VIA 57 West

2016 Residential Architect Design Awards
Multifamily Housing: Award

Text by Amanda Kolson Hurley

Conceived as a hybrid between a courtyard apartment building and a tower, VIA 57 West in New York City combines the density and intimacy of the former with the height and visual drama of the latter. One corner of the structure is pulled up to a peak of 467 feet, forming a broad slope down to the Hudson River, an arrangement which allowed the Bjarke Ingels Group to maintain views for a neighboring building, also owned by the Durst Organization.

Apartments in the 831,000-square-foot building are arranged in a herringbone pattern to capture daylight and views, and the central courtyard, which is lined with amenities such as a children’s room and game room, offers ample green space. The Scandinavian-inspired interiors are simple, with white walls and oak floors; a staggered-brick wall in the lobby adds texture. “This project is innovative and commendable,” juror Kevin Kudo-King said. “I like the common spaces, but was disappointed in the units, which seem staid compared to the rest of the building.”

This is one of twelve American projects on the 2016 World Architecture Festival shortlist.

By Ian Volner

Manhattan is not quite a stranger to offbeat typological experiments: Pyramidal multi-use buildings and sprawling indoor–outdoor complexes were quite popular 40 or so years ago, before developers lost their nerve and started going for anodyne context-iness. So BIG’s West 57th is, in a sense, a return to form—and a big, jagged, twisting V of a form, at that.

Rising from a simple rectangular base, each of the 1.003-million-square-foot building’s four elevations appears entirely different from the next, the effect of carefully contrived cutaways that bring light and views (the Hudson River to the west, the skyline to south and east) to all of the 700 apartments within. This visual dynamism is complemented by a programmatic complexity unusual in a residential high-rise: Public-facing street-level storefronts, art displays, and an improved pedestrian streetscape bring a little action to what has long been a very dull enclave of West Midtown. A grand staircase connects these to a verdant central courtyard on the third floor that echoes the proportions of nearby Central Park, with some apartments opening directly onto the courtyard.

The overall sense of a private building with a public dimension—and one in which the boundary between the two spheres is deliberately blurred—seems in keeping with the Copenhagen- and New York–based designers’ avowed “Scandimericanism,” a blending of their open, socially minded Danish outlook with a rougher Gothamite edge. This hybridization is also expressed in a materials palette that mixes natural elements like cork and oak with decidedly urban ones like blackened steel and exposed brick.