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Architecture

New York architecture explained through the engineering, design, history, and hidden systems of the city's most significant buildings.

How The Standard Learned to Step Over the High Line

How The Standard Learned to Step Over the High Line

The Standard, High Line turns an awkward Manhattan constraint into its defining feature, carrying an 18-story glass hotel across a historic railway on monumental concrete supports.

How The Smile Bends Sunlight Into an East Harlem Street

How The Smile Bends Sunlight Into an East Harlem Street

The Smile at 158 East 126th Street turns a bowed facade into better daylight, wider views, and one of East Harlem's most recognizable silhouettes.

Why the Whitney Museum Has Two Faces

Why the Whitney Museum Has Two Faces

Renzo Piano’s downtown Whitney looks less like a pristine art temple than a piece of waterfront machinery. Its asymmetry answers the competing demands of galleries, city streets, the High Line, and the Hudson River.

The Spiral Turns a Manhattan Skyscraper Into a 1,000-Foot Garden

The Spiral Turns a Manhattan Skyscraper Into a 1,000-Foot Garden

At the northern end of the High Line, BIG’s supertall office tower wraps every floor in a shifting ribbon of terraces designed for life in the wind.

How an Art Deco Landmark Reshaped 222 LES

How an Art Deco Landmark Reshaped 222 LES

A failed air-rights deal and a protected 1931 building forced a Lower East Side development to trade twin towers for a sharper dialogue between old brick and dark glass.

How 8 Spruce Street Made a Skyscraper Ripple

How 8 Spruce Street Made a Skyscraper Ripple

After Frank Gehry’s vast Atlantic Yards plan was abandoned, another Bruce Ratner project gave the architect a very different New York challenge: turning the rigid skin of a residential tower into something that appears to move.

Hudson Landing Would Build 1,127 Homes Above Manhattan’s Coal-Tar Legacy

Hudson Landing Would Build 1,127 Homes Above Manhattan’s Coal-Tar Legacy

A parking lot opposite the Intrepid Museum could become a two-tower housing complex. First, its buried history as part of a manufactured-gas plant must be addressed.

520 Fifth Avenue: The Supertall Wearing a Terracotta Disguise

520 Fifth Avenue: The Supertall Wearing a Terracotta Disguise

At 520 Fifth Avenue, an aluminum curtain wall borrows the texture and glow of fired clay, allowing a 1,000-foot tower to speak in the architectural language of old Midtown.

IAC Building: The Manhattan Building That Bent Glass Into Sails

IAC Building: The Manhattan Building That Bent Glass Into Sails

After years of unrealized New York proposals, Frank Gehry found his opening on the Hudson, where he turned an ordinary office curtain wall into a white, windblown landmark.

Equitable Building: The Skyscraper That Made New York Step Back

Equitable Building: The Skyscraper That Made New York Step Back

The Equitable Building’s enormous shadow was legal, but the backlash helped produce the zoning rules behind New York’s wedding-cake skyline.

Worldwide Plaza: The Tower That Dressed for an Older New York

Worldwide Plaza: The Tower That Dressed for an Older New York

Its brick walls and copper crown helped lure corporate Manhattan west in the 1980s. Nearly four decades later, the same landmark is caught in a very modern office-market crisis.

The Hess Triangle: New York’s Tiny Monument to Property and Spite

The Hess Triangle: New York’s Tiny Monument to Property and Spite

A sidewalk mosaic in Greenwich Village preserves the memory of a parcel the city missed, along with a family’s refusal to surrender it.