![]() ![]() Six circular planters, each fourteen feet in diameter, with engaged seating, would line the perimeter of the block along Cedar Street, replacing the four raised, linear planting boxes that were added there after the 1960s design. The black granite plaque that currently protrudes from the ground plane, paying tribute to real estate mogul Harry Helmsley, would be replaced with another plaque to Helmsley inserted flush with the pavement. In this plan, the large circular planter, which would have changed the compositional balance of the plaza, was notably absent. Originally scheduled to be presented on February 6, 2018, the proposal was pulled from the LPC docket after a firestorm of public criticism over the proposed renovation.Ī revised proposal by NV5 and Higgins Quasebarth & Partners went before the LPC on March 20, 2018. ![]() The plan alarmed several advocacy groups, including TCLF, which enrolled 140 Broadway in its Landslide program as an at-risk landscape on January 29 and wrote a letter to the LPC voicing strong objections. The large new feature, planted with trees, would have fundamentally altered the site’s key visual and spatial organization by negating artist Isamu Noguchi's iconic Red Cube as the singular, dominant element in the plaza. The initial proposal called for removing several elements introduced to the plaza after the original 1960s design, but also for adding several new features, including a raised, circular planting bed, fourteen feet in diameter, at the southwestern corner of the block. On January 22, 2018, the Tribeca Trib reported that the building owners were asking the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to approve a plan, prepared by the landscape architecture firm NV5 and preservation consultants Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, to renovate and redesign the Modernist plaza. The property is owned by the Hamburg, Germany-based Union Investment Real Estate company, GmbH. A circular hole punctures the center of the cube on its west face, inviting passersby to look up through it to the tower above. Installed in 1968 on the Liberty Street side of the plaza, the 28-foot-tall site-specific sculpture teeters on one edge. The one major interruption to the otherwise pristine plaza is the Red Cube, a steel-and-aluminum painted vermillion cube by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi. The intended plaza design is a simple, stark plane composed of travertine pavers that extend to the curb, with few furnishings and devoid of street trees. The Modernist tower is a uniform slab with no setbacks and little ornamentation, surrounded on three sides by a 25- to 30-foot-wide sidewalk, which extends into an 80-foot-wide open plaza on the Broadway-facing side. One of the first projects to conform to the 1961 Zoning Resolution that incentivized developers to incorporate public plazas into their office building plans, the tower has a trapezoidal footprint that covers approximately 40 percent of the property, with the remainder of the block designated as privately owned public space (POPS). The site was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill between 19 as an open plaza surrounding a 51-story skyscraper with a shell comprising a matte-black-aluminum frame and glass. In each case, continued stewardship involves an ongoing dialogue about what happens – ecologically, aesthetically, culturally, economically – when art and the landscape are merged.Įncompassing one square block in Lower Manhattan, this plaza and tower face Zuccotti Park, two blocks east of the World Trade Center. ![]() For the five sites below, TCLF’s advocacy and engagement involved bringing increased visibility to their historic significance and the dangers they were facing for 140 Broadway and Green Acres TCLF mounted strategic communications and media campaigns that ultimately saved them from destruction while Sudama (MARABAR) was relocated and reimagined by the artist. The presence of art in the landscape and the shaping of landscape into art attests to a powerful human ability to re-vision our surroundings and to invite others to do the same, whether viewing a tower through a hole in a 28-foot-tall red cube that appears miraculously balanced on one point, or transforming a derelict industrial landscape into an expansive and immersive work of public art. Image courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Screen Capture from Landslide 2014: Art and the Landscape Homepage.
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