New York - The bottle-green glass tubes that grid the new 40 Bond St. condominium in NoHo are the most delicious thing to happen to Manhattan's streetscape in decades. They sparkle in the sun and glow like aquariums in the afternoon shadows. Boutique hotel guru Ian Schrager hired Swiss celebrity architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for this luxe 10 stories containing five townhouses and 23 apartments. The Swiss duo seems to be working out an architectural psychodrama in 40 Bond's conflicted personality.
Herzog & de Meuron certainly have moved away from those rational, mute (and so very Swiss) buildings they did in the 1990s, especially a famed railroad-yard signal box clad entirely in menacing slits.
They now play with spectacle, as at London's Tate Modern.
At 40 Bond, they try out everything at once. Starting at the third floor and running up to the penthouse, the glass tubes frame monumental, floor-to-ceiling windows. They are as sleekly modern as can be, yet they richly sculpt the wall surface, akin to the riot of columns and pilasters on the condo's 19th-century cast-iron neighbors. That cage of weighty-looking glass is made to float visually above duplex townhouses tucked underneath.
Herzog & de Meuron simultaneously evoke old and new.
The team draped garlands of intricately looped cast- aluminum confetti to make a gated fence in front of the townhouses. According to the architects, the rippling pattern is derived from the graffiti of spray-paint artists, carved into three dimensions by a computer that carefully calibrated the loops and swirls to lend strength where needed.
It's a tour-de-force fence -- a delightfully crazed cartoon when seen head-on, a saggy clothesline when seen obliquely.
Luscious Lobby
Herzog & de Meuron extend this tattooing from embossed panels behind the fence (in bronze that somehow iridesces in blue and green) all the way into the lobby. The effect is as luscious as the terra-cotta foliage that erupts across the surface of the great Louis Sullivan's 1898 Bayard Building, only blocks away.
Much as I love its individual elements, I wish the building didn't have such a dramatically split personality. The tidy Swiss rationality above the blingy exuberance below adds up to little more than showmanship.
Welcome to the world of Ian Schrager, who went from 1980s nightclub entrepreneur (Studio 54, which cost him 13 months of jail time for tax fraud) to inventing the boutique hotel trend at Morgans in New York and the Delano in Miami.
Ground-Floor Privacy
His signature theatricality works its magic in the townhouses, which should have been unsellable because they open directly from the sidewalk. The graffiti fence fixes that problem by offering privacy.
The ground floor leads to a generous back garden, accessed by massive sliding doors. A grand sweep of curving stair adds a couture note. All but one of the 2,800- to 3,700-square-foot townhouses have sold, for as much as $10 million each.
With the gorgeous wall of beefy windows rising 12 feet from floor to ceiling, Herzog & de Meuron have captured the essential appeal of the loft building: gorgeous light and ample space. Six floor-through apartments offer panoramas on two sides. Schrager has taken the full-floor penthouse for himself.
He understands that buyers paying $3,000 per square foot don't fix their own refrigerators or walk their own dogs. An "urban estate manager'' will see to such homeowner headaches. Only four apartments remain available.
The bravura appeal of the exterior extends only intermittently inside. Schrager lays down handsome smoked-oak flooring, then lets too many ventilating grilles and clunky door hinges deface the walls.
By contrast, the master bath has been totally reconceived. In the
Source: Bloomberg