Owner / Client : Private

Year of Completion 2021

Size 30,000 sq ft

Team Members – Julio Salcedo, Carlos Torres, Murilo Machado, Alberto Martínez, KenHo Lee, TingTing Jin, Megan Roy, Elizabeth Mac Willie

Our project is a transformative intervention on an existing 6 story 30,000 sf early XXth century structure located within Manhattan’s Commissioner city grid. The ideas for the innovative restoration effloresce in a new environmentally performative and digitally-fabricated envelope. Being located on a narrow street - mostly oriented East West, the design conjures a material and geometrical system that circumvents an existing façade steel structure to establish an oblique longitudinal relation with the street. The new oblique geometry allows for direct sun access - insolation- as well as a series of visual relations between the interior and the streetscape. In addition, the new envelope provides high performance insulation, and elective ventilation and porosity. The envelope was conceived as a system of panels that can be further reconfigured by rotation and mirroring. The metal and insulation panels are built by a digital process of cutting and folding. In such a manner, the capacity of the design software to flatten three-dimensional geometry closely aligned with the fabrication protocols. The folding of the panels hence operates at a variety of scales: the folding provides the necessary rigidity to a thin material, negotiates the connections to the existing structure sidestepping old columns, sites the project in the urban context of a narrow street, and ultimately affords a solar and environmental connection. In so doing, the design recalls the Manhattanhenge phenomenon - the bi-annual alignment of the Manhattan’s Commissioner’s grid with the sunset and sunrise- and prolongs it further throughout the seasons.