center which will consist of 1000-seat and 600-seat concert halls and a 140-seat jazz cafe The towers of AOL Time Warner Center rise above a building that is 480 feet wide and 434 feet deep The structure rises 349 feet or 24 stories on the south end and 315 feet or 20 stories on the north The condos and the Mandarin Oriental will be atop the steel base The prqject originally was proposed by Boston Properties to be bigger and taller but the MTA which had owned the site subsequently sought a smaller prqject after a public outciy Well-heeled potential buyers already have spoken for 40 percent of the residential condos at One Central Park as the residential portion is called With their spectacular views of the park it appears that prices starting at (17 million and topping out at $24 million for a 6 300-square-foot duplex have not been a deterrent Photo An Mints Warner construction toxiciitc photographers and offer views so spectacular that the uninitiated may feel swept away Konncttc Kiley an architect with offices on the 80th floor of the Empire State Building recalled a time several years ago when her mother visited An intrepid sort who likes to point out that ruin at this ultitude sometimes evaporates before reaching he street Kiley openod the window at that point she had a suite on the 83rd floor to provide an open-air panorama 1 ler mother from California promptly fainted mom just melted said Kiley who once worked for renowned architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee and while at their firm did major design work on a 36-story skyscraper at 53rd Street and Third Avenue that has become known os the (To somu it looks like a tube a woman might pull from her purse if say the purse were the size of Connecticut) That destabilizing sense of size and space perceived by mom mukes New York a most awesome metropolis one whose character is linked to daunting scale and dramatic setting In a place so thick with tall big-shouldered buildings a certain amount of swagger is assured York is about skyscrapers suid Kick Bell executive director of the New York chapter of the Amcricun Institute of Architects which has been deeply involved in the post-Kepl 1 1 dialogue about rebuilding Bell's assessment nside New York no longer is home to the world's tallest office building That title was surrendered in 1974 when the 1 454-foot 110-story Sears Tower osned in Chicago not quite 100 feet beyond the World Trade Center towers (One was 1362 feet the other 6 feet taller) Sears lost the honor in 1998 to the 1483-font 88-story Petronas lowers in Kuala Lumpur And Petronas will be outdistanced by the Khnnghui World Financial Center expected to be complete by 2007 and top out at approximately 1600 feet the equivalent of 1 I I stories But size alone isn't the issue With its fabled concrete canyons and extensive inventory of vintage1 high-rises the Flatiron Wool-worth and Municipal buildings to mention a very few and mid 20th Century International Style gums like Lever House and the Keagruin Building New York is unparalleled Around the nation an hi rid the glolre this is skyscraper central The world's tallest may lie elsewhere but what counts most is the cumulative cITect of so many big buildings in such a relatively small swatch of real estate (Skyscraperscom reports more than 4200 high-rise structures in New York und one of the Web editors Marshall Gerometta said conservative tally indicates that 775 of those measure at ktast 300 feet or rise 30 stories or more) Packed tight with office towers and high-rise residences Manhattan is incomparable und in the view of some the throng of humanity that daily pours into and out of New tall buildings provides an invigorating boost to the urbnn energy level is Raymond Mood chief architect of Rockefeller Center completed in 19-10 once said the best thing we have in New York The glory of the skyscraper is that we have provided for it so Walking through midtown Manhattan (the other boroughs have so few skyscrapers they may ns well be Milwaukee) even a native New Yorker is struck nnew by the grand procession of Goliaths The IBM Building ut 57th and Mudison Philip Johnson's oddball Building (now the Sony Building) block away it's the one cnpissl by what looks like the headboard at a Vermont bed and breakliist und the flashy Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue On Park Avenue a stylish woman strolls by wearing a peculiar gns-n collar precisely the shade of the iixlized turrets atop the towers of the 47-story Waldorf-Astoria Motel looming over her shoulder Next is the former Pan Am Building (now MetLife) hovering (blasphemously some say) utxive glorious Grand Central Terminal Then the Chrysler Building on Lexington dripping Art Deco detail workers gliding through revolving dixirs The American Kudiulor Building huuts up 40th Street west of Fifth Avenue Icorgia O'Keeffe captured it in a nightscape spooky and romantic und before long it's 34th Street and perhaps the most famous skyscraper of all In the lobby entry through a metal detector ure pictures of the seven wonders of the world There is an inevitable eighth picture too: the Empire State Building Marmluss management hype and with a measure of truth If the skyscraper is not a man-made wonder what is? Art engineering technology commerce economics human behavior the skyscraper is the synthesis of them all It is a form gaudy by definition that defies convention that screams self-importance and attests to the restless whirr! of the human spirit For architects the tall building is a star-turn a step into the spotlight is as though you walk on the stage with full sai aid Cesar Felli in a phone conversation from his New Haven office cannot just stand there A skyscraper better sing a song tell some Like many Broadway hits the skyscraper opened out-of-town Chicago claims to be the Tigris-Euphrates of skyscraper civilization New York is a latecomer partisans sniff and Second City supporters have not relented after 100 years They point to the influential ideas of Louis Sullivan and the acclaimed 1896 essay Tall Office Building Artistically And thqy say early skyscraper design was profoundly affected by another Chicago practitioner John Wellborn Root and partner Daniel Burnham who built mainstays like the Rookery and Monadnock office buildings Sullivan anil engineer Dankmar Adler collaborated on the Wain-wright Building in St Louis the Chicago Stock Exchange the Guaranty Building in Buffalo Working alone Sullivan designed the renowned Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago and the Bayard-Condict Building on Bleecker Street in New York his only Manhattan prqject Chicago practitioners brought discipline and rationality to their task Even when adorned with ornate elements such as cornices friezes arches and columns the skyscrapers iff as it was known seemed as appropriate in their surroundings as the 'stately grhiri elevators iff rural Illinois In her 1995 Follows Finance? (a play on Tha Flatiron Building.