949 Park Avenue

In the dreary world of New York City architecture, one is rarely surprised, let alone pleasantly surprised.
But so I was the other day when I passed a new building that has just arisen at 949 Park Avenue,
between 81st and 82nd streets. Designed by C3D Architecture, it is being developed by VE Equities
and marketed by Prudential Douglas Elliman.

This project is the latest and possibly the best of three similar buildings that have gone up on the east
side of Park Avenue between 81st and 87th streets in the past few years. The other two are 985
Park Avenue,
designed by Costas Kondylis, and
1055 Park Avenue, designed
by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. All three occupy a single lot, but rise to the canonic height, roughly
12 stories, of their neighbors. Whereas 1055 Park occupies the southeast corner of 87th street, the other two buildings are shoe-horned
in between two long-established structures. Comments

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At first glance, the nearly completed 1055 Park Avenue, on the southeast corner of 87th Street, looks like a stunt. Designed by the worthy firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox for developer Davis Development Holdings, the building confronts the avenue as an almost imperceptible sliver of glass appended to the sturdily pre-war structure that is 1049 Park Avenue. Scarcely the width of a townhouse, the 20-foot-wide building at 1055 Park Avenue nevertheless rises up 12 stories. At this late date, the changes that will be permitted on this illustrious avenue are minimal. Park Avenue has just about all the buildings it can handle, and those that are up are not going anywhere. The only remaining possibilities for new development, therefore, are interstitial spaces like 1055 Park Avenue, where previous occupants were often two-story structures that somehow survived into the modern age and are now being torn down in the name of profit. See the building after the jump.  [more]