The good folks over at Curbed last week practically dared us to surf through the dazzling web site for Jean Nouvel and Andre Balazs' 40 Mercer condo without drooling. After the jump we wipe our chin on our sleeve and focus in on one of the more amazing details of Nouvel's residential vision in SoHo: the huge retractable panes of glass.
What Nouvel has smartly caught on to is the scale of this old cast iron SoHo neighborhood. Scale is a concept that encompasses more than just height. The floor plates of the old factory buildings and their huge windows were part of their original function as work spaces. Later that scale made them chic living spaces. To echo this dramatic framing of space that makes SoHo what it is, Nouvel has employed walls of glass that retract like garage doors. From the site's own description:
The design of 40 Mercer Street marks the most cutting-edge use of glass in a residential building in the United States to date...the largest sheets, approximately 7 by 12 feet, ever used on a residential project...On the lower floors, six-foot-wide sash windows open by dropping down to create a safety railing. On higher floors, windows open 17-20 feet wide electronically. All window movements are operated via key-operated motors with a built-in monitoring system. Windows are provided with recessed shades to provide uniformity of appearance from the street.
You can see this sliding action via a little animation on the site. We hope the condo bylaws require the shades to be uniform, as Mies insisted with the Seagram Building. Be sure to take a look, as well, at the penthouse image, with its metal louvers like something from the lair of a Bond villain. We love louvers and trellises--they are such simple solutions to sun shade and have great modern heritage (think Case Study Houses). Nouvel has also been involved in the kitchen and bath design, the wood cabinet systems here strongly reminiscent of Jean Prouve's modern classic shelving forms.
There is a lot to like here. This may now be the best residential starchitect project to be built in New York, perhaps eclipsing Richard Meier's West Street towers in innovation and response to site, if not pure form. Certainly this raises the bar for developers who claim to want good architecture. It calls their bluff.
(lobby view)
SEE ALSO JEAN NOUVEL's 100 Eleventh Avenue tower
