A New Gothic Tower for New York

Slate takes a look at the plans:

New York City’s West 57th Street is becoming a booming forest of tall, skinny skyscrapers that soar above Central Park with a nearly indistinguishable blandness.  Mark Foster Gage is having none of it. The New York City–based architect has designed an extravagant skyscraper for a mystery client (whose name the architect is withholding per the client’s request) that borrows from the Gothic flourishes of architectural monuments past.

The 1,492-foot-tall, 102-story concrete-framed skyscraper at 41 West 57^th St. would contain 91 residential units, with a sky lobby, retail space, four-star restaurant, and ballroom on the 64^th floor. Its façade would be covered with limestone-tinted panels, bronze, and brass, according to a project description, and each unit would have “its own unique figurally carved façade.”

Gage said that his design is a stylistic rebuttal to the “glass or steel modernist box[es]” whose 20^th-century aesthetic dominates the New York skyline. But to the naked eye, renderings of the ornamental flourishes on the façade—which seem all the more over the top given the building’s astonishing height—recall a video game designer’s interpretation of the kind of Gothic excess associated with Paris’ Notre Dame or the Chartres Cathedral, not a visionary new silhouette to redefine the future of the world’s most celebrated skyline.

See here for more pictures.