Manhattan transfer - apartment in Manhattan, New York

Architectural Review, The, June, 1999 by Verity Love

An old warehouse in southern Manhattan has been renovated as fiats, with the top floor as the luminous finely detailed piece de resistance.

To realize their desire to live with views of the sky and skyline of Manhattan, Kathryn Dean and Charles Wolf set up a cooperative group and acquired a dilapidated electrical warehouse in TriBeCa (short for the Triangle Below Canal Street). The district, once the centre for Manhattan's wholesale and retail food suppliers, is characterized by the nineteenth-century industrial buildings that line its streets and are historic examples of cast iron construction. TriBeCa is now an area of chic loft living and lively restaurants, but when the cooperative bought their building the markets had moved and properties were abandoned and decaying.

The warehouse faces east onto Duane Park and has six storeys. It was decided to let the ground floor as a shop which would earn the building income, and the five partners of the cooperative would each occupy one of the upper levels.

In return for taking the most desirable top floor, Dean and Wolf, who are partners in practice as well as being husband and wife, agreed to act as unpaid architects of the renovations required to make the building legally habitable and sorted out the complex paperwork required for change of use.

The roof and parapet were replaced, the east face repaired and windows in the west face widened. To provide an emergency exit, the main stair was extended to the roof. New services were installed and a lift created in an abandoned shaft. Dean/Wolf designed the flats on the lower levels for their cooperative partners, and the new toy shop on the ground floor (Wolf himself built freestanding structures inside it). At the same time, the architects were working on design of their own flat on the top floor.

At the heart of their design is manipulation of light. Though it overlooks the small park on the east, the building is otherwise hemmed in by neighbours. On plan, it is a long narrow and slightly irregular rectangle and in its original state, the top floor was illuminated by windows only on the east and west.

Having established an office on the east, Dean/Wolf separated it from the living room at the centre by a sliding sandblasted glass partition, keeping bedrooms to the quieter west side. But their masterstroke was to cut a courtyard in the middle, restructuring the roof's steel beams and building a precipitous unadorned flight of precast concrete steps to the roof. The court which is paved with limestone is a complex luminous conduit, transmitting light into the interior in a variety of ways. Its walls are slightly skewed in plan so that surfaces catching the changing light act like a prism. Partly lined with rich glimmering copper sheets, it is otherwise enclosed by sandblasted and clear glass panels. A huge pivoting glass door leads into the living room on the east, while on the west, panels of clear and sandblasted glass separate courtyard from bedrooms. Clerestory lights scoop luminance into living room and bathroom; two near the floor direct it into the flat below.

The same materials have been used inside to similar effect. Sheets of copper lining one wall of the living room and facing kitchen cabinets create rich reflections in an otherwise austere interior. Floors are of polished concrete, the colour and texture echoed in the plastered ceiling. Shadow gaps serve to isolate floor and ceiling from walls of sandblasted brick, making them appear to float and emphasizing the horizontal quality of the spaces. Other spatial manipulations occur in passages between the various zones, their asymmetries creating false perspectives and reflecting the slight distortion of the plan.

Impressively, much of the construction, including the joinery, was carried out by Wolf himself, for reasons of economy but also because of the difficulty of finding experienced craftsmen. The result is fine detailing throughout.

Architect

Dean/Wolf Architects

Project architects

Kathryn Dean, Charles Wolff, Karel McAllister, Kelley Bryant, Aaron Fein

Photographers

Peter Aaron/Esto