So do ticket prices: The whole shebang, one cocktail included, comes to $83 per person. An extra 20 bucks buys you a few seconds in a glass elevator that glides up the side of the building from deck to tip so that the view becomes that much more astronomical. Interior spaces, by Snøhetta) provides a refuge from the wind-battered outdoor deck. The woo-woo walk-through continues upstairs, where an icily cozy café with a gas fireplace in the corner (designed, like the rest of the When it really gets going, it’s manic and loud enough to block out thought, not to mention the panicked howls of children. This entire Museum of Knockoffs is enriched by a soundscape of rumbles and electronic whooshes of the kind we’ve been trained to associate with mechanical failures in outer space. Silver balloons fill yet another room, wafting on updrafts, crowding your field of vision and recalling Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds. This corporate context it looks more like shavings from one of Anish Kapoor’s chrome kidneys. In a separate space, an array of shiny metal blobs scattered across the floor turns out to be a real Kusama (“Clouds”), though in Some visitors stretch out on the floor, which may be a good idea if you’ve timed your day correctly and the edibles are starting to kick in. It could almost be one of Yayoi Kusama’s popular Infinity Mirror Rooms, only less mind-expanding. Then you enter a large room and stand on a mirrored floor (visitors are advised not to wear skirts) beneath a mirrored ceiling, catching repetitive glimpses of yourself in mirrored walls. Instead, you file down a hallway that’s been bathed in uniform orange light, like a down-market James Turrell. “You emerge,” the promotional copy assures us, “into a boundless, structureless world, one with its own relationship to physics and time.” That sounds alarming, but relax: Your head doesn’t in fact go spinning off into the atmosphere by itself, and you don’t find yourself suddenly back in fourth grade. The Summit’s website promises that the elevator will get you higher than high. The trip reminds me of a recurring nightmare I have from time to time. Lights flicker, and as a chunka-chunka rhythm picks up speed, you suspect you’re on a runaway vertical train about to get shot into the clouds. This one, though, is special: It rattles and thumps (electronically, I trust). Any ordinary elevator in a modern office building can speed you up a quarter mile in a few dozen seconds, smoothly and silently enough that it seems like you’re going nowhere. Then, the tower is merely a base for the Summit, which in turn contains Air, a full-immersion experience created by Kenzo Digital.Īir starts at ground level - or below, since you begin the journey to the skyline by descending from the street to the main concourse level at Grand Central Terminal. If, on the other hand, you understand that real estate isn’t real at all, that altitude is a state of mind, that a lofty view is in the eye of the beholder, and that the world is full of beholders desperate to be distracted from the panorama they’ve paid to see, One Vanderbilt becomes something else entirely. If you’re a literalist, One Vanderbilt is a very tall midtown office building with a new observation deck on the 91st through 93rd floors, high enough to look down on the Empire State Building.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |