3/20/2017
By Ivan Pereira
London has Big Ben. Will New York get Big Bend?
A city-based architecture firm has pitched a 4,000-foot-long skyscraper for midtown, Manhattan.
Oiio’s silly straw supertall structure would rise in two towers on 57th Street and connect in the air over Calvary Baptist Church.
Ioannis Oikonomou, who came up with the design, said his proposal reveals “hidden layers of New York,” and tells a story about how the growing luxury buildings on the block, dubbed Billionaires Row, are changing the way we look at the city.
“[New York] architecture no longer operates as formation of buildings and streets. It is a cluster of catalysts to memories and emotions which inhabit our minds,” he said in an email to amNewYork.
Currently a 77-floor condo and a seven-story prewar building take up the two spaces on 57th Street where the tower would be built. The building would be roughly 2,000 feet tall based on the firm’s measurements.
Calvary Baptist Church and the city’s Department of City Planning didn’t give an official comment on the proposal.
Layla Law-Gisiko, the chair of Community Board 5’s Sunshine Task Force, which has been opposing the crop of supertalls on 57th Street, acknowledged the firm’s vivid imagination but called its design silly and out of touch. Buildings, like One 57 and 432 Park Avenue, have already altered the look and feel of the neighborhood and it shouldn’t be encouraging the trend, she said.
“There is clearly a salacious appetite from developers that aren’t contextual and don’t blend in,” she said.
