The public courtyard at 1221 Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan has a new look (and a lot more plants) after an extensive renovation.
Photographer: Tom SibleyHow to Fill a Hole in Rockefeller Center
A $50 million makeover by Milan-based ACPV Architects turns a sunken plaza in Midtown Manhattan from an “urban void” into a place to socialize.
The revered sociologist William Whyte had a lot of rules about designing places where people would want to gather, and one of them was very easy to follow. “Unless there is a compelling reason, an open space shouldn’t be sunk,” he wrote wrote in his 1980 book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. “Once there, you feel rather as if you were at the bottom of a well.”
So when the owners of a sunken plaza in midtown Manhattan decided to bring the nearly half-century-old space below Sixth Avenue up to date and up to code, they understood the challenge that awaited.