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The towers that make up the midtown Manhattan skyline are a motley bunch. In among the elegant needle of the Empire State Building, the twinkling chrome cap of the Chrysler Building and the runaway-truck ramp of Citicorp is a chorus line of undistinguished slabs. The ensemble changes constantly, yet the stars remain the same.
Two projects that for now exist mostly on paper hold promise as high-rise heartthrobs: Renzo Piano's New York Times Tower, poised for the corner of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, and Norman Foster's Hearst Tower, already going up at Eighth and 56th. Both will one day reach out to passersby and demand a strong opinion rather than just a glazed nod.
The Times Tower, a glass-skinned beauty sheathed in a see- through veil of ceramic tubes, is designed to disappear. An actual 52-story skyscraper rarely looks as gossamer as it does in models and renderings, but here, lightness is both a metaphoric and an architectural goal.
Structural symbolism
The Times wants a symbol of its journalistic values and the qualities of an ideal democracy: openness, integrity, transparency. Piano wants a structure that doesn't glower behind dark glass like a highway patrolman wearing shades. Instead, he has imagined a self- effacing edifice that will shimmer and dissolve as it rises to a slender needle.
To achieve that mistiness, Piano decided to enclose each floor in untinted, ultraclear, low-iron glass, then wrap it in a coat of white rods, which will deflect heat and glare. The veil of rods continues upward well beyond the top story, making it look as though the shroud were being plucked skyward by a heavenly hand.
Theatrical illusion
The Hearst Tower spins another kind of theatrical illusion: the effect of one era's modern architecture giving birth to another's. Foster's crystal rocket will rise out of a squat, six-story structure built in 1928 for the corporation founded by William Randolph Hearst. The architect and set designer Joseph Urban gave the International Magazine Building, as it was grandiosely called, a wanly heroic touch with columns that reach past the roofline, topped with precarious Art Deco urns. It looked unfinished, and it was: The Depression squelched Hearst's plan to erect a high-rise on top of it.
"I wanted something which...