Born from the idiosyncrasies and scale of New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, AIA National Chapter Honor Award Winner, One Jackson Square, responds in dramatic fashion to its celebrated locale.
Home to the highest concentration of early architecture in New York City, the historic district of Greenwich Village requires that new structures must respect its existing architecture, the artistic life within its boundaries, and the history that permeates its streets. Formerly a surface parking lot, the six-sided, split-zone site above two subway tunnels posed significant challenges, which the design of the 30-unit luxury residential development negotiated through its massing, material expression, and robust foundation.
The building volume steps down from 11 stories to seven stories, from north to south, accommodating the zoning laws and mediating the varied scales of the neighborhood. Undulating bands of glass identify individual floors, creating a ribbon-like series of convexities and concavities along the street wall. The predominantly masonry structures of the immediate surroundings, along with the park, are “played back” in the glazed façade, creating an intimacy of scale congruent with the local context through juxtaposition.
The fluid form of the façade is reprised in the lobby, where a bamboo-clad volume is conceived as a block of wood eroded over time by the ebb and flow of residents, much like a river erodes its banks.
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