One Jackson Square

At the intersection of Greenwich and Eighth Avenues in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, an oddly shaped lot sat empty for nearly a century. The last occupant of the site was a string of row houses that was torn down in the 1920s to make room for a subway tunnel beneath it. For years, building over the tunnel proved too expensive to be worthwhile. But with the escalation of the New York real estate market in the last decade, the investment in construction there finally seemed justified.

KPF's One Jackson Square in New York's Greenwich Village features an undulating wall of glass and metal. Photo: © Michael Moran

 

Apartment interiors have floor-to-ceiling fixed and operable window units. Photo: © Michael Moran

Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) was hired by Hines, the developer, to design a completely as-of-right building while maximizing the zoning volume. The corner portion of the site could rise as high as 11 stories, while the rest was limited to seven. "We treated the zoning volume like a rock in a stream," says William Pedersen, FAIA, design partner at KPF. "We allowed the surface to pour over the volume to modify its character and create something more acceptable architecturally." The designers envisioned a wall of glass since that was the best material they could imagine to unify the strange form in a consistent manner, but they wanted to deal with glass in a way that was unprecedented.

"We didn't want it to look like an office building," says KPF's Trent Tesch, AIA. "The more individuality we could give to each floor, the better." KPF created a series of striations that flowed horizontally through the building. Each striation is different from the one above it and below it in terms of the way it curves and the arrangement of windows it contains.

"The detail that allowed this resolution between the various layers is the key detail of the whole building," says Pedersen. "These constantly reversed positions pulling back and forth create the ability to separate the overlapping layers." Within each of these undulating ribbons, a series of 18-, 36-, and 48-inch-wide custom, floor-to-ceiling fixed and operable windows - all of which are completely flat - animate the facade.

"Because of all its facets, the glass wall becomes a kaleidoscopic playback of everything that surrounds it," says Pedersen. "An ordinary glass wall just reflects its context pretty much as you see it. This wall transforms it."