Upper East Side Townhouse—Historic District
New York, NY
1975
New York is a city that was made of town houses. The block where this building is located is one that has gone through transformations in scale and type. The site—part of the Upper East Side Historic District—is a very narrow lot (eighteen feet wide) located between two institutional buildings: The Russell Sage Foundation, formerly the Asia House—designed by Philip Johnson—to the left and a Presbyterian Neo-Gothic church to the right.
The different constraints that had to be dealt with were resolved by designing the building to act as a hinge between the two larger structures of opposite styles. While the first two floors are aligned with the church, the bowed facade of the upper floors links the building with the Russell Sage Foundation.
While the project resolves the ‘landmarks’ status in its public face, the town house type has been transformed, both in plan and section. The building was developed using the stair—an ellipse with its long side perpendicular to the party walls—as a spatial organizer, creating a transverse vertical space. The typical section of the town house was inverted by locating the public areas of the house in the upper floors where the spaces generated by the stair are fully developed. In the lower floors, the stair is set within a rectangular figure dividing the plan in front and back. At the fourth floor, the stair volume starts to disengage from the box and is framed by a plane implying an elliptical volume. The eye of the ellipse creates an inner volume that projects through the roof in the form of a lantern.
The different constraints that had to be dealt with were resolved by designing the building to act as a hinge between the two larger structures of opposite styles. While the first two floors are aligned with the church, the bowed facade of the upper floors links the building with the Russell Sage Foundation.
While the project resolves the ‘landmarks’ status in its public face, the town house type has been transformed, both in plan and section. The building was developed using the stair—an ellipse with its long side perpendicular to the party walls—as a spatial organizer, creating a transverse vertical space. The typical section of the town house was inverted by locating the public areas of the house in the upper floors where the spaces generated by the stair are fully developed. In the lower floors, the stair is set within a rectangular figure dividing the plan in front and back. At the fourth floor, the stair volume starts to disengage from the box and is framed by a plane implying an elliptical volume. The eye of the ellipse creates an inner volume that projects through the roof in the form of a lantern.