The Hotel Mogul
Ian Schrager invented the velvet rope, the boutique hotel, and the well-designed life. What’s left to accomplish? Plenty.
People keep gathering outside Ian Schrager’s latest project in downtown Manhattan to take photos, but they’re not paparazzi. They’re taking pictures of 40 Bond — the 90,000-square-foot building is the celebrity. Designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss neo-modernists Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, 40 Bond blows hot and cool with equal aplomb: Its translucent green façade shimmers like Kryptonite in the fading afternoon light, yet at the building’s base, a swirling, graffiti-derived steel gate looks like a Le Corbusier brise-soleil that’s melted in New York’s high-intensity glare.[...] At an age when many men begin taking their foot off the gas, Schrager, whose storied biography runs from law school to Studio 54 to a jail stint to the reinvention of the American hotel, is entering the most ambitious phase of his career yet.
