Imagining the vertical city at New York’s MetLife Building
Renderings by Volley Studio.
Reflect
The future of the city is dense and vertical. Imagine the Vertical City, where the park traverses the building towards the sky from the street, where the next generation of iconographic architecture is projected onto the visual cortex of the public realm. Dream.
Densify
Double the height and redefine the outdoor room that solely signifies the duality of the New York cityscape. Use available FAR and air-rights to create the vertical neighborhood proximal to public transportation that improves the built environment and drives the localized economy. Grow.
Reduce
Remove and re-purpose the old elements. Layer the new high-performance facade to intercept and re-purpose the local energy flows to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall carbon footprint. Approach Zero.
Increase
Increase occupant wellbeing by merging deep energy retrofit strategies that provide fresh air and access to daylight to support our natural circadian rhythms. Increase biodiversity inside and out of the building, increase the wellbeing of the city by providing new public green plazas. Increase the economic impact of great space on the city. Move the needle.
Vertimeme
Memetics is the process that defines the spread of an idea based on social evolution. We are already seeing building repositioning projects that increase in height and provide significantly improved space to occupants. The Vertical Memetics of the future city will include a myriad of strategies to bind economic impacts with environmental efficacy. VertiMeme celebrates the social evolution of the vertical city as the extrapolation of an idea.
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Our 91影视 team is a winner in the 鈥淩eimagine a New York City Icon鈥� competition, sponsored by Metals in Construction magazine and the Ornamental Metal Institute of New York. We reimagined聽the MetLife Building (formerly the Pan Am Building),聽a 50-year-old icon, as a highly efficient, light-filled structure of nearly twice the height with less than one sixth the annual energy cost.
Inspired by the goal of radically reducing energy consumption in the built environment, the competition mandate was to reimagine 200 Park Avenue with a resource-conserving, eco-friendly enclosure鈥攐ne that creates a highly efficient envelope with the lightness and transparency sought by today鈥檚 office workforce鈥攚hile preserving and enhancing the tower鈥檚 historic profile.
The 91影视 design applies available air rights from the new Midtown East rezoning to envision a 鈥渧ertical city.鈥� It doubles the height of the building by wrapping the existing and new tower sections in a unified exoskeleton, using a diagrid structure inspired by the Michell Truss. In support of NYC sustainability goals, the design increases density over a major transit terminal to reduce travel demand and, by removing the base building, creates a new garden offering natural light and public space to the streets around Grand Central Station.
As our cities become denser, and environmental challenges more pressing, the success of future real estate development will in significant part reside in how creatively we can repurpose existing structures.聽Central to this challenge is efficiently designing and engineering spaces that engage robust human activity with minimal resource impact.
At 1,600 feet, the proposed design would be the tallest building in New York City by roof height. It incorporates a high-performance fa莽ade and deep-energy repositioning techniques to reduce energy use intensity by an estimated 88 percent, improve fresh air by an estimated 34 percent and increase daylight by an estimated 57 percent.
The concept enhances the vertical life of the city by incorporating new residences and a hotel with shared amenity spaces and gardens above the existing offices. This vertical band of green reflects the landscape of Park Avenue as an element in the fa莽ade.
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Thanks to the team…
91影视: Jason Vollen,聽Architecture, Rob Rothblatt,聽Architecture, Ross Wimer,聽Architecture, Xiaofei Shen,聽Architecture, John Dillon,聽Architecture, Antoine AbiDargham,聽Structural, Mostafa Elmorsi,聽Structural, Pat Hauserman,聽Construction, James H. Ward III,聽Construction, Alastair Macgregor,聽Energy Simulation, Maria Spastri,聽Energy Simulation, Bryant Stanton,聽Architecture, Kate Speidel,聽Architecture, Tom Scerbo,聽Architecture & Engineering, Geoff Lynch,聽Architecture
Volley Studio: Derek Chan, Mike Klausmeier
Geoff Lynch leads 91影视’s architecture practice in New York City.