56 leonard tower9/10/2023 ![]() This expressiveness is driven directly by the requirements of the interior, consisting of ten large-scale penthouses with expansive outdoor spaces and spacious living areas. The top of any tower is its most visible element and, in keeping with this, the top of 56 Leonard Street is the most expressive part of the project and relates to the tradition of iconic tower tops in New York City. Aggregated together, these houses-in-the-sky, form a cohesive stack, a vertical neighbourhood, somewhat akin to New York’s specific neighbourhoods with their distinctive mix of proximity and privacy in equal measure. While careful to avoid directly overlooking a neighbouring apartment, these outdoor spaces provide indirect visual links between people – maybe strangers – who share the building. The strategy of stacking rooms also happens in section, creating a large number of terraces and projecting balconies. From the interior the experience of these blocks is like stepping into a series of large bay windows. These blocks come together to directly inform the volume and to shape the outside of the tower. The project began with individual rooms, treating them as “blocks of glass” grouped together on a floor-by-floor basis. To break-up the tendency towards repetition and anonymity in high-rise buildings, 56 Leonard Street was developed from the inside out. In-between, the staggering and variation in the middle-levels is more controlled and subtle, like in a column shaft. ![]() At the base of the tower, the stack reacts to the scale and specific local conditions on the street, while the top staggers and shifts to engage with the sky. A careful investigation of local construction methods revealed the possibility of shifting and varying floor-slabs to create corners, cantilevers and balconies – all welcome strategies for providing individual and different conditions in each apartment. The project is conceived as a stack of individual rooms, where each room is unique and identifiable within the overall stack. Its ambition is to achieve, despite its size, a character that is individual and personal, perhaps even intimate. 56 Leonard Street acts against this anonymity and repetitiveness, emanating from so many towers of the recent past. For those who live in these structures, this experience of sameness and repetition can be relatively unpleasant. The multiplication of units within simple extruded shapes produces repetitive and anonymous structures with no extra benefits or architectural qualities despite the incredible densities they achieve. Typical residential towers, while successful in aggregating the living unit, often fail to improve upon the living environment. However, towers have come to be defined solely by their height and, as a type, they have become anonymous. The high-rise tower is an important ingredient within the contemporary city.
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