Stealth Building
A gut renovation and reconstruction of an existing building with a two-and-a-half-story penthouse addition, WORKac’s Stealth Building has been hailed as a model of sensitive but stridently contemporary historic preservation that celebrates the integration of “urban nature”—both real and projected— into architecture. Four floor-through simplex apartments are organized around a kitchen/ bathroom core that is conceived as an insertion with a sleeping loft and mini-greenhouse (watered by steam from the master shower) on top. Each kitchen has a small herb garden and built-in composting machine. Mosaics in the bathroom create pixellated murals of trees. The exuberant roof form responds to Landmark’s requirement that additions be invisible. Tracing sight lines from the street produced a volume that fit within the “shadow” cast by the building’s pediments and bulkheads. The penthouse has a secluded terrace with a hot tub in the old elevator bulkhead and generous planters. The restored cast-iron facade incorporates new column capitals designed with artist Michael Hansmeyer, who developed a computer script to fractal “grow” the floral elements of the Corinthian order—a new take on an old idea about the integration of nature and architecture.
