Articulated Functions

Owner: Robert Green
Address: 70 East 10th Street, Penthouse B New York, New York 10003
Architect: Cha & Innerhofer Architecture + Design, New York City - Paul Cha, Margaret Innerhofer ( principals-in-charge); Ali Turan Koluman, Paul Granger, Julia Mutzbauer (project team)
Photographer: Dao Lou Zha
General Contractor: Nexor Construction, New York City
Square Footage: 1,125sf indoors/ 435sf outdoor terrace
Cost: Withheld at owner’s request
Date of Completion: May 2003

Program: The 1500 square foot loft with a terrace is located on top of a twenty-two floor residential high-rise.The terrace commands a view of the East Village, framed by the Queensboro Bridge to the north and the Manhattan Bridge to the south.

The clients, a young couple, who are both wine enthusiasts, requested a serene and open space to incorporate specific programmatic requirements ranging from daily living rituals to frequent entertaining functions.

The design strategy was to separate/articulate ‘primary’ and ‘support’ functions. The ‘primary’ spaces are aligned and sequenced along the perimeter window wall, which acts as a porous plane with the Living/Kitchen/Dining/Master Bedroom on the inside and the Terrace on the outside. The visual perception of the perimeter window wall on the inside is a sequence of layered spaces, allowing the eye to traverse the length of the loft, through the apertures and transparencies of the furniture-like kitchen cabinetry as well as the glazed opening in the Master Bedroom wall.

The ‘support’ spaces are arranged along the Entry wall as closets, the Powder Room/Master Bathroom/Walk-in Closet, defining also the spatial perimeter of the ‘primary’ spaces.

In between the ‘primary’ and ‘support’ spaces a continuous diagonal line of sight is preserved to emphasize the spatial depth of the interior in parallel to the expansive view from the Terrace.

Light, materials, colors and textures are used as a means of accentuating the visual and tactile experience of the loft, while references to the winemaking process provide abstracted forms and images.

As natural daylight filters inward from the perimeter window wall, incandescent light illuminates the terrace and plantings outside, and both lights assume various characters ranging from warm glows to precise reflections as they encounter different materials such as wood, stone and stainless steel.

The use of materials, such as the contrasting woods of ebony and ash of the Kitchen cabinetry, in conjunction with the stone fountain providing a quiet stream of water, as well as the wood clad circular wall of the Powder Room orchestrates to enhance the sensual perception of the space and evokes a calming ambiance.