497 Greenwich Street
New York City
Archi-tectonics

Winka Dubbeldam slips a crystalline building into the tight urban fabric of a lower west side neighborhood

© Floto + Warner

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By Clifford A. Pearson

Fold paper and you give it extra strength and, in the right hands, added beauty. Fold glass and you get an “inhabitable facade,” says Winka Dubbeldam of the 11-story loft building that her firm, Archi-tectonics, completed in October. Using bent glass and a fluid approach to geometry, Dubbeldam created a curtain wall with depth, a street front that envelopes space as much as it separates inside from out.

While New York City developers have been riding a booming residential market over the past several years, almost all of the apartment towers they’ve built have been numbingly formulaic in terms of floor plans and exterior design. Jonathon Carroll, a London banker who had hired Dubbeldam to design a New York apartment for him in the late 1990s, looked at the situation and saw an opportunity to do something different. Wary of a stock market that he correctly saw as overvalued, he decided in 1999 to invest his money in real estate instead. And rather than the cookie-cutter apartment towers rising all over Manhattan, he asked Dubbeldam to design spacious lofts in a building that would generate some architectural excitement.

By inserting a new building on the street and incorporating the empty six-story warehouse next door, the architect could create 23 living units and provide space on the ground floor for an art gallery or stores, as well as a small fitness center and meeting room for the residents.

Wanting to establish a dynamic relationship between old and new, Dubbeldam explored the idea of “slippage” in her design. Instead of presenting a static pairing of eras and structures, she decided to slip one up and past the other. At the same time, she developed the notion of creasing the new glass facade, treating it as the fashion designer Issey Miyake might a pleat in the fabric of a dress. Bending the glass off the vertical plane and angling it off the horizontal, Dubbeldam sculpted a remarkably three-dimensional facade.

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Formal name of Project:
497 Greenwich Street

Location:
New York City

Gross square footage:
77,000 sq. ft.

Owner:
Jonathon Carroll
Take One, LLC

Design Architect:
Archi-tectonics
200 Varick Street, Suite 507B
New York, NY 10014
Phone 212.226.0303
Fax 212.206.0920
www.archi-tectonics.com