The Wildest Apartment Building Design

• February 11th 2011

by UrbanTurf Staff

One of UrbanTurf’s toughest parts of the week is whether or not to wait for the arrival of New York magazine in our mailbox around Wednesday or read a good chunk of the weekly issue when it hits the internet in the early Monday morning hours.

Usually, temptation overcomes us and we end up reading it online, however, this week was busy, so when the hard copy arrived yesterday, the feature on Bjarke Ingels’ crazy design for W57, an apartment project in midtown Manhattan was news to us. The 36 year-old Danish architect has designed a project that is described on his website as “a hybrid between the European perimeter block [read: low density housing] and a traditional Manhattan high-rise.” Frankly, it is one of the wilder designs we have ever seen.

The 600-unit project looks like a pyramid, and once complete, will have a shape that rises to 470 feet and then dips down into three corners, all surrounding a large courtyard that opens to the Hudson River. Plans call for all the apartments to either have bay windows or balconies with the idea being that every unit should have natural light. Wild as it might be, Ingels told New York that the city is “ready to embrace such a griffin.”

Naturally, the project must get a litany of approvals, but it is scheduled to be complete by 2015. Read more about it here.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/the_wildest_apartment_building_design/2982.