Overview

In the late ’80s the pioneering Red Square building became the first high-rise luxury project to break ground in the East Village, and its design made an overt effort to reflect and incorporate the eclecticism and artiness that the area was known for at the time. Nearly 30 years later and just a few avenues west, Ian Schrager’s 40 Bond Street is taking downtown luxury living to a much higher level. But the Bond Street design makes little direct effort to reflect its surroundings. Instead it makes post-modern winks at the neighborhood and its history that will, I suspect, be lost on the majority of passersby unfamiliar with the building’s press releases. The architects on the project are the Swiss-based, Pritzker prize-winning team of Herzog and de Meuron who have created an esoteric, luminous green facade that is meant to reference and update the cast iron buildings of the surrounding area (while cleverly managing to circumvent Bond Street’s European-style building restrictions). The building’s front gate, a busy, bone-white, sculptural structure, is ostensibly a nod to the downtown graffiti culture of yore. Whether either of these two allusions actually succeed is open to debate, but what is clear is that building will definitely have a bold look that will come as a welcome departure from the mundane steel-and-glass and brick-faced condos hastily springing up all over East Houston Street two blocks to the south. (more…)