The Fillips That Take Buildings From Merely Wonderful to Genius

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The New York Sun

It’s the fillips, or flourishes, that really count in the great paintings. Those grand curlicues of putti-protecting clouds; those diaphanous veils that encircle half-shell Venuses; those gilded glimmers from the orderly chests of beribboned, medaled warriors.

For architects, however, the real badges of honor are often more obscure: a fusillade of endless doors, a few unnecessary flying buttresses, and other small details that separate the genius from the merely wonderful.

Two such occurrences have recently cropped up.

Downtown are the nearly freestanding, dangling windows at 217-219 West Broadway in TriBeCa, where five long, green tentacles of Lady Liberty’s crown from El Teddy’s restaurant once so exuberantly stretched.

In 1984, Antoni Miralda and Montse Guillen acquired a former steak house and soon installed the green-painted, steel “Liberty” crown. They called the restaurant they opened El Internacional. In 1989, the restaurant reopened as El Teddy’s, but it closed in 2004, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission declined to designate it as a landmark.

The developer, Steven Elghanayan, subsequently bought the building and commissioned Cook + Fox Architects to design a six-story residential condominium, which was completed about a year ago. Richard A. Cook, the architect, said his firm and Mr. Elghanayan had considered ways of incorporating the Liberty crown into the new design, but decided such a solution “seemed contrived.”

Mr. Cook’s inspiration for the new design came from the shadows cast by the fire escapes on the neighboring buildings, and by the clean lines of the white terra-cotta building across the street.

His elegant solution was “floating” glass panels beneath the tall windows, suspended by two metal bars placed horizontally, and one metal bar placed vertically in the center of the opening. The proportions of the “floating” panel and its supports are quite exquisite and infinitely more attractive than the cheap “children’s guard” that the city requires placed in many apartment windows.

Another fillip worth noting is uptown, where too-large balconies adorn Harry Macklowe’s glassy condo tower at 310 E. 53rd St., at the southeast corner of Second Avenue.

The recently completed, 28-story residential condominium tower was designed by Moed de Armas & Shannon, the building’s “design architects,” and SLCE, the building’s “architects of record,” for Macklowe Properties.

Many of the apartments in the setback tower have balconies with glass railings that extend below the floor of the balcony, which is known, in architectural circles, as the “eyebrow.”

A partner in the architectural firm, Dan Shannon, said the unusual railing design was a collaboration between the architects and Mr. Macklowe, who also developed the stunning mixed-used, black-glass, knife-edge skyscraper at 146 E. 57th St.

“Harry wanted to find a way to change the look of the concrete edge of a floor slab — the ‘fly-by.’ During the extensive mock-up process, we didn’t find any precedents,” Mr. Shannon said, adding that the “underhang is a bit like a window valence and makes the balcony space more comfortable and enclosed.”

He added, “The layered planes of glass and Bulgarian white limestone suggest a dissolving boundary between interior and exterior space; depending on the changing light, the glass panels reflect the street and sky, cast subtle shadows on the stone, or seem to disappear altogether.”

Mr. Horsley is the editor of CityRealty.com.


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