Carter's Review

This very striking, 14-story apartment tower at One Vandam Street is a mid-block building at 180 Avenue of the Americas in SoHo.

It has 25 condominium apartments and two commercial units.

The developer is Quinlan Development Group/Tavros Capital Partners.

BKSK Architects did the design.  Their other projects include the very elegant 25 Bond Street and 3 Hubert Street.

Bottom Line

A south-facing, wedge-shape tower on a two-story podium, it conjures a galloping, “road-runner,” runaway caboose with rickety side panels and a sliding top cabin. The panels here, however, are quite solid and secure, and the perceived velocity is, of course, virtual.

With its variegated limestone façade and seemingly eccentric fenestration, its projecting rooftop pergola on stilts accentuates its slip-shod appearance like a dashing cowboy’s, or Mercury’s, flying hat

Description

The overall image the building conveys is neither Deconstructivist poetry nor camp modernism and it is, simply, quite original and it definitely is not your off-the-shelf, average static mass masked by the glint of swaths of reflective glass.  Indeed, many reflective-glass buildings succumb to the motion sickness of passing vehicles, while this is more likely to stop vehicular traffic.

This building chops up such optical illusions with its limestone panels creating fenestration havoc almost as if it had been chipped and dented in a wobbly washing machine.

The north end of the building has a small, projecting, 5-story wing on the avenue.

It’s not a clear-cut, jaw-dropping masterpiece of massing, but is distinctive and different.

The architects’ website states that “situated at a rare ‘mid-block corner site,’ the building will stand proud and form a distinctive western edge to lower-scale SoHo and be a defining structure of this stretch of Sixth Avenue.”

“The façade articulation emphasizes the building’s unusual proportions and at the same time has subtle massing shifts that tie it to the neighborhood context.  Alabama Silver Shadow limestone is to alternate with large expanses of full height fixed and operable glazing.

The building is between Charlton and Spring Streets and is across the avenue from the eastern terminus of Vandam Street.

Amenities

The building has a landscaped, second-floor terrace open to all residents with a fitness center.

Apartments

Penthouse A is a four-bedroom unit with a large entry gallery on the lowest level that leads in one direction to a bedroom and in the other to a 20-foot-long, windowed, dining room that opens onto a 28-foot-long, angled living room with a fireplace and a 25-foot-wide terrace and an enclosed 20-foot-long kitchen with an island and a 11-foot-long pantry.  The middle level has an angled, 27-foot-wide master bedroom, two other bedrooms and a 12-foot-long terrace.  The top level has 14-foot-long entertainment room with a small kitchen and a 70-foot-long terrace with a fireplace and an outdoor space;

Penthouse C is a 5-bedroom unit with 4,759 square feet of interior space and 278 square feet of external pace with a long entry gallery that leads past a 27-foot-long, windowed kitchen to a 28-foot-long living/dining room with a fireplace and a 23-foot-wide terrace and a very long hall that leads to a 16-foot-longlibrary with a fireplace and a 14-foot-wide terrace.

Penthouse B is a four-bedroom, triplex unit with 3,400 square feet of space and 880 square feet of exterior space in two terraces.  It has an entrance gallery on the lower level that leads to a 22-foot-wide living room with a fireplace next to a 15-foot-long dining room that adjoins a 20-foot-long, angled and windowed kitchen with sliding doors, and there is one bedroom on this level.  The middle level has three more bedrooms and a long gallery.  The top level is a 46-foot-long roof terrace.

Apartment B on the 7^th through the 10^th floors is a three-bedroom unit with a long entrance gallery that leads to a 30-foot living room with a 13-foot-wide terrace and a 16-foot-wide kitchen with an island and a balcony.

History

In a June 11, 2013 article in The Wall Street Journal, Josh Barbanel wrote that “In the 1920s, when New York City extended Sixth Avenue south follower Manhattan, it obliterated entire streets and the homes of thousands of people, leaving a patchwork of demolition scars.”

“But,” he continued, “adversity sometimes begets opportunity.  Developer, filling on of the last remaining scars, have turned some of the Greenwich Village and Soho lots into buildings with prominent designs and necessarily unusual shapes.  The latest entrant is a 203-foot-high condo building on a triangular site on Sullivan Street.  It will be SoHo’s tallest residential structure and have a façade that points south with a rounded tip that will rise above the neighborhood like the prow of a ship.  It is loosely modeled on the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue.  Cary Tamarkin, the project’s architect, said the unusual shape of the lot - one inch wide at one end and 356 feet long along Sixth Avenue – allowed the developer to build an “iconic presence” marking the southern entrance to SoHo and Hudson Square.”

The article noted that the site had been occupied for years by a one-story mattress store.