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Grant/Fulton Recital Hall
HBNY (Parenthetical Space)
Hyundai Shops
Lusso
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Stadtbahnstation Rathaus-Süd/ LRT station Rathaus-SüdHBNY (Parenthetical Space)
Translucent surfaces demarcate an innovative, shared loft space.
According to SINGLE speed DESIGN, the density of today's urban environments is deceptive: while physically substantial, cities can be quite vacant in terms of actual occupancy. Transactions among peoples, places, and events accelerated by the Internet foster a nomadic lifestyle that not only contributes to material, space, and energy waste but also to the spiraling cost of housing as the available quantity of apartments is artificially diminished.
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Positioned somewhere between a hotel and a home, HBNY is a prototype for shared metropolitan living: the loft-like project, created by SINGLE speed DESIGN, posits a human-scale solution for this urban-scale phenomenon by allowing twelve on-the-go users to share the spatial resources of a single apartment. A glass-clad “locker wall” serves as storage and display or personal artifacts and separates the living space from the bedrooms. Through sliding doors, translucent surfaces, and built-in workspaces, this wall also allows the users to customize varying degrees of interaction between public and private activities.
In the large open living area, aluminum mesh curtains can be positioned as what the architects call “spatial parentheses,” allowing users to redefine the larger whole into smaller programmatic territories. In the same way parentheses can fundamentally change the nuance of a sentence, new paths, separations, and patterns of inhabitations can be dynamically redefined by merely moving the curtains. Through dual lighting tracks that shine on the inside and/or outside of the curtain, the controlled illumination of the mesh changes their opacity, allowing varying degrees of privacy.
Formal name of project: HBNY (Parenthetical Space)
Location: New York, NY
Gross square footage: 2300 sq.ft.
Completion Date: June 2006
Total construction cost: $380,000
Architect:
SINGLE speed DESIGN
171 Brookline Street
Cambridge, MA 02139
T:617-576-9300 F:617-576-7200
www.singlespeeddesign.com/
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