100 E 16th Street

Type : Mixed Use Rental

Location : New York City

Size : 32,000Sf | 29 Units

Team : Yiannos Vrousgos, Brooke Lichtenstein, Rostam Seraj, Soua Hong, Ting Hsieh

Collaborators : Kao Wha Lee Architects, Bluesky Builders

Status : On-Going

Union Square opened as a park in 1839, and the row houses that went up afterward on East 17th Street and Irving Place, one block north, followed the same order every Italianate building did: plain lower floors, and the ornament, arched window heads, heavier trim, saved for the top. 100 East 16th Street runs that logic in brick and glass. Twelve stories rise plain and working, and the building saves all its ornament for the crown.
That crown is where the brick gives way to an oiled bronze, rounded, arch-topped framing, a contemporary reading of the cast-iron cornices that once capped the commercial palaces a few blocks over on Union Square's west side. Below it, the window frames stay close to the brick's own warm gray-beige, close enough that the grid barely reads at all. It's the sun that draws it out, a different set of shadows through the day rather than a change in the wall.
The building treats its amenities as one sequence rather than a list. The fitness room sits below grade, in the cellar. The day's first move happens underground, before anyone's seen the sky. A resident library opens straight off the lobby, the room between the street and the elevator, a place to slow down before going up. The sequence ends at the top, in a rooftop lounge that looks straight down into Union Square, the same park whose 1839 opening set this whole stretch of blocks in motion.