The iconoclastic French designer Jean Nouvel, cited by the New York Times as the most original architect of his generation, made his long-awaited U.S. debut with 40 Mercer, Andr Balazs’ luxury condominium –famous for apartments with private pools — that is nearing completion in Soho.
But with his latest design in New York City — for 100 Eleventh Avenue, the shimmering glass riverfront condominium tower that just began construction in West Chelsea — “you’re getting an amped-up Nouvel.”
So says James Lansill, managing director of the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, sales and marketing agent for the condominium.
“This is Nouvel unabridged,” Lansill says.
The architect’s scheme for the startlingly complex 23-story structure on far West 19th Street takes “design build” to a new level, calling for teams of engineers to invent new ways to put glass and steel together. The building’s curved glass façde consists of 1,650 individual windowpanes mounted on 165 steel-framed “megapanels” that range from 11 to 16 feet in height, and up to 37 feet across.
“It’s an enormous engineering undertaking,” says Craig Wood, principal of Cape Advisors, developer of the project in association with Alf Naman. “There are probably 50 engineers working on different aspects of it.”
With prices for the 72 ultra-luxury apartments in the building ranging from $2,000 to almost $5,000 a square foot, the developers figure the extravagant, eccentrically artful building will attract design-conscious upscale buyers.
But, says Wood, “we struggled with it a little bit. We tried to respect the integrity of the design as much as we could. Jean comes up with very different answers than what a normal architect would do. You need to go into it with an open mind.”
And wallet, he might have added.
“They’ve really let Nouvel’s concepts be,” says Lansill. “There’s almost a complete lack of value engineering.”
Glassy chassis
Obsessed with capturing and amplifying the light coming from the southwest, Nouvel delivered a glass curtain wall design that is not the typical sheath, but an intricately woven, curved façde containing windows in 500 different sizes with varying degrees of transparency. The idea was to frame views of the Hudson from every apartment in the building — indeed, from every windowpane — in ways that are distinctive.
The view from, and reflectivity of, each of the 1,650 glass panes is individually numbered and cataloged in the blueprints. Each windowpane inside the glass wall is framed in coated steel and sloped at a different angle, and each opens in a different direction — up, down, left or right.
“It’s almost like the building was designed by a semi-mad scientist,” says Lansill.
But there is a method to the madness: “More than any other designer, he is fascinated by aperture, the lens through which you see the outside world,” Lansill says.
Of his scheme for the glass façde, Nouvel writes, “The architecture diffracts, captures and watches. On a curving angle, like that of the eye of an insect, differently positioned facets catch the reflections and throw out sparkles. The apartments are within the ‘eye,’ splitting up and reconstructing this complex landscape: one framing the horizon, another framing the white curve in the sky, another framing the horizon, another framing the white curve in the sky, another framing boats on the Hudson River.”
John Beyer, principal of Beyer Blinder Belle, the executive architect for the project, collaborated closely with Nouvel. The window mosaic puts a signature touch on the river views, he says.
“The way the curtain wall faces that view,” observes Beyer, “is fragmented into smaller pieces and different shapes and angles of glass, reminding you that it’s not just a piece of glass you’re looking through. You’re looking through architecture that’s composed to give you an enhanced sense of that view.”
When Beyer first walked the site with Nouvel, the two agreed that the reflection of the light on the water would be an important element of the design. This contrasts with another architecturally ambitious building right next door — Frank Gehry’s first project in New York City, the billowing, glass-sheathed IAC headquarters.
“Gehry’s building has a smoky, airy, cloudy quality,” says Beyer. “Ours will have a very strong-faceted, shimmering look — more like reflections in water than clouds in the sky.”
Nouvel is a close friend and admirer of Gehry’s. “Could you ever have a more prestigious and luminous neighbor at the street corner than Frank Gehry?” he writes in the brochure for 100 Eleventh.
Because the building’s front façde curves around a northwestern corner, and each apartment has between 35 and 175 linear feet of glass on the floor-to-ceiling window wall, every one of its 72 units has the benefit of southwest views and light.
But what of the units on the first six floors, which face the funky signage of the sprawling Chelsea Piers across the West Side Highway? How will they earn their $1.6 million and more per apartment?
Nouvel’s answer to that is to wrap the six lower floors of the building with a six-story perimeter “screen,” a second wall composed also of multifaceted glass. At ground level, the space between the building’s wall and the perimeter screen forms an atrium, called “The Loggia,” which will contain a semi-enclosed public space with heated floors and an outdoor garden and terrace for a street-level restaurant.
The apartments on the first six floors, the “Loggia Residences,” will have terraces, some enclosed, some open, that will look onto landscaped platforms built into the Loggia’s inner grid.
The building has four apartments per floor, two large floor-throughs and two one-bedrooms — all with southwest views. The floor-throughs will also have expansive city views from the back of the building through large windows punched into the rear façde. The back of the building is made of black brick.
“You have a building with a yin and a yang, a front and a back,” says Beyer.
The apartments’ layouts and finishes are molded by the façde of the building. “Every aspect of the exterior shape and form and various ins and outs,” says Beyer, “become features of the apartment layout. Instead of having a rhythm of modules, with walls perpendicular to the exterior, which is typical in the New York City apartment, the interesting soft and zigzag shape of the building creates rooms with angled, non-parallel walls.”
The right white
The color scheme is “white on white on white,” says Beyer. The apartment is a light reactor, with every surface and finish geared to amplify the light. The floor is white terrazzo throughout, probably the only one like it in New York City. “A difficult and expensive decision,” says Wood. “We did struggle with that for awhile.”
“It’s European,” says Beyer. “Jean is French, French is Mediterranean. The fact that Nouvel designed it brings an international cachet and the fact that it’s terrazzo makes it very contemporary — a fresh new version of the white box.” The section of the floor nearest the window is specially glazed to reflect and intensify the daylight streaming in.
The building offers one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments plus a $22 million, 4,700-square-foot four-bedroom penthouse with 12- to 14-foot ceilings, 175 feet of continuous west-to-south glass frontage and two wood-burning fireplaces. The massive loft space has a private 3,700-square-foot rooftop terrace separated into glass-walled outdoor rooms, including a kitchen area, dining area, lounge and screening room.
The condominium is LEED-certified by the U.S. Green Building Council for being environmentally-friendly and features a fitness center and 70-foot mirror-canopied swimming pool, 24 feet of which extends outdoors into the landscaped garden. A drop-down glass panel covers the outdoor portion for year-round swimming.
The recent rezoning of West Chelsea, one the largest undeveloped tracts of land in the city, says Beyer, “has given the development community the means to really express themselves more than any other zoning I can remember in the city for a long time. It permits a high level of creativity and individual expression.”
And it has given New York City its first amped-up Nouvel.