Why hire one of the best architects in the world to build a glass box on top of a prewar building when there are glass boxes with amazing views all over the city — glass boxes many other billionaires happily call home?
The proposed Norman Foster penthouse. Art: Foster + Partners For a little over a decade, the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman lived in a duplex apartment at the Beresford whose windows looked south, toward 6–16 West 77th Street. Perched on the roof of that 1927 apartment building was a relatively undistinguished structure — a pink stucco penthouse — that nevertheless commanded some of the most spectacular sight lines in Manhattan.
The design Ackman and Oxman settled on could not be any further from pink stucco: a two-level modernist glass box designed by Norman Foster, possibly the world’s most famous architect, who is celebrated for his modern interventions on historic buildings, such as Hearst Tower and Berlin’s Reichstag.
“By no means is this a building of people who are poor, but the difference in wealth between us and Mr. Ackman is astronomical,” said one resident. The people who live in 6–16 West 77th own their own firms or helm the New York offices of companies you’ve probably never heard of; they own second homes in New Hampshire or Connecticut, not $23 million Hamptons estates.
When I called Ackman, he told me he has actually spent $6.1 million. He maintains that he and Oxman had the board’s support for new construction before buying the property; he also noted that the building is the legal entity that has to submit a Landmarks application, which it did. This would seem to imply an endorsement of the project.
Among the project’s other local supporters are the board of the Beresford and the New-York Historical Society, whose president, Louise Mirrer, spoke in favor at the recent community-board hearing. “The applicant approached us immediately to talk about this project,” she said, praising Ackman’s neighborliness. “There are high marks to be given to this project and the applicant.
It was also, he added, an opportunity to work with one of the world’s great architects, who has not designed a private residence in New York other than his own apartment on Fifth Avenue. Why live in a structure designed for someone else, after all, if you can build your own? And not just anywhere, but on the roof of another building?
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