599 W 17th St

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Type: Mixed Use 

Status: Proposal

Year: 2015

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The project is located in Chelsea, New York City. The proposed block building offers the potential to evolve according to its changing occupants, their needs and activities. Just as the street and block grid provide the city a stabilizing public spatial framework for the often-chaotic building activity that happens within the urban block, the following design offers a similar opportunity at a smaller scale.

 

At this scale, the public and semi-public interior and exterior circulation, as well as gathering spaces become the stabilizing, orienting framework for the naturally evolving changes that will inevitably occur overtime within the program-function spaces. As a microcosm of the city, the following project offers the possibility of both the logical stability but also the exciting variety of an urban realm to be found in a world-class metropolis.

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The Site is located in the block between 10th and 11th Ave and 16th and 17th street.​ It intersects the Highline in one of its nodes and expands its reach to the various parts of the designed program. The morphology of the buildings on site is given by a careful study on the surrounding urban context. Streets, access points, building size and form determine the shape of the three types of buildings (commercial - hotel and offices, residential - housing, public - library) based on program and square footage; the project takes 40% of the site footprint, this allows to build higher and create more public space on the ground floor becoming in this manner an extension of the Highline.