Mercer Street Loft

New York, NY

Architecture, Construction

Published in GA Houses 8

Built in 1884, this Soho loft building is a six story masonry structure with a brick facade and ornamental cast iron pilasters at the street level. The design, which provides living and studio space within a 3500 square foot loft, juxtaposes the open plan interior with a trace of the classical plan of the enfilade. Thus, a modernist conception of space as continuous is integrated with a sequence of volumes conceived individually as rooms. This synthesis establishes tension between the expansive open plan and the compression of the series of rooms within it. In addition to this juxtaposition of compositional ideas, the narrative of the project is established by contrasting images of the industrial loft as a work place with those of domestic life. It is the intention that the objects and materials themselves carry these references. Instead of painted-on illusions or abstract constructions of sheetrock, the architecture and objects act as repositories of social meaning from which the narrative of the work may be read. Thus, forties steel office partitions and shelving are aligned with, for example, classical pedestal sink and cast iron bathtub.

The painted floor is also a painting. It reinforces the industrial/domestic dialogue and serves to mark the formal compositional intentions of the plan. The water theme begun in the bathroom is expanded and transformed, suggesting associations with swimming pools and gymnasiums which use lines to demark a particular athletic court. An island of natural wood finished floor remains as the center area of the loft to signify the domestic living room. The diagonal development from the front (street) side to the back derives from the displacement of the windows on these two walls and the corresponding effects of light and view on the experience of space. This oblique is established counter to the axial orienta-tion of the central living space and primary grid of the plan formed by the eight wood columns.

Finally, a series of formal structures frame these relationships. Particular views are constructed. Windows looking from a room to the larger space enforce the idea of an inside/outside metaphor. This idea is then further extended to the actual exterior. The sequences of layered views serve to emphasize the shifts in scale and to relate the various parts to the whole.

Mercer Street Loft

CXC

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