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nArchitects sets the front and back facades of this mid-rise apartment building in motion to capture views and light.
In a digital world made of billions of binary computations, a building that switches views, cladding, and balconies back and forth seems to capture the spirit of the times. The seven-story apartment building designed by nArchitects on Norfolk Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, though, didn’t start in a haze of theoretical brainstorming. Instead, partners Eric Bunge, AIA, and Mimi Hoang began with some very practical considerations, namely New York City zoning regulations and the needs of the building’s residents.
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The client, a first-time developer, came to nArchitects with a building permit in hand and the need to move quickly. Because he had gotten approval through New York City’s contextual zoning regulations, he received a building bonus but needed to provide a community space on the ground floor and align his building with the generic brick apartment block recently completed immediately to the north. For more than 100 years, the Lower East Side had hosted wave after wave of immigrants, providing cheap housing in tenements and low-wage employment in sweatshops, clothing stores, and ethnic restaurants. In the past decade, though, hip boutiques, bars, and eateries had moved into the neighborhood, along with upscale condos and the wealthy folks who live in them.
hen Bunge and Hoang began working on the project, they developed a scheme with two apartments on each of four floors, a two-story penthouse unit on top, and an art gallery on the ground floor and in the cellar. Eventually, the architects and the client decided to put one 1,450-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment on each of the four main floors while keeping the penthouse (2,100 square feet) and art gallery (2,700 square feet). The challenge for nArchitects was to design a building that brought light and views into a narrow, 25-foot-wide building and that somehow negotiated the very different personalities of the old Lower East Side and the newly cool neighborhood it was becoming.
To align their building with its neighbor to the north, Bunge and Hoang had to set it back 5 feet from the front property line on Norfolk Street. While they weren’t happy about stepping away from the street, they used it as an opportunity to design bay windows that project out 18 inches from the building facade. “We wanted to give the building some depth on the front,” says Bunge, “just as bay windows and fire escapes do for the old buildings in the neighborhood.”
Formal name of project: Switch Building
Location: 109 Norfolk Street, New York
Size: 15,000 gross square feet (7stories, 5 apartments, one art gallery)
Cost: $4 million
Completion date: Dec 2007 (started construction in Oct 2004)
Owner: 109 Norfolk LLC
Architect:
nARCHITECTS, PLLC
68 Jay Street, #317
Brooklyn, NY 11201
T: 718 260 0845
F: 718 260 0847
e: n@nARCHITECTS.com
Want the full story? Read the entire article in our June 2008 issue.
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