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Greene Street Loft
New York City
David Hotson Architect
Light takes top billing at this lofty
Soho dwelling
© Eduard Hueber |
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For more photos click on 'photos
& drawings' above.
To see the people and products
behind this project click on 'people & products.'
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Designed for a young couple looking to
take maximum advantage of the tall ceilings and enormous windows,
this Soho loft began with chaos. Occupied by artists in the
1970s, a collection of illegal conversion features included
raised bathroom floors, windowless bedrooms, jerry-rigged
mezzanines, clothes dryers venting into coffee cans filled
with water, and a single exposure of enormous windows, with
no light or ventilation on the other three sides of the apartment.
A gut renovation created a generous,
double-height living room at the front of the loft, with the
bedrooms, kitchen, and dining area all borrowing light and
air from it. In order to allow light to penetrate, the partitions
separating the rooms were fashioned from etched glass panels,
framed in satin aluminum, and composed of hinged leaves that
allow the rooms to open directly to the living room space.
At the mezzanine level, the floor joining the media room to
the two children’s bedrooms was itself constructed of
laminated glass, and configured as a bridge passing over the
dining area. Light fixtures fitted into the translucent walls
and floor provide varied means for lighting public and private
areas.
The project is rendered architecturally
as a series of clearly defined interpenetrating volumes. The
principle volume of the double-height living area is defined
by full-height walls on three sides and carried across the
fourth side by the glass and aluminum mezzanine railings and
the overhanging upper level bedroom. The dining and kitchen
area, media room, and bridge are configured as secondary volumes
sheathed in translucent glass. Materials are treated as the
surfaces of concave spaces rather than as faces of convex
solids. This careful delineation of volume focuses upon architectural
space, rather than sculptural form, as the principal subject
of the design.
Click here to see September 2001's
Record
Interiors.
Formal name
of project:
Greene Street Loft
Location:
New York City
Gross square
footage:
1,650 sq ft
Total Construction
Cost:
$350,000
Architect's
firm:
David Hotson Architect
176 Grand Street
New York NY 10013
tel 212-965-8828
fax 212-965-8830
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