THE INCREDIBLE HULK.(Time Warner Center, New York, New York)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 17-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

The new Time Warner Center, at the southwest corner of Central Park, isn't a bad piece of urban design. The base of the building reflects the curve of Columbus Circle in a sumptuous, even graceful arc, and it gives the circle a monumentality that it never had before. If you don't look up, you could like this building. Columbus Circle is one of New York's few true roundabouts, and almost every building put on it has ignored the architectural potential that the shape holds. Edward Durell Stone's sweet but hapless marble museum at 2 Columbus Circle made a gentle nod to the curving street, but you hardly noticed it when the monolithic New York Coliseum loomed on the site that the Time Warner Center now occupies. The tall glass stick that is the Trump International Hotel doesn't help much, either.

It may be going overboard to say that the curved base of the Time Warner Center is reminiscent of John Nash's glorious facades on Regent Street in London. A better comparison, perhaps, would be to a fine New York building that is often overlooked--the old Standard Oil headquarters at 26 Broadway in lower Manhattan, by Carrere & Hastings, which has a tower set atop a convex base. The facade of the base reflects the shape of Broadway as it passes Bowling Green. The tower is aligned with the straighter grid of streets to the north, and thus can be seen from a distance. For the Time Warner Center, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings &...

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