Time Warner Center Towers (New York City)
N 40° 46.106 W 073° 58.962
18T E 585855 N 4513549
Two remarkable and 229 m tall glass towers of huge business and shopping Time Warner Center completely changed the environment and look of popular Columbus Circle next to the green lungs of the New York City, Central Park...
Waymark Code: WM6HNY
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 06/07/2009
Views: 27
The Time Warner Center has an interesting geometry derived from its site, its concave front facing onto the curve of Columbus Circle (at the southwest corner of Central Park), and its dominant twin towers shaped as parallelograms, their shorter sides aligned with the streets in the Manhattan grid, and their longer sides with Broadway, cutting obliquely through the grid from Columbus Circle.
Its scale is huge: a $1.7 billion investment bringing a major upscale shopping mall, a 5-star hotel, offices for 1 700 Time Warner employees and other companies, television studios, a jazz concert hall, residential apartments and more. The sense of scale and power is exacerbated by the unplanned significance of raising new twin towers in New York so soon after September 2001. The location and the power are exhilarating, though the forms of the buildings themselves, and the detailing, are all quite underwhelming.
It is hard to see the Time Warner Center as beautiful, or elegant, or inspiring architecture - although some do. It is an impressively large project completed on time, which will succeed as the landmark it seeks to be because of its technical credentials, and the scale of the new amenities it offers in a terrific site in New York's midtown.