You’ve got to see this photo on the NY Times‘ City Room blog.
After a third climber tried yesterday to scale the Renzo Piano-designed jungle gym
(scroll to bottom), composed of horizontal ceramic rods on the façade of the newspaper’s new headquarters, workers (depicted in the photo) were busily prying off those stunt-tempting rungs.
Sewell Chan reports in today’s Times:
A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because
The Times was still settling on a course of action, said that the
company planned to remove about nine feet of the ceramic rods from the
bottom of the screen that encases the building. By late Wednesday, the
screen had been shortened by only a few feet….Representatives of Mr. Piano could not be reached for comment about the decision to remove some of the rods.
As David Dunlap reported yesterday in City Room, these rods are not just decorative:
Likening it to a “fabric of ceramic,” he [Piano] called the screens a “suncoat”—as opposed to a raincoat—that would cut the transmission of light
and heat into the interior, thereby permitting the use of clear, rather
than tinted, glass.
So much for transparency. The Times reporters may not have succeeded in reaching Piano for comment (or in prying any substantive information from the newspaper’s spokeswoman), but hopefully the Times’ top brass have managed to make contact with the architect. According to Dunlap:
Michael Golden, the vice chairman of The New York Times Company,
said he was determined to find a solution that would not compromise the
architecture. “We’re going to sort this out within the design
sensibility of the building,” he said.