Forest City Ratner Begins to Push the Design Envelope

by Alex Padalka

(Photo courtesy of Annie Leibovitz)

When it first began its real estate development efforts two decades ago, Forest City Ratner Cos. made its name with standard, profitable projects - shopping malls, movie theaters, and office buildings that while functional and practical, did not break architectural ground.

That changed in 2001 when the developer joined forces with the New York Times Co. to design the newspaper's new headquarters building that would also house speculative office space for Forest City. They hired a world-famous architect - Italy's Renzo Piano - to design his first building in New York City.

The 53-story tower will be the first in New York to use a ceramic rod sheathing on its curtain wall. It also will have more exposed structural steel than any other New York skyscraper. Piano designed the 1.6-million-sq.-ft. tower in collaboration with FXFowle Architects of New York.

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Then in late 2003, Forest City hired a famous American architect, Frank Gehry, to design its $3.5 billion Atlantic Yards complex that will feature a glass-walled 20,000-seat basketball arena and 17 commercial and residential towers in downtown Brooklyn. Gehry released an initial conceptual design in 2004, but Forest City has since changed the scope, adding more residential space. Gehry's new design is expected this year.

Gehry is also architect on Forest City Ratner's 1-million-sq.-ft., 75-story Beekman Tower, a mixed-use project set to break ground this year in Manhattan.

Here's a look at the two architects:

* Renzo Piano, Italian, 1998 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner

• Best known for his co-design, with Richard Rogers, of the 1977 Centre George Pompidou in Paris, where the steel beams and a large part of the piping is placed outside of the building in primary colors.
• Best known in the United States for museum designs, such as the 1986 Menil Collection Museum in Houston and the 2003 Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.
• Hired to design the Pierpont Morgan Library expansion and renovation in Midtown Manhattan, which is slated to open to the public this spring. The project added three new buildings aboveground and an underground performance space, connecting them to three existing structures on an extremely tight site.
• Designed the proposed London Bridge Tower, a 66-story office building that would be Western Europe's tallest skyscraper.

* Frank Gehry, American, 1989 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner

• Best known for undulating metal-covered shapes covering buildings, epitomized in his design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which opened in 1997, and a line of corrugated cardboard furniture designed in the 1970s.
• Projects in the United States include: the Walt Disney Concert hall in downtown Los Angeles, which opened in 2003; the Experience Music Project in Seattle, a museum of music history opened in 2000 and founded by Paul Allen, the Microsoft cofounder and current owner of the Portland Trailblazers basketball franchise and the Seattle Seahawks football franchise; and Gehry House, his private residence in Santa Monica, Calif., completed in 1978.
• Projects in New York include the exotic Condé Nast cafeteria at 4 Times Square in Manhattan, completed in 2000; the Issey Miyake store in Tribeca, completed in 2001; and the InterActiveCorp Headquarters in Chelsea, currently under construction.