Petting Zoo

WRT Urban Garden Room at One Bryant Park on Vimeo.

On Thursday I took my class on a field trip to One Bryant Park, the sustainable skyscraper that is almost complete at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. We received a three-hour tour from project architect Serge Appel from Cook + Fox, including everything from the ice stored in the basement to the inside of the crystal crown. Next week they will all turn in reviews of the building (their first was on the High Line). My favorite moment of the tour was my first encounter with the building: I popped up from the subway on Sixth Avenue and saw through the lobby glass a set of wild green shapes. As soon as I was through the big glass doors, all the noise of the avenue stopped, and I was in a tall transparent room with three oversized aliens growing moss, vines and lichen on every side. A few others had found their way in and were eating lunch at cafe tables like those in Bryant Park across the street. It turns out this is a privately-owned public space, the Urban Garden Room, open to anyone, just off the building’s lobby proper. In summer the glass fronting the street will slide up, making it an outdoor eating spot. The verdant aliens are the work of landscape architects WRT, albeit derivative of Patrick Blanc. Few seem to know about the space yet, so if you work in midtown, I would make it an immediate lunchtime destination. It is a new iteration of pocket parks like GreenAcre and Paley Park (just up Sixth) and it will be interesting to see if it succeeds like those or fails like so many others.

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By Alexandra Lange

Alexandra Lange is an architecture critic and author, and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winner for Criticism, awarded for her work as a contributing writer for Bloomberg CityLab. She is currently the architecture critic for Curbed and has written extensively for Design Observer, Architect, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. Lange holds a PhD in 20th-century architecture history from New York University. Her writing often explores the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and design, with a focus on how the built environment shapes everyday life. She is also a recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary from AIGA, an honor she shares with Design Observer’s Editor-in-Chief, Ellen McGirt.