VIA 57 West is one of those buildings that, in New York, stands out in the skyline of the city not for height but for shape. It is located at 625 West 57th Street, between the eleventh and twelfth Avenue, almost on the West Side Highway, and from afar it seems a white pyramid cut on one side. It is actually a residential building: 709 apartments for rent, about 77 thousand square meters of surface, built for The Durst Organization and designed by Danish studio Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which completed it in 2016. It is 142 meters high, so it does not compete with the supertalls of 57th Street, but it notices much more than many higher buildings.
Its shape is not only born from the desire to make a photogenic building, although it later became. BIG called it a “courtscraper”, a word invented to say that it combines two different models: the inner courtyard typical of many European blocks and the vertical density of Manhattan skyscrapers. To achieve this, the building remains low on three sides and rises to the north-east corner, until it becomes a kind of rigid sail. So it can contain many apartments, but it leaves room for a large central vacuum and does not completely close the views on the river of neighboring buildings, including the Helena Tower, always Durst.
The point where it is helps to understand why a building so ended right there. VIA 57 West is located on the western edge of Manhattan, in an area marked for years by infrastructure: the highway, the garages of the urban nect, an electric power plant and traffic towards the river. BIG describes the site as a piece of city to be transformed into “an oasis” in the midst of all this.
The courtyard is the most hidden part of the building, especially for those who pass next to us by car or on foot, but it is the true reason of the pyramid shape. It measures about 22 thousand square feet, it is reserved for residents and works as a park, with plants and paths in the center of the block: it is inspired in fact in Central Park, from which it takes the classic rectangular shape, and all the apartments of the building were arranged in such a way that you can have a overlooking the courtyard. The triangular façade also serves to bring light into this green space: if the palace was a rectangular block, that vacuum would remain much darker.
Inside, VIA 57 West is less strange than it looks outside. The apartments range from studios to units with four rooms, many have balconies or terraces, and the common spaces are now habitual in the high market of rents in Manhattan: swimming pool, gym, lounge rooms, screening room, wellness spaces. In 2016 The Real Deal wrote that the building had 178 different planes, also because, due to its shape, almost every point of the façade generates different cuts, views and depths for each real estate unit. VIA 57 West is a high-end building, but the project included 142 apartments under the market price of 20 percent of the total. This quota allowed Durst to return to incentive programs and facilities related to New York housing.
After opening, VIA 57 West received several awards, including the International Highrise Award and the CTBUH award as Best Tall Building Americas in 2016. Ten years after its completion, the building continues to look a bit out of place and at the same time very consistent with New York. The result is that it looks like an icon.
The article And that pyramid-shaped skyscraper? It’s from IlNewyorkese.
