Lord Foster on the UES: Will New Residential Tower Also Go Green?

Fresh on the heels of the official opening of his Hearst Tower, Lord Foster's design for a new Upper East Side residential building appeared today in the New York Times. (Image to the right is a rendering of the structure provided to the Times by Foster and Partners). Times' architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff says that "[w]ith a little trimming . . . this could be the most handsome building to rise along Madison Avenue since the Whitney Museum of American Art was completed 40 years ago." Located at 980 Madison, between 76th and 77th Streets, Foster's building will rise out of an existing 1950s office structure called the Parke-Bernet Gallery Building. The developer of the new 30-story tower, Aby Rosen, was obviously intrigued by Foster's work in combining old and new at Hearst to critical acclaim. In fact, Rosen is the owner of several trophy buildings of his own in Midtown, including the Seagram Building and the Lever House on Park Avenue. From the green building point of view, it will be interesting to see if 980 Madison comes close to approaching the same level of sustainability as the Hearst Tower. For a variety of reasons, residential buildings are far more difficult to design, in terms of successfully incorporating green elements, than their commercial counterparts (hundreds of individual tenants, each with his or her own wildly different demands for energy and water, versus one corporate tenant, for example) Because the Hearst project was in an entirely different sector, it might be difficult for Foster to apply the same principles from Hearst at 980 Madison. And who knows how interested Aby Rosen is in developing another iconic green building. We'll see. Regardless, though, given the success of the Hearst Tower, another Lord Foster project in Manhattan is very positive news for raising the profile of green building in New York City.