New York New York

There is a famed anecdotal evidence that designing a tower is easier than designing a chair. The boastful comparison was rather meant to aggrandize architects’ furniture, but this improbable claim reveals a curious analogy: both are veritable object proper. An accidental type, stemming from sheer real-estate speculation, the tower is the ultimate architectural object, New York its indisputable place of origin. Akin to furniture, tall buildings of various kinds have been seemingly haphazardly placed in the city's urban landscape, as copiable items in a vast and sprawling family of things. The singular model proved to be easily malleable and able to adapt to any zoning codes and developers’ legerdemain, continuously breaking the records. Its indefinite condition makes the tower an expression of the latest fads, their agglomeration a testament to our collective unfolding. This studio somehow takes the tower at face value and sees its proliferation as the ultimate outcome of the building as a thing; an object with a DNA, a structure, a system, a figure, a type and a form—and all this always, at the same time. In an attempt to do justice to the radical idea of the tower, and its supreme indifference, we propose to embrace one of the many available towers in the New York skyline and make a duplicate of it: New York New York. What happens when we copy an object as a building; how does it transform; what and who is it for; what makes it relevant; what changes in hundred, or just twenty years; what are the potentials of a seemingly outdated figure… Many questions to answer in one semester, but we can only try.