The Shared Pleasures of Plutocratville

Little Island is a billionaire’s gift to the public; the supertall 111 West 57th is what the ruling class builds for itself. I [whispers] love them both.

- By Justin Davidson

PART I: The latest supertall is a cut above.

111 west 57th street

It’s an uncomfortable thing to fall in love with a building you wish didn’t exist. Of all the supertall towers that have risen like flares, lighting up the city’s excesses and inequities, 111 West 57th Street, designed by SHoP Architects and erected by JDS Development, is by far the most thoughtful. As a statement, it’s infuriating; as architecture, it earns its place on the skyline.

There’s nothing new about that contradiction, of course. The mighty and the rich have been dotting the globe with splendors since power and wealth were invented, and the masses have beheld those self- homages with a mixture of resentment, gratitude, and rage. New York is a global principality overlaid on a democratic metropolis, and if the lords of capital are going to alight here, their supertall palaces might as well inspire some awe. Mostly, they don’t. Christian de Port zamparc’s One57 is repulsive. Gordon Gill and Adrian Smith’s Central Park Tower expresses the primacy of engineering over elegance. The cool symmetries of Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue charm some but rouse amateur critics to fury. (Also, the elevators break down.) It doesn’t matter: These ventures’ only audience is a tiny club of potential buyers who experience them from the inside out. SHoP’s 111, however, works hard to seduce us all and to be a good New Yorker. Or as the firm’s founding partner Gregg Pasquarelli puts it, “If you’re going to put up a building that 8 million people can see all the time, it had better be pretty fucking good.”