English architect Lord Norman Foster must be tired of dealing with all the stuffy uptowners (lookin' at you, Tom Wolfe!) who get mixed up in the business of his grand architectural visions, because rumor has it he's heading downtown?to the Bowery, so conveniently left out of the East Village/Lower East Side rezoning. According to a Curbed tipster, Foster & Partners has designed the above nine-story gallery building for an established Chelsea art dealer at 257 Bowery, just north of the New Museum and across the street from FLAnk Architects' planned eco-friendly hotel.
257 Bowery, next to an old tenement building that sprouted a rooftop addition and went condo a little while back, is still an old tenement itself. The current building can be seen in the gallery above. However, the building was sold this summer to, wouldn't you know it, the Sperone Westwater Gallery. According to our tipster, the building is still in the schematic design phase, and indeed, according to the façade studies seen above, the design team is playing with a few different types of glass, including glass tubes, glass tubes of varying diameters, channeled glass and channeled glass with fins. Collect 'em all! The Bowery has landed on many stepping stones on its arduous path to becoming the playground of the rich and fabulous, but the arrival of one of the world's foremost starchitects has to be one of the biggest friggin' rocks yet. Mazel tov, you adorable old slum.
· Soho Apt. Building Sells for $8.5M [CoStar]
· Curbed's Bowery Gentrification coverage [Curbed]
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