A decreased footprint, together with an increased floor-to-ceiling height for the hotel bar and lounge, mark the start of the central section. The base occupies the full width of the site and contains a double-height ground floor as well as the first four levels of the hotel. (© Simon Menges/Courtesy Chipperfield Architects) View of The Bryant from its namesake park. The 228,000 square foot new tower-fittingly named The Bryant-is clad in polished precast concrete slabs that, as noted by Chipperfield Architects in a press release, “contains different aggregates identical to the stone varieties found in the neighbouring buildings’ masonry facades.”Ĭomprised of a 14-story hotel topped by private residences with two retail spaces and a pair of separate lobbies-one for the hotel and one for the residences-on the building’s street level, the tower also follows the tapering tripartite pattern found throughout New York’s historic skyscrapers: a base, middle, and crown.

The 32-story tower features a classic tripartite composition. These neighbors include, among other landmark buildings, two Beaux-Arts icons: the Main Branch building of the New York Public Library (Carrère and Hastings, 1897–1911) and the Knox Building (John H. The other, a 32-story mixed-use tower that now rises above the southwest corner of Manhattan’s Bryant Park, makes a generous, Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC)-adherent gesture to its historic environs by offering what the firm calls a “contemporary interpretation” of the classical facades that grace its historic, park-flanking neighbors. One of these projects, the years-long renovation of a Mies masterwork in Berlin, makes “no promise of new splendour, no promise of new qualities, no reinterpretation or aesthetic upgrade, but merely the refurbishment of the last work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in line with accepted conservation practices,” per Martin Reichert, partner and managing director of David Chipperfield Architects Berlin.

Towers by Matthew Bryant