New York City
Archi-Tectonics

In New York City, Winka Dubbeldam counters her building’s cascading facade with the Schein loft’s horizontal rhythms

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A rippling curtain wall of bent glass flows dramatically down the front of architect Winka Dubbeldam’s 11-story residential building, adjoining a 19th-century brick warehouse [record, November 2004, page 198]. The two structures, in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, merge as one, with floor plates aligned to house 23 apartments. While the Modernist glass folds cascading beside the stoic historic structure call to mind a waterfall, a loft apartment on the eighth floor evokes another part of the forest. Here, Dubbeldam, with her firm Archi-Tectonics, created an asymmetrical circulation spine, clad in bog oak, that anchors the loft with unexpectedly fluid geometry.

“The facade is a folded vertical landscape, and I wanted to internalize that notion,” says the architect, who was commissioned to design the loft after she had completed the shell. For the two-bedroom apartment, she adds, “the undulating folds of the curtain wall are wrapped inside out.” The facade’s transparency morphs into the wood spine’s expressive horizontality and planar rhythms.

Dubbeldam, who made one of the lower-floor lofts her own home, says she welcomed the assignment to craft another interior here. (Her firm had delivered the condominium units, ranging from 1,900 to 5,700 square feet, to the developer as Sheetrock-finished, open-plan spaces with 12-foot-high ceilings.) Artist and photographer Peter Schein was her client for the 3,200-square-foot, eighth-story apartment, a floor-through running from west to east and perched two levels above the complex’s 19th-century section. “Peter was open to sculptural forms,” the architect recalls, “but he requested a well-defined transition zone between public and private spaces.” Generous art storage and low-maintenance, environmentally friendly materials were also priorities.

The apartment’s entry opens onto the shorter leg of the L-shaped main living space. To the west, the slant of the floor-to-ceiling glazing, bordered by a terrace with sweeping views of the Hudson River and Lower Manhattan, immediately comes into view. The eastern wall introduces bog-oak-veneer plywood, a species Dubbeldam selected for its warm variegated hues. This sustainable material was waxed, formed into panels, and fitted into a black-metal framing system. Drawers within the wall accommodate art supplies and housewares, while the wall masks structural columns. Near the entry, an asymmetrical full-height section of drywall pivots to reveal a niche for oversize paintings and photography. As Dubbeldam points out, “The wall can be left open to create an ephemeral art installation.”

Want the full story? Read the entire article in our September 2006 issue.
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