NEW SEVENTY-FIVE-STORY NOUVEL TOWER FOR SITE NEXT TO MOMA

A new seventy-five-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel for a site next to the Museum of Modern Art in New York promises a faceted exterior, tapering to a series of crystalline peaks, suggesting an atavistic preoccupation with celestial heights. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff writes that it brings to mind John Ruskin’s praise for the irrationality of Gothic architecture: “It not only dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle.” Commissioned by Hines, an international real estate developer, the tower will house a hotel, luxury apartments, and three floors that will be used by MoMA to expand its exhibition space. Although MoMA completed an $858 million expansion three years ago, it sold the midtown lot to Hines for $125 million earlier this year as part of an elaborate plan to grow still further. Hines would benefit from the museum’s prestige; MoMA would get roughly forty thousand square feet of additional gallery space in the new tower, which will connect to its second-, fourth-, and fifth-floor galleries just to the east. The $125 million would go toward its endowment.

UPDATE, 11/16, 415 PM: Renderings of the proposed building have been published at the website Curbed.com.