#air-rights

#air-rights

Plopping a new, modern building atop a cherished, historic one is not a novel concept. In New York, the Hearst Tower rises out of a six-story Art Deco building from 1928. The Antwerp Port House, designed by architect Zaha Hadid, delicately balances a glass structure above a fire station. And using air rights to develop skyscrapers over transit hubs to fund their improvements is nothing new, either.

Staring across the Hudson, the young architect imagined a helicopter lifting a trailer from a dinky New Jersey development and placing it on top of a building somewhere in Manhattan. "It was a fantasy," he tells me, "but it was kind of a crystallization of the way I wanted to live in New York." It was the late 1980s. Tesoro was more than a decade out of architecture school and had been running his own firm for a few years.