Spliced Townhouse

New York, NY, United States

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Spliced Townhouse

New York, NY, United States

Firm

Type

Residential › Apartment

YEAR

2010

SIZE

5000 sqft - 10,000 sqft

This renovation and combination of two apartments
occupying several stories of an Upper East Side
townhouse derived its design logic from the idiosyncratic sectional condition
of the existing architecture. The original nineteenth-century structure was
previously converted into separate units, a process that resulted in divergent
floor levels on the north-facing (street-front) and south-facing (garden) sides
of the building. Within a limited square footage (roughly three thousand square
feet), the apartment included six distinct floor elevations. The challenge was
to reconfigure and integrate these discrete levels and separate units into a
single functioning residence.The zone between the divergent
halves was conceived as a spatial joint or splice, negotiating the multiple
elevations and interweaving the public and private circulations. The primary feature of this interstitial zone is a
slatted-wood and blackened-steel screen wrapped by an interconnecting stair. The
stair and screen physically link the different levels of the public program
while strategically arranged voids allow for visual transactions between the
stacked spaces. On the garden side, a spiral stair encased in a perforated
steel cylinder similarly connects the private floors. The continuity of these
vertical elements provides coherence to otherwise discontinuous and fragmented
spaces.