And when the developer, Alexico Group, purchased it in 2006, it also acquired the air rights transferred from the school’s adjacent properties. The 56 Leonard lot, previously owned by the New York Law School, was exempt from these limits. These vistas-as well as views of the tower from elsewhere in Manhattan-could actually remain unobstructed due to the peculiarities of the 12,500-square-foot parcel, which is surrounded by a mostly low-rise, height-restricted historic district. In the case of 56 Leonard, depending on an apartment’s position and orientation within the structure, occupants look out over the surrounding neighborhood and toward the Hudson and East rivers, Wall Street and the World Trade Center, and, in the distance, Midtown. This is the tall, slim, luxury residential tower with spectacular city views. The most exuberant projections occur near the top.īut even if the expressive crown refers to an earlier time of New York’s classical skyscrapers with silhouetted spires, Herzog & de Meuron’s building, which has a width-to-height ratio of about 1:10.5, is also representative of an emerging New York typology. Although no two floors within the building are exactly the same, the unit types are organized into seven zones that can be discerned from the outside if one carefully studies the shift in the patterns of the extending balconies. The 831-foot-tall reinforced concrete structure contains only 145 condominiums, ranging from 650-square-foot studios to penthouse apartments of more than 6,000 square feet. This sensation of pushing and pulling, together with its reflective glass envelope, give the building a compelling chimera-like quality, with features that seem to change depending on one’s vantage point, the weather conditions, or the time of day. Its protruding elements recall the famous image of a disembodied hand sliding one apartment into a model of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. But now, nearly a decade after ground was broken, the structure, made up of stacked glassenclosed volumes and projecting terraces, is almost finished, and residents are starting to move in.Īscan Mergenthaler, a Herzog & de Meuron partner, says that the idea behind the unusual cantilevering geometry was not to defy gravity, but to design the units from the inside out and then express the individual apartments and their generous outdoor spaces in the form of the architecture.Īlthough 56 Leonard has been referred to as “Jenga-like” countless times in the press, the result is an assemblage that appears carefully balanced in equilibrium rather than on the verge of toppling over. For four years during the financial crisis, construction was at a total standstill. For quite a while, it seemed as if Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street project-a 57-story residential tower in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan-would never get built.
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