Since making his inauspicious debut on South Broad Street in
2007 with the pink-hued, milk-bottle-shaped Symphony House, developer Carl
Dranoff has gone on to do something that once seemed improbable: He has
resurrected a big stretch of the battered commercial street as a residential
boulevard.
A canny developer, Dranoff seems to possess a sixth sense
about where the real estate market will go next. He gets his urbanism mostly
right, by packing the ground floors with generous commercial spaces and finding
tenants to turn the lights on. But architecturally, his growing collection of
condos and apartment houses has been a mixed bag.
His follow-up to Symphony House, a mid-rise called 777,
drips with Art Deco-inspired bling, while his latest, Southstar Lofts, is
shaping up to be a rather staid white box. It's as if his South Broad is still
trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Grand boulevard?
Generic apartment row?
Now Dranoff is back with a fourth project near Spruce Street
and it strikes a pleasingly different note. At 567 feet, it will be the tallest
high-rise built just for residential use in the city. Although it's been
clunkily named SLS International, the beanpole of a tower is the most
sophisticated design Dranoff has ever commissioned.
If you want proof that architecture follows the money, here
it is. Unlike Dranoff's earlier projects, which were on the southern, untested
fringe of downtown, it occupies one of Center City's most glittering
crossroads, across from the Kimmel Center and steps from the Wilma Theater. The
official budget is $200 million.
Dranoff is clearly out to fashion South Broad into a
desirable address and recognizes that pink concrete won't cut it anymore. So
instead of the usual suspects and the usual designs, he sought out a top New
York architecture firm, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, which has built
skyscrapers around the world.
Known for producing refined buildings with strong, legible
shapes - such as Chicago's 333 Wacker Drive and Shanghai's World Financial
Center, the tallest building in China - the firm also has left its mark on
Philadelphia. The quality here runs the gamut, from the stately Logan Square
office-and-hotel complex, to the more ponderous BNY Mellon Bank Center on
Market Street, to the airy cube of Children's Hospital's main pavilion.
From indications so far, the long-limbed, 47-story SLS tower
promises to be in the refined and elegant group. Like Logan Square, it's a
luxury hybrid, combining a 149-room boutique hotel and 125 condos. But instead
of separate elements, KPF stacked the pieces vertically, with 28 floors of
condos on top of the hotel. Combining two uses into one is what enabled Dranoff
to build a tower that hovers above the competition.
KPF follows the current fashion and dresses the exterior in
glass, but it's more than a simplistic, straight-up pile of floors.
KPF envisioned the tower as a composition of interlocking
boxes. It's a visual trick, achieved by cantilevering the north and south walls
out from the central shaft in asymmetrical sections. They jut out only about
five feet, but it's enough to provide a sense of depth and scale that you don't
get with slick glass walls.
KPF's puzzle box doesn't just sit statically on its podium;
it appears to slide over it, like a flash drive plugging into its USB port. The
podium, which will house a parking garage and hotel meeting rooms, also gives
the impression that it's made of interconnected boxes. Scrims of dark terra
cotta will pop out from the glass to screen the parking decks.
It's true there is a whiff of the corporate in the design.
The immense hotel insignia that is shown plastered on the podium and near the
crown certainly doesn't help. (Is there a brand consultant in the house?) But
there is still time for the architecture to settle down into something a bit
more homey. As we learned at Symphony House, which was originally depicted in a
buff limestone color, material choices will be crucial.
If it's anything like the rendering, SLS will be far better
than any of the city's new high-rises. Dranoff and KPF deserve props for
positioning the tower a respectful distance from both Spruce Street's Center
City One condos and the lacy Gothic facade of the Broad Street Ministry, housed
in the former Chambers-Wylie Memorial Presbyterian Church. The advantage of
thin towers is that they don't completely block out the sun or views.
It helps that SLS is lean as well as tall. The tower floors
will be just 7,500 square feet, making it as leggy as a fashion model. Just a
decade ago, Philadelphia condos were far bulkier. The St. James' floor plates
are 16,800 square feet, the Murano's 11,200. For all that height, SLS has fewer
units than 10 Rittenhouse.
But packing in the same number of units requires more
floors. Philadelphia's residential high-rises have been gaining an average of
100 feet in every building cycle - going from 300-footers in the 1980s, to
400-footers in the early 2000s.
Now that we're into the 500-foot range, it's likely that
Philadelphia condos will continue to get taller, as they have in New York,
where a forest of super-tall, 1,000-foot-plus buildings is rising near Central
Park. The demographic for the super-tall condos tends to be older, and they
want a full menu of concierge services. The hotel-condo combo makes that easier
to provide.
But the mix also makes things more complicated on the
ground. To serve the building, Dranoff is seeking zoning changes from City
Council to allow big driveways on both Broad and Spruce Streets, as well as a
height increase. Because the building's loading dock is planned for narrow
Spruce Street, delivery trucks will have to back in, a maneuver sure to cause
traffic headaches. The first Council hearing is scheduled for Feb. 12.
Like other hotel developers, Dranoff is seeking a state
subsidy - $10 million - as well as the city's usual 10-year property-tax
abatement. That's a lot of public subsidy for a building that will serve the
one percent.
But at least the rest of us will get to enjoy looking at it.
Source: Philly.com
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