40 Bond - NOHO - Condo - by Herzog & de Meuron
February 9, 2006
Design Notebook
Living at Cool, Not Just Visiting
By JULIE V. IOVINE
The 11-story facade of 40 Bond Street will be made entirely of cast glass with a street-level gate of cast aluminum inspired by graffiti.
Ian Schrager, the hotelier, is developing condos on Bond Street. Above is a rendering of one of five luxury triplexes.
BOND. Forty Bond. That's the address of the latest downtown luxury condominium being whipped into shape by Ian Schrager in league with the high-brow Swiss architectural team of Herzog & de Meuron. The name brings to mind the spy who never came in from the Cool.
And it had better. At upward of $2,800 a square foot, the condo on Bond Street needs to offer an experience beyond ho-hum workaday living.
But in the crowded field of luxury condos by celebrated architects, it is getting harder every day to be noticed. The ranks are heavy with A-listers Richard Meier, Santiago Calatrava, Jean Nouvel, Charles Gwathmey and even Philip Johnson from the beyond all vying to reinvent lavish living for those few, those happy few who never have to take out the trash or cook for the children.
"I'm interested in rethinking the genre," said Mr. Schrager, who is also reinventing the Gramercy Park Hotel with condos by John Pawson and hotel rooms by Julian Schnabel. "I'm making something really special for that person in the know who wants the unique living experience. It's the same person who went to my nightclubs and stayed at my hotels. Maybe now they're a little richer, a little older, but they still want to be part of the zeitgeist. I don't need many of them."
In other words, prospective seekers of smaller comforts, go home someplace else.
Enter Herzog & de Meuron, which is best known for the Tate Modern in London and, more recently, the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Forty Bond will be its first building in New York and its first condo in the United States. When the firm has taken on residential work, Jacques Herzog said in a phone conversation this week, it has more often been low-income housing. "We don't see ourselves in luxury," he said. "Our work is about experiment."
At 40 Bond now a grim hole in the ground in always trending, never trendy NoHo Herzog & de Meuron has done its radical best, envisioning an 11-story facade made entirely of cast glass with a greenish Coke-bottle hue.
Along the street, a cast-aluminum fence intended as a bold update on 19th-century cast-iron gates will look something like spray-foam squiggles, a nostalgic reference to the graffiti that once defaced many city surfaces. The graffiti pattern recurs throughout the project, most noticeably in the lobby, where it is etched on towering walls of wavy white Corian.
The condo consists of 27 units, including five "town houses" or triplex apartments entered at ground level with their own backyards and tiny forecourts facing Bond Street. Above the town houses are 22 loftlike dwellings ranging from 1,269 square feet for a one-bedroom to 3,288 for a four-bedroom.
Ceiling heights are a glorious 11 feet; bathrooms have smoked oak walls and milk-white Corian counters ("Corian is more expensive than marble," Mr. Schrager explained). Are there wood floors? Yes, indeed. The entire space is covered in wide planks of oak imported from Austria, including the kitchens.
When it comes to stardust du jour, nobody sells it better than Mr. Schrager, nightclub act turned swank hotelier, now swashbuckling developer. But it may take more than flashy lures to get prospective buyers to take the hook. Anyone driving up the West Side Highway can see that many of the original "starchitect" condos by Richard Meier built four years ago are still uninhabited.
Mr. Schrager adamantly, albeit predictably, dismisses any mention of a real estate bubble at bursting point. "There's always room for something special," he said. Even so, there are plenty of potential wrenches that could jam the works on the current luxury condo merry-go-round. For starters, construction costs are rising fast as China swallows up raw materials for its own building boom. Closer to home, high-end residential contractors with the requisite skill are flush with work and can afford to be very picky, and costly.
And then there's the most delicate concept of all: expiration date. Adding architectural gems to the skyline is a great thing, said Jon McMillan, a director of planning at the Rockrose Development Corporation, but as a marketing tactic, "it has a shelf life of about 15 minutes now that everyone's doing it, it's played out."
Until now, Mr. Schrager has shrouded the prospectus of 40 Bond in the highest-level secrecy. And secrecy has worked like a nightclub's velvet rope, fueling rabid interest. When a blog posted a rendering of the building facade (labeled Project No. 253 and bootlegged from a class taught by Mr. Herzog at the Harvard Graduate School of Design), Mr. Schrager said he had it removed. The real estate blogs went ballistic. Mission accomplished: 7 of the 27 units have been sold at prices ranging from $3.5 million for a one-bedroom to $10 million for a triplex.
With only the Richard Meier and Gwathmey Siegel luxury condos completed, it is too soon to tell how ripe the market for luxury condos costing close to $3,000 a square foot will remain. Certainly, Mr. Schrager himself is one of the most sensitive barometers in town. When does he move on to the next thing? "Once something goes mainstream, it's over for me," Mr. Schrager said. "Violating the status quo is what gets me up in the morning."
For most homeowners, however, it probably just takes a strong cup of coffee in a comfortable kitchen.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
For those of us who will probably never get past the "graffiti" gates, the best thing about this project (aside from viewing what promises to be a damn fantastic facade) is that it might lead to the re-cobbling of Bond St.
The stretch of Bond between Broadway <> Bowery is currently Belgian Block that has been dug up / replaced / heaved by freeze + thaw so many times that traveling that roadway via car or bike is akin to a ride on The Cyclone.
I was wondering if they had done the repairs to Bond Street that was planned.
Bond Street Restoration
In fact, I thought they had. Last time I looked I thought there were far less gaping potholes and asphalt patches, but if you say so....
Here's an old photo - need a new one for comparison.
They patched up the block between Broadway & Lafayette -- but in a kind of haphazard way -- it was still kind of rippling across the surface, although it is an improvement from what it was like before. But then a few months later Con Ed had to dig up all around the intersection on the west side of Bond / Lafayette and that resulted in a pretty sloppy re-cobbling of that area.
Nothing has been done on the stretch between Bond / Bowery.
What is needed is a rebuilding of the entire surface below the cobbles on those two blocks and then a re-laying of the Belgian blocks -- but that is a huge and expensive job. They've done this on some streets in SoHo -- aside from some disastrous design choices for granite pavers at the cross walks (not thick enough so they have completly cracked / crumbled / broken under the weight of trucks and have been that way for years now) the results are good.
It's good to hear cast iron is being used on the facade. More architects should experiment with classic materials and modern design. We usually get the opposite - modern materials and "classic-looking" design. That combination ends up looking generic and fake.
^^ Not "cast iron" but "cast glass" ...
Herzog & de Meuron has done its radical best, envisioning an 11-story facade made entirely of cast glass with a greenish Coke-bottle hue ...
Here is a litle more about this interesting building...
Rounded glass columns and a very ornate gate beckon buyers at 40 Bond
19-DEC-05
The sales office for a new 10-story residential condominium building at 40 Bond Street opened Friday and by early this morning five contracts had been entered into.
The buyers’ interest is not too surprising as the mid-block development promises to be one of the most stunning new projects the city has seen in several years.
The building has been designed by Herzog & de Meuron for Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen, who are also partners in the 50 Gramercy Park North development now under construction.
The Bond Street project will be distinguished by a rich dark-blue-green - "Coke bottle green" - glass façade with extruded rounded columns - recalling the 19th Century, cast-iron facades of many low-rise buildings in SoHo and NoHo, and by a metal first-floor gate that will be an abstract and highly intricate lace-like grill work that would make Antonio Gaudi, the legendary Art Nouveau architect of Barcelona, where the glass columns will be fabricated, smile, very broadly.
Herzog & de Meuron, who have won the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious award in architecture, are most famous for their redesign of a powerplant in London into the Tate Modern Museum, their plans for the main stadium for the Olympic Games in Beijing, China, a twisting structure for the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the mutli-faceted Prada Aoyama building in Tokyo.
In a mailing, Mr. Schrager notes that 40 Bond Street will be the architects’ "firstresidential project in America," adding that he considers "them to be the most brilliant architects working today." Mr. Schrager also said he is "taking the penthouse."
The building will have five 3-story "townhouse" units, each with about 3,750 square feet, fireplaces, gardens and 22-foot-high living rooms and front yards behind the very elaborate and impressive "gate." One-bedroom, two-bath apartments will have about 1,269 square feet and three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath apartments will have about 2,617 square feet. Floors four through seven will have four apartments a floor and the 8th, 9th and 10th floors will have two apartments a floor.
The building will have 31 units ranging in size from 1- to 3-bedrooms. All of the apartments other than the townhouse units will have 11-foot-high ceilings.
The lobby will have metal and Austrian oak paneling embossed with amorphous patterns.
The site, a former parking lot that has been cleared, is east of Lafayette Street in NoHo.
In 2003, Mr. Schrager had planned a hotel for this site with Richard Born and Ira Drucker, but changed plans for a 14-story, 65-unit residential building designed by Gary Handel.
Mr. Schrager was a partner with Steve Rubell in Studio 54, the legendary disco, and subsequently developed many well-known hotels such as the Royalton, the Paramount and the Hudson here and the Delano in Miami.
Mr. Rosen is a prominent developer who owns some of the city’s architectural masterpieces such as Lever House and the Seagram Building, both on Park Avenue.
Copyright © 1994-2005 CITY REALTY
Damn. That will be flashy - very "look at me".Originally Posted by lofter1
Graffiti Gate
I have seen, what I believe, to be the gate. It's on display at their sales office and looks truly unique and amazing. It's very similar to the graphic used on their website. I love Herzog & de Meuron. I grew up in Minneapolis and just recently visite the Walker Arts Center expansion, which they did. The outcome is truly amazing! Cannot wait to see the final product.
I predict it will blow away every other Starchitect's building and set a new precident for New York design.
The graffiti pattern: a slightly subversive homage as intended or just vain "ghetto chic"?
It should be a fine upscale building regardless, with exquisite detail and material quality.
This is a beauty... why can´t everything have this kind of effort? Notice the traditional shape of the window openings in proportion to the surrounding buildings.... the cast iron style revistited....
Take a look at their beautiful Prada shop in Tokyo.... maybe someone could post a pic? (I think it´s what that "blu" condo on the LES side wants to be).
Money.
I walked by the sales office today (like it says ^^ in the picture: 285 Lafayette -- just south of the Puck Building).
The office itself looks pretty danged fantastic.
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