NY Times Building Lobby Garden

Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s international design competition design for the New York Times Headquarter’s building, centered around a central garden courtyard – now considered the building’s heart and soul. A counterpoint to Times Square bustling neighborhood, the garden’s 360-degree visibility reveals a serene, symbolic slice of a Hudson River Valley woodland landscape. 3-D model simulations of seasonal light and levels provided horticultural science data that established sustainable growing condition design criteria. A grove of fifty-foot-tall Paper Birch trees were inserted precisely where direct sunlight would fall. The trees’ multi-stemmed form emerges from rolling woodland sedge mounds, accented with Autumn Ferns. These low-growing evergreen sedge “hillocks” contrast with and visually register against the lobby’s four-sided level floor. A straight timber path slices through the Birch grove as an extension of the lobby floor and purposefully bridges over the garden’s undulating topography. The garden’s minimalist expression harmonizes with the rigor of the building’s geometry by unexpectedly suffusing nature’s multi-sensory qualities into an urban workspace context.