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YEAR: |
2002 |
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STATUS: |
completed |
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LOCATION: |
new york, ny |
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PROJECT TYPE: |
multi-unit residential |
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Client: Gotham Organization
Project Team: SAA - Interior Architecture and Design; SLCE - Building Architect
Project Type: New Construction - Rental
Atlas New York is located one block from New York City’s fashion epicenter, Bryant Park. The new construction is a mixed-use apartment and office building designed for young fashion-conscious New Yorkers. The project involved interventions on the exterior facade at street level, the lobbies, elevators, internal circulation experiences, the lounge and the gym.
The project explores dialogues among art, artifact, and architecture. The methodology is intended to accentuate the transparent and translucent material “skins” employed, both literally and conceptually, and it underlines the theater-like voyeurism characteristic of the relationship between street life and life inside New York’s buildings. Photography, paintings, and paint are regarded as “construction materials” for the spaces of both the main and the secondary lobbies.
“Frames” and framed views alternatively come to the fore and recede relative to the physical walls, their color, and architect-generated paintings. All the elements are juxtaposed with projected and backlit, fabric-like photographic images. The nature of each spatial layer, both of construction and perception, is intended as a systematic allusion to the fabric and cloth of the Fashion District.
The promenade from the street to the building’s core involves a sequence of spaces gradually extricated from the noise of the city, colors and textures. The palette of the outer lobby is conceived as an “urban theater” followed by a gray stone threshold chamber where the murmur of running water drowns the city noise. The hazy glow of blue light adds to the otherworldliness of the inner lobby. The walls shift from strong colors to gray and white. The large photo projection of a lace-covered woman’s body generates the choice of the lacelike veining for the Italian marble that covers the walls. The sensuality of the human body becomes linked to bodies of space, commenting on the ambiguity between skin and fabric, and between that which is “to cover” and that which is “to reveal.” The glossy white interior of the elevators strips the space bare.
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