Ten years ago, an 1869 brownstone in the East Village was to be boarded up with a check-cashing operation filling its ground floor.
Go to this same spot today, and you’ll find a clean white condominium, and if the weather’s nice, you just might be able to see the entire second floor. From New York Magazine, in regards to the architect:
Peterson…imagined the brownstone tilting back and up like a garage door, updating the traditional parlor-level balcony into a 21st-century porch….The architect went to Stone Panels in Coppell, Texas, to source ultralight brownstone, which weighs three and a half pounds per square foot rather than 60. A thin veneer of real stone is bonded to a three-quarter-inch aluminum honeycomb, and the resulting blocks can be used like quarried rock. The hardware on the moving wall is custom, and McLaren Engineering Group, the firm Peterson eventually hired, also works for Cirque du Soleil.
The resulting space is still the original 16 ft wide, but now opens up to hear the bells of St. Mark’s and the din of nearby Stuyvesant Square.
Whatcha think? Has anyone actually seen this space in person?
[Via BoingBoing]
Tags: apartment, architecture
very cool
No safety rail? I love this idea, but I wonder how it passed safety code inspection. (or maybe I am missing something in this little picture.)
I walk by it all the time and never knew it was there, I’ll have to look up from now on.
Its on rather busy 14th street, I can’t imagine if I lived there opening that wall very often
This looks great, but when I showed my boyfriend, he dourly pointed out that it’s probably freezing in the winter. How did they tackle the insulation issue?