56 Leonard Street

Project Details

Project Description

FROM THE ARCHITECTS:

The top of any tower is its most visible element and, in keeping with this, the top of 56 Leonard Street is the most expressive part of the project and relates to the tradition of iconic tower tops in New York City. This expressiveness is driven directly by the requirements of the interior, consisting of ten large-scale penthouses with expansive outdoor spaces and spacious living areas. These large program components register on the exterior as large-scale blocks, cantilevering and shifting according to internal configurations and the desire to capture specific views that ultimately result in the sculptural expression of the top. Meanwhile, the base of the tower responds to the special character of Tribeca. This is a part of New York characterized by a wide range of building scales - from small townhouses to large industrial blocks and the ubiquitous high-rise buildings of downtown. By grouping together blocks of various sizes, including lobby, parking deck, housing amenities and a few apartments, the tower reflects and incorporates each of these neighborhood scales.

The overall appearance of the tower is very much a result of accepting and pushing to the limit simple and familiar local methods of construction. As a volume, the building has extreme proportions – at the very edge of what is structurally possible – and given its relatively small footprint, is exceptionally tall and slender. The building also shows its structural ‘bones’ and does not hide the method of its fabrication underneath layers of cladding. Instead, exposed horizontal concrete slabs register the floor-by-floor stacking of the construction process and exposed in-situ concrete columns allow the scale of the structural forces at work to be experienced from within the interior. The system of staggering and stacking is further animated through operable windows in every second- or third- façade unit.

This unusual feature for high-rise buildings also allows occupants to directly control fresh air intake. Together these different strategies – considering the tower from the inside-out, responding to local scales, and maximizing the potential of local construction systems – produce a building where only five out of the 145 apartments are repeated, giving those who will live in this project their own unique home characterized by distinct moments of individuality within the overall stack.