Breakfast Overlooking the WTC

This year Flatiron District of Manhattan replenished with one more original high-rise building – One Madison Park, erected on the project of the New York architectural office Cetra/Ruddy. Not quite Uptown or Downtown, One Madison is ideally located at the nexus of Flatiron, Gramercy, NoMad and Chelsea. One Madison’s slender 60-story bronze glassclad tower, designed by Cetra/Ruddy, is a distinctive new icon in the Manhattan skyline.

The building is handsomest approached from the west through Madison Square Park, where the silvery cubes peek out from behind the dark bronze glass of the tower’s core. As you move east, the cantilever seems to become more pronounced, as if the cubes were straining toward the view up Madison Avenue. The facade is slightly more menacing from the east, where the narrow gaps between the cubes contribute to an unexpected feeling of vicelike compression.

As captivating, for architecture lovers are the ghosts that the design conjures. The stacked cubes are reminiscent of Santiago Calatrava’s abandoned 2004 proposal for a luxury tower in Lower Manhattan: a design whose structural system of tension cables was far more refined than this building’s but also more cloyingly precious. Both designs, in turn, are reinterpretations of the modular plug-in architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular Kenzo Tange’s Shizuoka Press Administration building and Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower. These structures were conceived as radical experiments in mass production for an increasingly dense and urban postwar society. The latter-day version is used to envelop the rich in the aura of luxury while insulating them from the masses; they are private town houses in the sky.

One Madison Park features open, loft-like layouts with floor-to-ceiling glass and 360 views of New York City and beyond. The design utilizes lateral bracing placed in the center instead of around the perimeter, forming a cruciform of shear walls, buried between rooms and shafts, minimizing the impact to room layouts. A Tuned Liquid Damping system incorporated into the building structure at roof level mitigates lateral movement caused by wind and seismic forces.

Another key element of the design was creating a modern building that would complement the fabric of Madison Square Park and the classic architecture of the neighborhood. The main tower shaft is composed of earth-toned bronze glass, enabling it to blend with the older surrounding limestone and masonry buildings. OMP’s tall and slender form also compliments its two famous neighbors, the Flatiron and the MetLife tower, creating a graceful linear progression between the three towers.

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Materials provided by Extell Development Company