Wednesday, February 11, 2009
When Bruce Ratner hired Frank Gehry in 2004 to design a wrinkled-looking 76-story residential skyscraper in New York near the Brooklyn Bridge, the market for eye-popping luxury condominiums was booming, and the world-class architect's multimillion-dollar fees probably seemed relatively insignificant. Now, however, the economy is crumbling, the building is envisioned as rental apartments and Gehry is bringing a more potent tool to control costs than most architects can deliver.
For the Forest City Ratner Companies, the developer of Beekman Tower, the project will test the idea that an architect can provide powerful (and expensive) modeling software to help keep costs down. Using the software, fabricators have produced a facade with various textures at a price that Gehry says does not exceed what a developer would pay to build a conventional boxy building of similar dimensions.
The project, Beekman Tower, which has $680 million in debt and is due to open with 904 apartments in 2010, will be Gehry's most important contribution to New York's skyline. With the building's distinctly bumpy silhouette, "the idea I was trying to achieve was a fabric, so it would catch the light," Gehry said.
Gehry developed the software, now called Digital Project, to produce a sculpture of a diaphanous fish for a Barcelona exposition in 1992 and refined it to specify the titanium panels cloaking his celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1997. He based it on the three-dimensional software that aerospace companies use. "If they can build airplanes paperless, I think buildings can be built paperless," Gehry said.
In 2002, he spun off the software business into a company called Gehry Technologies, which sells Digital Project to other developers and architects and trains project teams to use it.
Digital Project works by modeling, in three dimensions, every odd shape an architect envisions and then letting engineers and architects reconcile the shape with a building's site, ductwork and other features. It shows how one change to a building's ingredients changes all the others.
The stakes in construction are very high. Developers say that the closeness of the match between what an architect draws and what contractors produce can make or break a project. When engineers and contractors misunderstand how parts of a building connect, resulting delays often inflate a construction budget by 5 or 10 percent.
These days, when banks are loath to risk any money, such contingencies are not available. And some developers do not expect them to return soon.
"If you've got a $100 million cost that your bank engineer has approved, you will add $5 million or $10 million contingency for construction errors into your loan," said Donald Capoccia of BFC Partners, which is building a twisty residential tower called Toren near the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. "In the future, with stricter underwriting requirements, I believe a building with a $100 million deal will have to be done for $90 million or less."
Architects routinely use modeling software, but the latest version of Digital Project would enable them to try extreme designs for skyscrapers. While acknowledging that the Gehry software is impressive, Carl Galioto of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a firm that has designed many skyscrapers, says that it is hard to learn and three or four times as expensive as a conventional modeling program. Revit Architecture, the industry standard from Autodesk, is listed at $5,495 on Autodesk's Web site.
At Beekman Tower, the pressure on Digital Project is intense. The returns on a rental building are likely to be lower than on a condominium, and committing to Gehry's ornate design could burn the developer if it leads to cost overruns.
Beekman Tower, with steel panels that bend a little, a lot or not at all and sit in various ways on the building's skeleton, is definitely complicated. "There is a stair-step character that I tried to achieve," Gehry said.
While Gehry fine-tuned his design and Forest City Ratner tweaked the mix of apartment sizes and shapes, Digital Project analyzed the number of stainless-steel panels that could be used while meeting an essentially fixed price. "There are flat panels, panels that curve a little and panels that curve a lot," explained Dennis Shelden, chief technology officer of Gehry's software company.
Software modeling revealed where panels could sit flush against the skeleton, where they could break without letting in too much cold air, and where they could lean outward.
"We had to find places to put cylinders or cones behind the panels to prop them up," said Sameer Kashyap of Gehry Technologies, who oversees the use of Digital Project at Beekman Tower. "This is the first time a 76-story building has had entirely unique slab edges."
Forest City Ratner's relationship with Gehry is not limited to this project. He also created a design for the multibillion-dollar Atlantic Yards project, with 17 buildings, which the company has proposed for downtown Brooklyn. With lawsuits pending and the economy turned sour, however, none of those buildings have gone to construction.
Of Forest City Ratner's financing for Beekman Tower, $203.9 million is in tax-exempt Liberty bonds, which Ratner secured by agreeing to build a public school at the base ( Gehry did not design it) and by directing $6 million to a fund to support affordable housing. The project must repay a $476.1 million loan from a consortium of six international private lenders. The developer says it is current on its debt service.
Gehry professes confidence that Digital Project will guide the tower smoothly through construction. "The Bilbao Museum came in $3 million under on a $100 million budget," he said. "If there were surprises at Beekman, I would know about them."
Forest City Ratner said that the project is on time and on budget. "It will stay on budget," added a spokeswoman, Joyce Baumgarten.
Success with this version of Digital Project seems crucial to Gehry's legacy. He has frequently been commissioned by institutional clients, which might be expected to be more indulgent than profit-minded developers.
But his image suffered when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued his firm in 2007 because of leaks in his 720,000-square-foot Ray and Maria Stata Center, a laboratory and classroom building with a day care center and gym. (Neither MIT nor Gehry's companies would comment about the litigation, which is pending in Superior Court in Boston.)
But David Gerber, Gehry Technologies' chief marketing officer, said that future refinements of Digital Project will incorporate more information and avoid foul-ups. The latest iteration, Gerber said in a recent interview, even models a building's basement sprinklers.
Architects and developers agree that software to measure a building's ingredients will gain value as governments tighten rules about buildings' effects on the environment. "You can ask a model to show you what shadow a building casts, or how far materials have to travel to a job site," says Phil Bernstein, a technologist with Autodesk.
So Digital Project may offer Gehry a way to make money in an economic era when relatively few clients are likely to be commissioning ambitious buildings. The Swire Group, a Hong Kong concern, used it to deliver One Island East, a tower in Hong Kong, several months ahead of schedule last year.
"Our service is now in consulting," said Shelden, the chief technologist for Gehry Technologies. "But we are in discussion with some clients about a shared-savings model," under which the company would be paid a portion of a client's savings in construction overruns.
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