Five Franklin Place in Tribeca
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NYの最新高級コンドFive Franklin Place
設計はメルセデスベンツ・ミュージアムの実績で知られるUNStudio
インテリアは全てB&B Italiaのオーダーメイドという超ラグジャリーな仕様です。
ゴムバンドをやや不規則に巻いたような外観デザインをインテリアにもリンクさせて住空間に独自の世界観を創出しています。
また、感性の鋭い富裕層にアピールするために高品位なイメージCGは必須ですが
archpartnersのレンダリングは、深みのある上質感をしっかり表現していて
空間への期待を高めていますね。
こんなプロジェクトは画像を見るだけでもわくわくしますし
自分をモチベートアップしてくれます。
気になる価格は200万ドルから1600万ドルです。
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In the spirit of great architecture, Raul Barreneche sat down with Ben van Berkel to present and discuss the design and origins of Five Franklin Place.
raul barreneche: You have said that one of the greatest influences on your design for Five Franklin Place is the historic architecture of TriBeCa. Can you elaborate upon that?
ben van berkel: Absolutely. We picked up the strong horizontal cornices and decorative details of TriBeCa’s castiron architecture, re-formed them, and transported them onto our building in a very contemporary way that makes them truly functional but that still has a lot to do with pure surface decoration. The reflective metal bands of our building are almost sewn on, like a dress. They grow thinner and thicker, wrapping themselves around the building and generating different visual effects as they change. But they are not just graphic elements, they are three-dimensional. Sometimes these bands become balconies; other times they become sunscreens that protect the apartment interiors from excess sunlight and reflect excess heat. So they have a true function and a sustainable quality, too. These metal ribbons not only pick up the external qualities of TriBeCa through their geometries and their character as added metal elements on the surface of the structure, but they also frame the views from inside the apartments and create intimacy. We couldn’t have achieved the privacy and intimacy of the homes at Five Franklin Place if we’d made ours a fully transparent glass facade building.
rb: What about the fluid geometry of the exterior?
bvb: There are definitely strong curvilinear qualities in the design. The corners of the building are soft, almost etched. I can imagine sitting in one of those corners of the apartment, drinking coffee and reading the paper in the morning light — and it would be like sitting right in the middle of the city. We think it’s very important to bring things together coherently and inclusively, to create a formal resonance with the details of the design. Sometimes a curving line on the facade is echoed inside the apartment in the form of a curved wall. So there’s integration between the geometry of the facade and the geometry of the interiors.
rb: In one of your books you wrote, “The box is dead,” suggesting that you’re not a fan of traditional rectilinear buildings.
bvb: I’m not saying you can’t work with regular, grid-like organizations. It’s not so important to think of architecture with stylistic references. Who cares if something is a box or a blob? I very much like the idea of transformative architecture. This building is about moving away from a harder system — the grid — to a softer kind of architecture. That’s transformative. But it’s not invasive or gratuitous.
rb: Is that a result of having studied with Zaha Hadid?
bvb: Being a student of Zaha’s at the Architectural Association in London was very important for me. She was quite good at teaching us to draw big. I had tended to sketch on little pieces of paper before that, but we had to work on 10-foot long sheets — otherwise you weren’t allowed in the classroom. When I arrived there, I had already studied architecture, interior architecture and graphic design for four years. Zaha thought I should start in the third year, but the head of the school, Alvin Boyarski, said, “You have to start all over. You know too much. You have to forget everything you have learned.” I liked that. In fact, I still use that as a slogan for my way of thinking. In the studio, I don’t like when we get too fixed on a particular paradigm, or we’re only following one direction. Often we rethink things and start all over with a new idea.
rb: Speaking of new ideas, what about the unusual color of the facade at Five Franklin Place? There aren’t many black buildings in New York, though two very elegant mid-century landmarks — Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building on Park Avenue and Eero Saarinen’s CBS headquarters on Sixth Avenue — are famously black.
bvb: Black is not a color we think of very often when it comes to buildings, but it’s a very accepted color in fashion and industrial design. So while the bands are indeed black, the black captures the colors and reflects the environment and weather around the building, bringing light and color to animate the facade. Think of the incredible work of the fashion designer Issey Miyake, who plays with texture, volume and the reflection of light. And he does this exquisitely with black garments. His is work like architecture, in fact it has been exhibited in major museums as a kind of architectural achievement. In a way, we have borrowed certain ideas from people like Miyake and others in different design disciplines, making a textural facade that sometimes picks up light and reflects it, and sometimes absorbs light. So black contains many things and at Five Franklin Place it
is extremely elegant but also very dynamic.
rb: You’ve written about the connections between architecture and fashion design. How do you see the two disciplines informing each other?
bvb: It’s fascinating. On the one hand, fashion is something that moves quickly. But at the same time — and for that very reason — it usually generates much better ideas than architecture. I think architects are slow to come up with new design techniques. I often refer to fashion because I think that architects “dress” the city, in a manner of speaking. And buildings are in some ways like bodies with their complicated structures and functions; they need to have skins, be dressed. Why not explore new building techniques or design concepts, like pleated or textured facades? I’m not suggesting that architects should become fashion designers, but we can rethink architecture.
rb: You haven’t designed any clothing, but you have created serving trays and a tea service for Alessi, as well as seating for Walter Knoll in Germany. Are there common threads between these various design disciplines?
bvb: We very much like working on smaller-scale projects, industrial design projects, and things of that nature. We’ve learned a lot working in industrial design over the past few years. What I find interesting about such projects is that you get to experiment with a certain material, like sterling silver, that you are not using in buildings. When I designed a coffee and tea service for Alessi in silver, I discovered that you could create far more complex forms than I ever expected. Product design gives you ideas that you might expand on later at a bigger scale — like buildings, for instance.
rb: What were some of your priorities when you started designing Five Franklin Place?
bvb: Exploiting light and views was an essential part of the overall architectural design concept and a guiding design principle for us. We start first with the purpose and the program of any building: how will the users experience it, what will it be like to live and work inside? At Five Franklin Place, the lower part of the building is framed between the walls of adjacent structures on two sides, north and south. So on these lower floors we created what we call double-height Loft Residences with floating upper level mezzanines and large openings so that daylight can be filtered deep into these apartments. In fact, we decided to change the traditional way mezzanines are fixed at one end of an apartment — this often creates a sort of tunnel effect that leaves some part of the space very dark — and instead placed the mezzanines of the Lofts toward the center of the unit. This was a key move in the design process to optimize daylight throughout the entire home, and we’re very excited about this solution.
There are nice big vaults in the Lofts, a wonderful integral wall that turns from the kitchen into the library, and big bedrooms and bathrooms. The City Residences on the middle floors of the building have beautiful views and a generous floor plan. We studied the entries of New York’s great pre war apartments to create a graceful experience in each residence, with custom wall panel details that frame gallery foyers. And many of the City Residences have terraces, east and west.
The Sky Penthouses at the top of the building have spectacular panoramas over the West Side of Manhattan, all the way to the river, by virtue of the height of the building at that level, rising above the buildings around it. The Sky Penthouses have big terraces and an internal elevator and stair. These residences have all the features one associates with a penthouse.
rb: Are there other distinctions among the different types of apartments you designed?
bvb: We chose different colors and materials related to the amount of natural light that can be accessed in apartments at the various levels of the building. Our idea was to work with the natural light and complement it, but not necessarily in expected ways. So on the lower floors of the building where there is a need to maximize daylight, we have specified the lightest-colored floors and fixtures and wall colors throughout — finishes that boost the natural light farther into the spaces. On the middle floors, we have a more cream-colored palette, softer because there is more natural light and less need to push for its reflection into the homes there. And on the top levels of the building, where there is very abundant light, we have richer, deeper colors and finishes.
rb: How did the building’s location in the heart of TriBeCa shape your design?
bvb: TriBeCa is a wonderful place with incredible history — amazing architectural history, but also an interesting history in how art and artists have worked and lived in the buildings there. To us, artists defined the lifestyle of the neighborhood. One aspect of this is the casual way that people have occupied the lofts you typically find in TriBeCa. Thinking about those, we wanted to create some of the same casualness and flexibility — we didn’t want to overdefine the spaces in our apartments — because people today want to live with a sense of freedom and define the home spatially for themselves. We live so differently now then we did ten or twenty years ago. Contemporary lifestyles seek out new forms of flexibility.
rb: Does this mean open kitchens?
bvb: Yes. The kitchen island has become much more than just part of the kitchen: It’s a crossing point between different spaces in the home. People love to socialize in the kitchen; families like to gather around the kitchen island to talk when someone is cooking. So we see the kitchens at Five Franklin Place more as areas that connect different spaces of the home and provide a kind of pivot point. Also, I like it when a kitchen doesn’t really look like a kitchen, but more like a composition of furniture with a beautiful product as part of that composition — like an iPod. So we have given special focus to the kitchen islands at Five Franklin Place, giving them a unique sculptural quality that we think brings something special to the homes in the building. We designed these specifically for the building and are working closely with B&B Italia to custom-construct these pieces. It’s very exciting.
rb: What kind of technology do the apartments at Five Franklin Place utilize?
bvb: The computer played a very important role in the design and the manufacturing of the facade. The façade ribbons twist into each other; they become the floor of a balcony and then turn into a handrail, and then become part of the facade itself. The technology for how we designed all of that is quite advanced. Inside the apartments themselves we thought about very advanced details, from how you switch on the lights to the way the glass wraps around the bathroom and how the windows open. There are many things we are making as advanced as possible and those elements are technologydriven.
rb: Many of the houses you’ve designed, including the Möbius House in the Netherlands, featured at the “Un-Private House” exhibition at MoMA, and the VilLA NM here in the United States, tend to have long, horizontal profiles. How do such houses compare with the kind of vertical New York living you have designed for Five Franklin Place?
bvb: The apartments at Five Franklin Place do not follow a strong grid. They are organically designed in how the stairs swoop upward, how the balcony loops you back indoors. There’s an idea of looping around the apartments, without many dead ends, so that all of the space really accommodates life and the flow of life. In these urban residences, the bathroom becomes part of the bedroom and both share the same view. That kind of transformative living is something we thought a lot about and it is something that vertical living invites and even needs.
rb: What qualities of New York does the building reflect?
bvb: Manhattan is a very robust, urban place with an all-important grid. But it also has charming, almost European qualities. You find this combination in TriBeCa especially. What we wanted to pick up in the design was a very robust building — in a modern sense — that also had a little bit of delicateness and intimacy. In the bends and frames of the facade of Five Franklin Place, we played with deforming the idea of the grid that is so potent outside, but we also respected the context and made a building that complements that context.
rb: What do you hope this building offers, not just to the people who will eventually call it home, but to the urban landscape of New York?
bvb: Hopefully, Five Franklin Place is a building that communicates a contemporary idea about the city and about living in it. Architects shouldn’t make buildings that only they find attractive. I hope the building becomes part of the changing landscape of Manhattan, and that it creates a dialog with people, those who live inside it, but even those who are just passing by.
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