Most residential developments in Manhattan, going back many years, have tried to sell themselves through an appeal to the latent — or not so latent — snobbery of their prospective buyers. Even if the building in question is a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, the idiom of its marketing will evoke the white-glove exclusiveness of Park Avenue.
But in recent years, when chic has come to rival elegance among those hellbent on conspicuous consumption, another, cheekier tone has infiltrated the rhetoric of real estate, especially if the development is a luxury building that happens to lie below 14th Street. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the marketing of William Beaver House, at 15 Beaver Street.
Few developers have capitalized on the avidity of the jeunesse dorée more effectively than Beaver House’s André Balazs, often a consort to Uma Thurman and initially a pioneer of the boutique hotel. And so it is that his 47-story condo, around the corner from the New York Stock Exchange, had chosen as its mascot a cartoon beaver decked out in a tux; he raises his glass of champagne in a toast to the good life that awaits anyone fortunate enough to purchase an apartment in this particular development.
All but completed and partially inhabited, William Beaver House is part of a larger trend, over the past 10 or so years, to colonize non-residential areas of the five boroughs and make them not only safe but also desirable for families to live in. For many would-be buyers, a large measure of the appeal of these projects, whether in the Financial District or in former industrial zones like Dumbo, is their sense of freshness and incongruity, like having a dance space in Saint Mark’s Church on the Bowery or a planted promenade on the High Line.
And even if, only a decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine that an entirely new high-rise would emerge in the Financial District, it now makes perfect sense that William Beaver House offers terrace hot tubs and outdoor showers, 24-hour doorman and concierge service, squash courts and a penthouse sky lounge, among many other amenities.
The structure itself was designed by the relatively young firm of Tsao & McKown, which has been quite busy in the city over the past few years. It is responsible for the renovated Spring Street Condominiums on Lafayette, as well as the Cipriani Residences at 55 Wall Street. Beyond that, the firm has designed rooms at the Tribeca Grand as well as Métrazur Restaurant in Grand Central Station, a library at P.S. 19 and the well-received Kandinsky-Schoenberg exhibition at the Jewish Museum.
William Beaver House is, to date, its most ambitious commission in the five boroughs, and it has provoked considerable consternation among some of the locals.
With 320 simplex residences, 10 duplexes (each with a private terrace) and three terraced penthouses, William Beaver House is not exceptionally tall relative to the dense cluster of high-rises in this area. Rather, what is striking is the façade, specifically, the architects’ decision to adorn its surface with spotty and irregular passages of yellow against a dark brown ground. It seems that the architects intended to invoke the early 20th-century modernism of Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building right off Fifth Avenue on 39th Street, built in 1924.
In terms of swift brilliance of effect, however, William Beaver House cannot compete with that earlier development, whose gold accents have been so memorably restored in the past few years. In the newer building, the yellow is apt to read initially simply as yellow rather than as gold, with a resulting visual confusion. Gradually, and begrudgingly, the eye is willing to see it as a kind of gold, but without too much conviction.
The shaft of the high-rise itself is undistinguished. Within the context of the deconstructed style that dominates so many new developments in Manhattan, it is also largely unobjectionable. In obedience to the trend that sees right angles and planar walls as anathema, the building’s brick cladding is arrayed across moderately faceted surfaces that buckle and bulge in unexpected places. But in the process, the deconstructivist idiom, once so radical, has been thoroughly defanged. Its planned irregularities, rather than seeming challenging, now feel tame, polite and, above all, family friendly.
The most daring feature of the design, the irregular joining of the eastern and southern façades, yields a thin cleft that runs down the length of the shaft. The device is obviously intentional, but to this viewer, it feels simply odd, and its effect is hardly enhanced by the certainty that, in relatively short order, soot is likely to accumulate in its interstices.
Perhaps the most ungainly part of the building, however, is the base, which, in its volumetric aggression, displays an almost brutalist self-assertion that makes little sense in the context of the rest of the building. As you approach from the southeast, two large prostheses, in the form of thick bands of metal cladding interspersed with windows, converge upon the corner, where the building’s brick cladding stands revealed. But these two add-ons feel visually flimsy and unnecessarily involved — a feeble attempt at something between Mod and Modernist that clashes with the deconstructed language of the rest of the development.
After the sound judgment and good taste that Balazs displayed when he enlisted Jean Nouvel to design 40 Mercer about three years ago, it is disappointing to see so little of those qualities in this latest venture.