Chapter 2 of 13
The New York Times Building In Manhattan
...but if you walk in that region where the New York Times is built now, that is between 40 and 41st and 8th Avenue in Times Square. If you walk there, you understand that the grid of New York is North, South, East, West, and the parcel are cut like that. And every piece of land goes up like that to breathe fresh air up there. There is no reason fundamentally to escape from the grid. I mean, you are on the grid. So fundamentally the invention is not really to change the grid, but it is more the way you grow up, the way you disappear in the air, the way you catch the light, because this is what is great about Manhattan. It is a city where at the sunset, in the evening, in the sunny day, everything becomes red, and after a shower everything becomes blue. And so it is a city atmospheric in some way. It is a city where everything keeps changing. So the way this building disappears in the air, the way the building touches ground, you don't really wonder too much about the shape of the building. The shape of the building is in the grid. Well, yes, we have done some work on the edge. We have broken the edges. We have been making a bigger podium at the bottom because the newsroom is there, and the newsroom is like a bakery. It is working day and night, mainly night. So we did that, but fundamentally the building is obedient to the grid. It goes up. But where it becomes a bit more sensitive is because it touches ground in a different way from usual. Actually it doesn't touch ground. It touches ground with the public spaces, with the birch trees little garden that is going to be public, with an auditorium that is going to be open to public, shops. So fundamentally normally Manhattan building touches ground in a quite selfish way. They take the ground. This building gives back to the street. So fundamentally the story of that building in the New York Times came from working there by understanding that the grid was a difficult thing to accept. The grid is there. It is natural. But the good thing to do was to build a dialogue that is quite rare in New York between the street and the building. Permeability, visibility. Working on 40th Street you have got to be able to see 41st Street and vice versa. That kind of sense of participation, of belonging. And the other thing was when the building goes up, this sense of lightness, this sense of atmospheric capacity of the building to be metamorphosed, to change together with the weather. If I move now from Manhattan and I walk before making the jump on London Bridge Station in London...