![]() ![]() We got there and they had this beautiful wood model of the building and plaza, and there’s this 40‐by‐40‐foot glass cube in the middle of the plaza. “The point of the meeting,” Shannon recalled, “was that Steve wanted to show Harry what his vision was for that site. The answer, according to four people in the room - Macklowe, Backus, Bohlin, and Shannon - is that the cube was the brainchild of the late Steve Jobs. What happened next has long been the subject of speculation and some dispute: Who came up the idea of placing a 30‐foot square glass cube - the world’s “smallest skyscraper” - in the middle of the GM Building plaza? In that lightbulb moment, an unused basement that had caused headaches for its owners for more than 40 years morphed into what is arguably the most famous retail space in the world. Bohlin and Karl Backus from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the designers of the Apple Store in Soho. “It would be open 24/7.” The meeting included Macklowe’s longtime design collaborator Dan Shannon and the architects Peter Q. The Apple team started talking about a flagship store that would be groundbreaking in almost every aspect,” he said. “He’s wearing this black turtleneck, he’s wearing black jeans … it was terrific. Out in Cupertino, Macklowe hit it off immediately with Jobs. ![]() How Apple Pay Will Cause You to Buy More Useless Junk He pestered George Blankenship, Apple’s vice-president of real estate, until he was invited to a meeting with Jobs in November 2003. Macklowe had a feeling that his best bet for really transforming the property from a prestigious relic into a vibrant commercial property lay with Apple, which was on the verge of blowing up into a retail titan several years into Steve Jobs’s second stint as CEO. In 2003, when the still-aspiring property mogul Harry Macklowe finally hit the big-time with his purchase of the iconic GM Building for $1.4 billion in borrowed funds, one of his first concerns was how to fix the “problematic plaza,” as industry insiders and architects called the large and rather useless open space that extended from the front entrance to Fifth Avenue. But few people realize that it exists because of a real estate developer who had just taken the biggest gamble of his life, and needed to solve a problem - and because he knew just how to play mind games with Steve Jobs. Though it has been open for less than a decade, the Apple store under the glass cube at the base GM building is already one of the best-known and most successful retail sites in the world. ![]() The scene will almost certainly repeat itself in a few months when the new Apple Watches arrive. What might have appeared like civic unrest in another time or place was just business as usual at Apple’s flagship store during the release of a new product - in this case, the iPhone 6. Camera crews looked on, recording the event. Thousands of people stood in a mass, separated by rows of metal barriers. On September 19, there was a mob scene around a large glass cube at the corner of 57 th Street and Fifth Avenue. The McKissack Group, tipped to build the project, is ‘the oldest minority/women-owned design and construction’ firm in the United States.Photo: Jon Hicks/? Corbis. It also said that Manhattan Community Board 4 had expressed a preference for residential use on the site but that this was not a requirement.Īccording to Real Estate Weekly, if approved the skyscraper will be the first to be built by a black team of developers, investors and designers. The document called for a commercial or mixed-use development and encouraged the inclusion of a hotel. In March, the state issued a Request for Proposals to build on the Plot K site, which it called ‘one of the last remaining vacant parcels on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan’. It sits just to the north of the Hudson Yards complex and Heatherwick Studio's Vessel, which has faced calls for permanent closure after a string of suicides. The tower includes two hotels, an observation deck and skating rink as well as office space. The concept has been submitted by developer The Peebles Corporation to the Empire State Development Corporation for its plot directly across from the Jacob K Javits Center in Manhattan. Formed of stepped cantilevered blocks, the 450-metre tower proposed for a state-owned plot dubbed ‘Plot K’, would be the British-Ghanaian architect's tallest scheme yet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |