Elicc Americas Project, The American Copper Buildings, NAMED BEST BUILDING OF 2017

NEW YORK - Dec. 19, 2017 - PRLog -- This year, one building—well, technically two—stood out above the rest for Curbed's editors: SHoP's American Copper Buildings brought a bit of glamour to the otherwise architecturally bland east side of Manhattan, and thus, it's our building of the year.

Curbed critic, Alexandra Lange, states, "Did you know that what the skyline needed was a cross between all-in 1960s corporate branding, the Downtown Athletic Club as described by Rem Koolhaas and a lair worthy of Goldfinger? I didn't, but it did, which is why SHoP's fraternal twin, 761-unit rental towers are our 2017 Building of the Year.

We've been watching for some time as the copper-clad north and south sides of the two towers, zigzagging within their ho-hum zoning envelopes, rose. First, they were as shiny as copper pennies, then they went dark and streaks appeared, including a stripe of verdigris. "Eventually the whole thing will be Statue of Liberty green," says SHoP principal Gregg Pasquarelli. "We thought of it as a performance art piece viewed from the FDR Drive." While other Jenga-inspired skyscrapers already seem old hat, these can still surprise us. What will be the first movie to use the skybridge that links the two 40-plus-story buildings as its villain's hideout? It could have been Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but—probably just as well—they called too soon. Some less cartoonish evil must take place in that three-story parallelogram some 30 stories in the air, with chevron floors and chevron light fixtures and, most glamorous of all, a blue-on-blue tiled chevron lap pool suspended between views of either the Empire State Building and the East River.

"I imagined swimming from one skyscraper to another," says SHoP principal Gregg Pasquarelli, who, as architect and resident, can now live the dream, one implanted in many of our heads by Koolhaas's vision, in Delirious New York, of the vertical club as a paradise for bachelors.

The health club, by the way, is called the Copper Tone, the roof deck, the Copper Top. The light fixtures, custom designed by K&Co., all have copper somewhere; the signage, by Pandiscio Co., uses the same chevrons, plus hits of neon green, to keep the brand story rolling. A scene of seduction at the gym's two-story climbing wall? A meet-cute in the lobby's disco-worthy black mailroom? It's fun to see a building ready for more than Netflix and chill."

Congratulations to all parties involved for creating such beautiful towers!!


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