Report: Rogers Picked To Design Vornado Tower Atop Port Authority

The London-based Architect’s Journal reports that British starchitect Lord Richard Rogers has won a contest to design the planned tower on top of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

The tower, which Steve Roth’s Vornado would develop, is a proposed 42-story office building that invokes the crude, exoskeletal design of the bus station below. Should the news be correct, Mr. Rogers beat out designs by Pelli Clark Pelli and KPF.

This summer, when the Port Authority unveiled the three competing designs, the bi-state agency gave Vornado, in a venture with the Lawrence Ruben Company, an extra year—until August 2009—before it is supposed to fully sign off on the deal. The REIT has no tenant signed to take any space in the planned tower, which would go up across the street from a new 1 million-square-foot tower currently under construction, 11 Times Square. That tower is in the later stages of construction and still has no tenants, a worry for developer SJP Properties as the leasing market has slowed to a crawl.