Plans for a new condo tower in New York create a ‘communal ecosystem’ for residents
By John Caulfield, Senior Editor
The conceptual plans for a 700-foot-tall, 65-story condominium tower in New York City were unveiled in early March by its architect, Perkins+Will.
The design for this 150,000-sf building, referred to as East 37th Street Residential Tower, debuted in Cannes, France, where it received the MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects Award, in the Tall Buildings category, out of more than 2,400 submissions.
The tower’s developer, Turkey-based Nef, is using this project to introduce its Foldhome brand abroad, according to Erden Timur, a Nef board member. Foldhome is an architectural concept notable for its common usage areas with pay-as-you-use systems “that would not normally be able to fit in a home or office,” like a music room or movie theater, according to Nef.
P+W states that it designed this slender tower with a concept “that is specifically tailored to the Midtown Manhattan context.”
That design organizes the building into five clusters of shared amenity and park spaces, at several intervals of the tower’s rise. Robert Goodwin, FAIA, LEED AP, Design Director in P+W’s New York office, describes these clusters as “interconnected blocks of social and community zones.”
The building will include five open-air gardens, arranged as a series of overlapping, angled, and diverse spaces within no more than four stories from any given condo unit. Each space will feature such amenities as event rooms, a chef’s table, private yoga studio, art room, exterior Jacuzzi, fitness rooms, terraced gardens, an outdoor cinema, observatory and, at the tower’s top level, an infinity pool and roof terrace garden.
P+W points out the building’s exterior area for each terrace prevents Nef from incurring a penalty against the building’s overall floor-to-area ratio.
The building’s structural system is shifted to the exterior perimeter, and its floor plate is arranged in a 17x19-inch steel diagrid with a concrete core. This structure allows for more flexibility when laying out the units, and reduces by about 50% the overall thickness of the interior elevator core.
East 37th Street Residential Tower is one of several recent P+W projects in New York. Others include the programming and design services for the 3.7-million-sf United Nations Building, and Lehman College’s LEED Platinum Science Building.
Neither P+W nor Nef disclosed the projected cost for this tower.
