Elliott)
8 Union Square South
At University Place
This glassy dud rises on the site of a little drama that took place in 2005 when workers pulverized a quirky glass stairwell tower in a 1949 building by Morris Lapidus—just as the Landmarks commission was issuing its protective decree. Its successor is utterly generic.
Blue
105 Norfolk Street
Some fancy new architecture was inevitable and even desirable here, and it’s not as if Bernard Tschumi’s baublelike condo displaced any gems. But from a certain angle, the swollen blue thing looks disconcertingly like … well, like a sore thumb.
One Union Square South
At Broadway
Davis Brody Bond’s apartments are basically a support for Metronome, the ever-puzzling steam-¬breathing artwork that tells time but remains silent about history. The legendary Union Square Theater stood on this site and should never have been allowed to rot.
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery
Simple and inviting on the street, the museum is more aggressive inside, where acres of fluorescent lights give the galleries a bleary, refrigerated feel. Inhabiting a long-vacant lot, Sanaa’s brilliant stack of boxes is perfect in what is—for now—a transitional zone.
Cooper Square Hotel
27 Cooper Square
When tenants of a ramshackle four-story building refused to leave, Carlos Zapata simply sucked their homes into his design for the tower clad in milky glass. The result is an elegant building that makes a clumsy intrusion, like a well-dressed passenger on a crowded subway train, forcing his rear onto a too-small slice of seat. Such a radical neighborhood transformation needed more tenderness and care.
4 Times Square
At 42nd Street
A dour, broad-shouldered office building and a Nathan’s Famous stood in the way of the glamorization of Times Square. Fox & Fowle’s handsome landmark for Condé Nast offered the neighborhood some much-needed architectural sophistication, as well as a nice gastronomic rejoinder to the wiener stand: Frank Gehry’s beautifully baroque cafeteria.
Avalon Chrystie Place
229 Chrystie Street
The staid developer AvalonBay recruited Arquitectonica and SLCE Architects to doll up its façade, and the result is a marriage of expediency and dullness. It has helped lift the neighborhood’s fortunes, but at what cost?
