Renderings of Dutch architect Ben van Berkel's eagerly-anticipated 5 Franklin Place have popped up on the Web a couple of times over the past week or so, and each time the developer has rushed to demand that they be taken down. Now we know why. The façade of Berkel's first NYC project?made of reflective black metal bands?gets a full-page reveal in this week's issue of New York, complete with a "published here for the first time" boast. Berkel's luxury condo building, at 369-371 Broadway but facing the tiny alley known as Franklin Place, looks just as crazy as we'd been promised. Justin Davidson pens a good description: "The great Dutch architect Ben Van Berkel brings cloth—or the idea of cloth—out of doors, swaddling a twenty-story condo in black metal scarves that thicken and thin as they wind their way around. The façade becomes a burka, a form of resistance to the immodest transparency of glass." A big ol' luxury burka; as if Tribeca didn't have it all already!
· Show & Tell: Five Franklin Place [NYM]
· Berkel Diggin' 5 Franklin Place [Curbed]
· In Tribeca, the Berkel Has Landed (Almost) [Curbed]
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