Christian De Portzamparc Lvmh Tower, New York, 1994-1999
Project type
Paris architect Christian de Portzamparc has created a tower encased in opaque glass, concealing quality materials with discrete elegance.
The floors in the building have been partially subdivided by their occupants to create office space, but the strong point in the building's design is the tower's crown: the twenty-second floor atrium and the two-level party room above it.
Christian de Portzamparc's great sensitivity to urban design has given the city of New York a twenty-three storey tower, filling in an old gap on the city's luxury shopping street, Fifty-seventh Street.
The building, headquarters of the Louis Vuitton-Moët-Hennessy group, stands on the corner of Madison Avenue, next to the Chanel tower.
The architect has given up his favourite material, cement, in this project, achieving his customary plasticity with green and white sanded glass instead.
The starting point for this glass construction is known as the "Blue Room", a base which is partially underground, out of which all the building's façades rise, like the petals of a bud.
One of these "petals" is covered with panels of white sanded glass, specially produced in France and finished in Canada.
The outer covering of the other façades consists of insulated elements of green glass, through which we can see the suspended floors, which thin out where they meet the façades. The special treatment of the floors and the way in which the supporting pillars are set back give the outer surface of the tower the appearance of filigree, permitting light from the inside to illuminate the whole façade with no interruption due to horizontal scanning at various levels.
In many of New York's skyscrapers floors clearly divide the building horizontally, due to the presence of massive floors containing technical plants, giving the buildings a rather heavy look.
Portzamparc emphasises the slender verticality of his building with a series of small illuminated glass façades that seem to move forward and back continuously and continuously changing light effects. A series of blue and red neon tubes run vertically, parallel to the inside of the line dividing the white and green façades.
They wrap around the front facade, folded up in a coloured light that changes continuously thanks to a computer programme. The building's interiors contrast dramatically with its outside. A narrow entrance hall takes the visitor into the heart of the tower, to the lifts, passing before indirectly lit glass panels.
The view of the atrium and lifts provides the visitor with an introduction to the precious materials used in the building's interior. Floors are made of orange-brown Indian limestone, while the walls are finished in brass, glass and wood.
The building is constructed on a narrow lot that strictly limits its layout, a common situation in Manhattan.
Though the architect prepared large open spaces for use as office space, the companies using the building preferred to divide each floor up into small meeting, conference and work rooms.
But the big surprise in the building is on the twenty-second floor, the access to the top part of the tower, with a broad view over the city reaching as far as the Hudson River to the west.
The two-floor events room, referred to as the "Magic Room", is completely glassed-in with sunshades.
Portzamparc has come up with an intelligent response to the lack of building space in New York, adapting his building perfectly to Manhattan's building code governing height and volume.
He manages to come up with a very interesting multifunctional building, a sort of light over the city; with the aid of precious treatment of materials and unusual forms, he has created a building that could be called a masterpiece of contemporary gothic.
Floriana De Rosa
Link: www.chdeportzamparc.com/t8.html
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