Richard Rogers

The Port Authority at its board meeting this afternoon is taking a look at three possible designs for the planned tower over its bus terminal, with the firms of Richard Rogers, Cesar Pelli and Kohn Pedersen Fox all submitting plans.

Steve Roth's Vornado, in the hunt for an anchor tenant, is the developer for the tower, which would sit across the street from the Renzo Piano-designed New York Times building.

Pelli Clarke Pelli designed the Bloomberg tower on Lexington Avenue for Vornado; Mr. Rogers' firm designed the planned Tower 3 at the World Trade Center; and KPF was signed on for JPMorgan Chase's now-scuttled new investment banking headquarters (with a notable goiter for trading floors) downtown.

Images below.  read more »

Vornado Realty Trust CEO Steve Roth is considering a design by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Rogers for his planned office tower atop the Port Authority Bus terminal, a Port Authority official confirmed.

The design by Mr. Rogers, along with two other designs (New York-based SHoP was said to be working on a design for the tower at one point), is expected to be presented at today's Port Authority board meeting.

Mr. Rogers, whose works include the planned Tower 3 at the World Trade Center and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, recently withdrew from a nearby project: the now scuttled Javits Center expansion.

We'll (hopefully) have more after the meeting at 1:30.

Renowned architect Richard Rogers has left the architectural team to renovate and expand the Javits Center, a move that comes four months after the state finalized a decision against any large scale expansion, an Empire State Development Corporation spokesman confirmed.

The Pritzker Prize-winning Mr. Rogers was brought on for the project by Pataki development chief Charles Gargano in part as a means to draw public support for the project. Mr. Rogers designed, among other projects, Paris’ Centre Pompidou museum with Renzo Piano.  read more »

While much of former Governor Eliot Spitzer’s economic development agenda seems to be on hold or in flux (e.g. Moynihan Station, for one), his once controversial plan for the Javits Convention Center has outlived his tenure.

The Paterson administration is trekking down the path of a renovation and modest expansion for Javits, with plans for an additional 50,000 square feet of exposition space and a truck storage area. The budget, at least as of a few weeks ago, was $1.3 billion for the whole ordeal, $300 million or so less than the amount approved for a much larger expansion and renovation under the Pataki administration (which the Spitzer folks later found to have a true cost of more than $3 billion).  read more »

Anticipating the type of questions that arise this time of year, developer Larry Silverstein held a press conference today to assure everybody that rebuilding at the World Trade Center site continued on track, that shovels will go into the ground for his three towers in January, and that they would open in 2012.

If that’s not news, the 200-odd media people who turned out, many from national and international news outfits that cover developments like this from a distance, will try to believe really hard that it is. Instead of starchitects Richard Rogers, Sir Norman Foster and Fumihiko Maki, who attended last year’s unveiling of the actual designs, senior staff people from each of the three firms gave updates.

Yet the renderings looked remarkably the same, aside from a few details at street level.  read more »

Lord Richard Rogers--the architect who almost lost his job on the Javits Center expansion--is no Lenora Fulani Lenora Fulani. That's one of her allies in the Independence Party, attorney Harry Kresky explained it during a party meeting on Saturday in midtown.

According to Kresky,

Shelly Silver, the speaker of the New York State Assembly [and] Anthony Weiner, a congressman who ran for mayor, both Jews by the way, essentially said that unless this architect recanted, backed down,and said that he is pro-Israel, and that he attended the meeting by accident, that they would make sure he didn't get the contract. And unlike Dr. Fulani, this architect backed down and recanted. So that's the level of muscling that's going on in the Independence Party and in the country right now.

By the way.

--Azi Paybarah

A well-connected source says the architect Richard Rogers is to be officially forgiven for his dalliance with Israel-boycotters.

"The bottom line is Silver and Wiener, backed up by Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, ... will accept his admission of being naive about hosting the meeting and not having any history of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish statements in the past --- so he gets to keep his architect jobs in NY," the source writes.

And that's how these things are done.

The British architect Sir Richard Rogers unveiled the design for the Javits Convention Center expansion Monday. It has certain elements of the defunct West Side stadium that was going to sit just a block away, and maybe bears some resemblance to the Pompidou Center in Paris for which Rogers is so famous. Here, a few slides:

The idea is to replace I.M. Pei’s dark-glass walls, which Rogers said made Javits look “more like a mausoleum than a great exhibition space.”

The unveiling was notable for other reasons: it shows that Charles Gargano, the chairman of the state-appointed Convention Center Development Corporation and Gov. Pataki’s economic development czar, is not going to pay much attention to alternatives raised by developer Douglas Durst and the Newman Real Estate Institute, which would have brought the convention center south (Durst), or would have torn it up and reconstructed it perpendicularly to the water (Newman), instead of maintaining a five-, growing to six-, block wall along the Hudson River. The development corporation’s president, Michael Petralia, said his appointment with Newman was tomorrow—which would be a little too late to influence the plan laid out today. Petralia said either alternative would require more time and money.

The other newsy tid-bit was that Gargano wants to put the convention center hotel across 11th Avenue between 35th and 36th, where a state-owned concrete plaza called Stonehenge Park is located. Doing so would disappoint developer Steve Witkoff, who had wanted to build a hotel on both Stonehenge Park and a parcel he owns across 36th Street. By using government-owned property, the corporation can apply the $150 million set aside for property acquisition to the center’s construction, which will now cost an estimated $1.7 billion, about half-a-billion more than was previously thought.  read more »

Giving away land for (presumably) free does not mean that developers won't be asking for any subsidies, however. Once the plan is finalized, the corporation will put out an invitation to bid on the hotel—known as a Request for Proposals, in construction lingo. Glenn Johnson of Tishman Construction, a consultant for the state, said, “Any public investment required will be determined by the response to the R.F.P.”

-Matthew Schuerman