If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.
—F. Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms
- Christian de Portzamparc returned from New York to Paris in late 1967, having decided during his sojourn abroad that he no longer wished to be an architect. By May of the following year, the “eco-hippie-Marxist”—as he later described himself to an interviewer—felt only more convinced by the political convulsions then seizing the city that psychology, not design, was the only field capable of comprehending a society in such drastic flux. At some point over the ensuing five decades, after winning the Pritzker Prize and designing the French embassy in Berlin and cultural and institutional projects the world over, an older, presumably wiser de Portzamparc must have reflected on the strange path that had carried him to the peak of the architecture profession, and wondered, Is this it? And so it was, back in New York for his first major residential project in the United States, that de Portzamparc designed One57 (originally Carnegie5…