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July 10, 2008
After 3 Climbs, Facade at Times Building Is Altered
City Room, blog of The NY Times
By David W. Dunlap
Back in 2002, Bruce Ratner characterized the facade of 620 Eighth Avenue, the building co-owned by Ratner and the Times, as "pretty." Yesterday, after a third person climbed the building, the facade was deemed a "pretty" serious security threat and workers began removing ceramic rods.
The screens of ceramic rods that float in front of the clear glass curtain wall are in many ways the building’s signature. “The complexity comes from the skin, the surface of the building actually vibrating, working with the weather,” Renzo Piano, the architect, said in 2001. Likening it to a “fabric of ceramic,” he called the screens a “suncoat” — as opposed to a raincoat — that would cut the transmission of light and heat into the interior, thereby permitting the use of clear, rather than tinted, glass.
Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner Companies, which developed the building with the Times Company, said in 2002: “Mr. Piano refers to the skin as lace. I’ll use a word — it’s not an architectural word — to describe it: pretty.”
The scene was anything but pretty on Wednesday afternoon as four workers, standing on a canopy along the 41st Street side of the building, unclipped the rods from their frames and began piling them on a hand truck to be taken away.
Posted by lumi at July 10, 2008 6:02 AM