|
|
2009 Annual Design Review
Environments
|
|
Best of Category
TKTS BOOTH
AND
REVITALIZATION
OF FATHER DUFFY
SQUARE
FOR 33 YEARS, PEOPLE WHO WANTED half-price theater tickets in New York City bought them at a couple of construction trailers pushed together in Times Square behind a statue of Father Francis Patrick Duffy. In case you missed the statue, the place was easy to spot by the big, homely billboards with “tkts” in Helvetica hung overhead from red support poles. Funnel cakes have been served from more interesting venues, but people went for tickets, not design, so the trailers remained, unchanged. But in 2008, a spectacular replacement transformed the area into a blazing tour de glass, and turned the booths into a design destination.
Some landmarks are born overnight. This one simply marries itself to the city. It’s useful, yes, but it’s also magnetically beautiful, supremely civic, structurally innovative, and quite sustainable, with a geothermal system for water and air handling that comes up from 450 feet below the street.
This design began in 1999, when the nonprofit Van Alen Institute held a competition to replace the old TKTS structures. An Australian duo, John Choi and Tai Ropiha, beat out 643 entries to win with a design for a booth with a stepped red roof where people could sit. In 2001, the project stalled in the wake of September 11, shortly after the architecture firm Perkins Eastman was hired by the Times Square Alliance and the Theatre Development Fund to begin a feasibility study that led to the firm’s redesigning of the project. The basic idea, however, stayed intact because it was “very strong,” said the designer, Nicholas Leahy, a Perkins Eastman principal.
“It transforms the environment, and it creates a large effect on all sorts of different scales,” Grima said. Weiss loved the way the booth becomes part of its surroundings. “It’s inhabitable signage in a place defined by speed and signage: the belly button of Manhattan, which is littered with uninhabitable graphics,” she said. Cloepfil seemed to find in this design practically all the qualities he sought in looking over the larger lot of entries. “I like that it occupies that ambiguous realm where it’s not just architecture and it’s not just signage,” he said. “Most of these solutions can go anywhere in the world, and this one can’t. It’s that specific.”
Design Perkins Eastman Architects (New York):
Nicholas Leahy, principal
Original concept Choi Ropiha (Sydney):
John Choi, Tai Ropiha |
|
