Design: Big Yet Still Beautiful

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Cesar Pelli lives and practices architecture in New Haven, Conn., for him the perfect distance from Manhattan: close enough to visit for an afternoon, far enough to experience the New Yorkophile's delight each time he plunges into the city. "Coming down Broadway," Pelli recalls of a recent visit, "I suddenly noticed this burst of golden light up ahead." He smiles his sheepish, civilized grin. "It was this building of mine." Pelli, 64, has designed some of the worthiest large buildings of the past few years: the humpback blue glass Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood; Wall Street's vast, handsome World Financial Center; the romantic 1930ish Norwest Center in Minneapolis -- each one urbane and appealing and unlike the others. But this new building, this burst of golden light in midtown Manhattan, is Pelli's best work yet. Indeed, Carnegie Hall Tower, officially finished last week, is the finest high-rise to go up in New York City in a generation.

The feat is all the more salutary given the building's horribly overbuilt location: just 25 ft. east stands Metropolitan Tower, a grim, 66-story black glass trapezoid finished in 1986 (only the two-story Russian Tea Room separates the two buildings), and less than a block south is architect Helmut Jahn's new 70-story Cityspire. Yet instead of adding to the high-rise pile-on, Carnegie Hall Tower improves the neighborhood and the skyline -- in part by visually eclipsing Metropolitan Tower -- and proves that grandeur need not equal bulk. Pelli's apartment-and-office tower is a full block deep and 60 stories tall, but it is marvelously narrow -- a mere 50 ft. wide. New buildings of this height usually contain two or three times as much square footage; no matter how interesting or tarted up, such behemoths almost inevitably darken and oppress their bit of the city. This slender, elegant slab is like a dancer among thugs.

The unusual difficulties Pelli faced -- squeezed site, Carnegie Hall as partner and next-door neighbor -- are what have made the new tower so special and grand. "Constraints," the architect says, "are not necessarily negative. They force you to try avenues you would have ignored." Contextualism has been the urban-design buzz word of the past decade, but no architect has done a better job of fitting a big building into such an important, tightly woven urban fabric. The 535,000-sq.-ft. tower is technically an addition to Carnegie Hall and takes important aesthetic cues from it.

The hall's century-old Roman brick and terra cotta are suggested on the tower by a skin of brownish and amber brick in five shades, and the molding and cornice lines of Carnegie's beaux arts facade are continued across the front of Pelli's building. The high-rise is wrapped by thick metal bands at six-floor intervals corresponding to the older building's height.

Pelli, however, did not make the standard postmodern mistake of replicating an old form at inappropriately huge size. The interior spaces are modest (no more than about 14,000 sq. ft. per floor), and an intricately detailed exterior suggests a bygone age, not any particular building or style. Four metal grids, each bolted at an upswept angle to the 60th floor, provide a classically inspired, yet unequivocally modern top. "We picked up threads of the past," says Pelli, "with a contemporary technology and contemporary sensibility."