The American Copper Buildings

Contents

1. Two towers, two directions of fold
2. Copper on two faces, glass on two
3. The ground and the water
4. Recognition from the tall building council
5. A change still under way

The American Copper Buildings are the pair of residential towers that Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group built on the East River in Manhattan: twin towers joined 300 feet up by a three story skybridge, the first skybridge in New York City in 80 years, on a site Con Edison once held, acquired in 2013. A 2017 completion report in designboom gives the towers as 41 and 48 stories, each wrapped in copper, with the bridge spanning between them high above the ground.² Occupancy began in the fourth quarter of 2016 and construction was completed in 2017. The plainest way to understand the pair is to compare the two towers on one variable, the direction in which each one folds, because that single choice settles where the bridge could go, and which faces carry the metal.

Two towers, two directions of fold

Architectural Digest’s 2016 report on the construction described the buildings as a leaning pair whose bent outlines recall two dancers arching away from each other.¹ Gregg Pasquarelli, a principal at SHoP, told the magazine that the team wanted to stretch what a residential tower could look like while keeping inside the envelope the site permitted. The answer, he told Architectural Digest, was to fold one building along a north and south line and the other along an east and west line.¹

Compared on that one variable, the towers are two halves of a single idea. Pasquarelli told Architectural Digest that the shared rooms were placed where the two come closest together, and likened the linking space to the instant in a tango when one dancer’s arm reaches around the other’s waist.¹ Architectural Digest listed a lounge and a lap pool inside it.¹

Figure

The pair in four numbers

Stories in the two towers

41 and 48

Skybridge elevation above the ground

300 feet

Stories inside the skybridge

3

Year construction was completed

2017

Copper on two faces, glass on two

Architectural Digest’s report set out how the skin follows the geometry: the faces that look east and west are all glass, while the windows on the north and south faces sit inside copper panels.¹ The Architect’s Newspaper’s later review of the finished facade gives the same pair of heights, 48 and 41 stories.⁴

Architectural Digest reported that the team chose to leave the metal untreated: Pasquarelli said the copper could have been finished green at the factory, but because the site is so exposed, beside the FDR Drive, the East River Ferry landing at 34th Street and the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel, the designers preferred to let the whole city watch it weather, calling the idea a kind of “performance art piece” for New York.¹

Copper changes because air reaches it. A materials note from the coatings maker Caparol explains that patina is the result of a chemical reaction between the metal and particles carried in the air, and that the green layer on copper is made of basic copper hydroxide compounds. The layer protects the metal beneath it, which is why copper roofs can last for centuries. The note also separates patina from verdigris, a copper acetate pigment that is a different substance.⁵

New York’s best known example is in the harbor. NBC New York’s account of the Statue of Liberty traces the statue’s color to the same process: the shiny sheets began oxidizing as soon as they were assembled, turned dark brown first, and then reacted with sulfur compounds in the air to give the green seen today.⁶ The architects told Architectural Digest they expected the towers to follow a similar path, from penny bright to a chocolate brown and finally to green, and admitted that nobody could say whether that would take a decade or half a century.¹

Figure

How raw copper changes color

1. 01
   InstalledBright metal, compared by the architects to a new penny.
2. 02
   Early yearsThe surface darkens to a deep brown as the copper oxidizes.
3. 03
   LaterA green layer forms and spreads across the panels.
4. 04
   TimingAnywhere from about ten years to about fifty, by the 2016 estimate.

The city already has a copper bridge that has made the whole trip. In 1925 the Gimbels department store linked its Herald Square building to an annex across West 32nd Street with a three story copper traverse by Richmond Shreve and William Lamb, who went on to work on the Empire State Building. The Bowery Boys’ history of the traverse notes that it now wears the same bright verdigris as the statue.⁸ The longer story of such links is told in Skybridges in New York, and the material in Copper Cladding and Patina.

The ground and the water

The land came out of the utility’s retreat from the East Side. The history of the Waterside Generating Station records that in 1999 Con Edison announced it would sell its Waterside plant along with three other First Avenue properties, that the sales closed in 2005, that demolition and environmental cleanup were finished in 2008, and that the parcels were rezoned for housing and commerce the same year. One of those parcels was the former Kips Bay Generating Station, on the east side of First Avenue between East 35th and 36th Streets.⁷ The plant itself is covered in Waterside Generating Station.

Figure

From utility land to finished towers

1. 01
   1999Con Edison announces the sale of Waterside and three other First Avenue properties.
2. 02
   2005The sales close and the Waterside plant is retired.
3. 03
   2008Demolition and cleanup finish and the parcels are rezoned.
4. 04
   2013JDS acquires the riverside parcel once held by Con Edison.
5. 05
   2017Construction of the two copper clad towers is completed.

The towers stand on the East River, and their waterfront resilient design was worked out in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Architectural Digest added in 2016 that the landscape firm Scape was laying out a park at the base with storm buffers meant to protect against flooding from the river.¹¹ The shore’s older layers, its fill and the water that crossed it in 2012, are the subject of The Ground Under the American Copper Buildings.

Recognition from the tall building council

The American Copper Buildings received Best Tall Building Americas from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Multifamily Executive’s report on the program explains that the council’s program gives regional awards for the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia and Australasia, among nine projects singled out, and that the Oasia Hotel Downtown in Singapore took the worldwide title.³ The regional category is judged on built work across North and South America, so the prize placed the pair among completed tall buildings across two continents rather than within a single city. The institution behind the prize has its own entry, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

A change still under way

Set side by side, the two towers answer the same question in opposite planes, and everything else about them follows from that: the height of the bridge and the orientation of the copper. Those decisions are fixed. The color is not. The copper faces on the north and south sides are partway through a change that began the day the panels went up, and on the estimate the architects gave Architectural Digest, no one can yet say when the finished green will arrive.