Renta Corporacion:
Renta is a Real Estate Company specializing in acquiring and refurbishing historic real estate in Europe. The two projects below are Renta's first acquisitions in the New York market.
The Merc Hotel adapts and enlarges the historic Mercantile Library of New York into a contemporary 16-story, 58-key boutique hotel. We sought to design a roof-top addition that speaks softly to the original structure - to converse rather than merge. To create a focused backdrop addition that solely acts like an addition. We did this by folding glass. A new glass curtain wall is first sliced at an angle from top to bottom. Then the glass is folded slightly inwards for the first setback and outwards for the second setback, creating facets that reflect the sky. These big but minimal facets quickly guide your eye toward the more ornate, historic limestone structure below. The glass folds to create a visually fast background that highlights the old yet lives independently, a complementary contradiction.
12 Warren is an eleven-story, 46,000 G.S.F. residential development of a five-story commercial loft in TriBeCa. The design separates but honors the old and new. For the existing structure, new arts-and-crafts windows replace the current aluminum ones. The cornice and ornamentation are fully restored, and a new storefront is faithful to the spirit of the existing structure. On top, a new six-story glass addition is designed to be porous and transparent. Two glass towers divide the fifty-foot facade like pillars, accentuating the addition's verticality. These columns extend upwards beyond the roof to create a modern cornice: one of glass. Through it, the sky can be seen from the street; from within the penthouse, the cornice dissolves the boundary between inside and out.