Redressed Duplex

Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

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Redressed Duplex

Manhattan, New York, NY, United States

Firm

Type

Residential › Apartment Private House

YEAR

2011

This project is an exploration of digital
artisanry as architectural appliqué.
Oxford Dictionary defines redress as “to remedy or set right”.
Our project “re-dresses” bad new luxury residential interior construction. Our client, a structural engineer by training and an art/design connoisseur/collector by passion, bought a new 1500 SF duplex penthouse, pre-construction, site-unseen. Not surprisingly, it suffered cramped proportions, poor layout, and clumsy detailing: bad white-box construction. We were told: “make it stunning; a sexy, one-of-a-kind home; consummately New York”. Further, the client was fully in support of our deploying state-of-the-art digital design/fabrication methods off-site, as he needed to remain living there. So the project was an anti-gut, less a renovation than a redressing. The new interior architecture is a 5-6” thick additive layer. Clothing analogies abound - we cloaked the white-box interior with a series of couture architectural garments. We dressed it up.There
were three primary elements added to the interior that define the
transformation: Back-lit CNC-Corian Negligee: The most compelling aspect of the
existing spaces was that one felt immersed in the Manhattan skyline. 270 degree
views brought in soft twinkles of the urban nightscape. Our concept was to wrap
a softly-pleated garment around the oddly-shaped existing spaces, hiding the
previous architectural “sins”, creating a seductive architectural “negligee”.
White CNC-milled corian is backlit with LED lights to continue the Manhattan
nightscape into the interior. Origami folded-plate steel and corian stair:
Aesthetic and structural criteria were met by CNC-water-jet cut and folded
steel plate welded to a tube steel stringer to create the floating stair with
cantilevered treads. Bedroom mirror/tv/light-wall: Up in the bedrooms, a
sinuous LED-backlit mirror-wall containing TVs links the two bedrooms back to
the skyline - the ultimate sexiness which is this residence, and Manhattan
itself.

This project received an award for exemplary use of structural steel from the American Institute of Steel Construction in July of 2012.Project Photographs by Evan Joseph