56 Leonard Street, Manhattan, NY US
Herzong & de Meuron, 2017
The high-rise tower is an important ingredient within the contemporary city. However, towers have come to be defined solely by their height and, as a type, they have become anonymous. Typical residential towers, while successful in aggregating the living unit, often fail to improve upon the living environment. 56 Leonard Street acts against this anonymity and repetitiveness, emanating from so many towers of the recent past.
The project is conceived as a stack of individual houses, where each house is unique and identifiable within the overall stack. 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. At the base of the tower, the stack reacts to the scale and specific local conditions on the street, while the top staggers and undulates to merge with the sky. In-between, the staggering and variation in the middle-levels is more controlled and subtle, like in a column shaft.
To break-up the tendency towards repetition and anonymity in high-rise buildings, 56 Leonard Street was developed from the inside-out. The project began with individual rooms, treating them as “pixels” grouped together on a floor-by-floor basis. These pixels come together to directly inform the volume and to shape the outside of the tower. From the interior the experience of these pixels is like stepping into a series of large bay-windows.
The strategy of ‘pixelating’ rooms also happens in section, creating a large number of terraces and projecting balconies.
Meanwhile, the base of the tower responds to the special character of Tribeca. This is a part of New York characterized by a wide range of building scales - from small townhouses to large industrial blocks and the ubiquitous high-rise buildings of downtown. By grouping together ‘pixels’ of various sizes, including lobby, parking decks and housing amenities, the tower reflects and incorporates each of these neighbourhood scales.
The building also shows its structural ‘bones’ and does not hide the method of its fabrication underneath layers of cladding. Instead, exposed horizontal concrete slabs register the floor-by-floor stacking of the construction process and exposed in-situ concrete columns allow the scale of the structural forces at work to be experienced from within the interior.
Project start: 2008
Completion: 2017
Gross floor area: 39,483 m2
Floors: 57 (+1 underground)
Units: 162
Total height: 250 m
Client: Alexico Group
Architects: Herzong & de Meuron
