Monday, May 26, 2008

Rooftop shed in Manhattan

According to Joseph Giovannini in Architectural Digest, this penthouse/retreat was originally a "humble, metal-clad storage shed that anyone else would have called a teardown" before it was turned into something very nice indeed by Robert A.M. Stern. As Giovannini says:
"Stern is a busy man leading three professional lives—architect, historian and dean of Yale’s architecture school—and in his practice, he found that his time and concentration were being nibbled away as associates approached him in his office asking him for “just a minute.” Stern needed a quiet place for working with two writing colleagues as well as a getaway of his own....“I wanted to create a magic relationship between inside and outside, with gigantic doors that folded open to an outside deck on the same level,” he says."
I particularly like this final quote from the piece from Stern.
“People know that if they’re to come up here to the shed, it has to be a crisis. It’s a great advantage to be a little hard to get to.”
The article is well worth a browse.

2 comments:

  1. Great blog! Glad I found it. Adding it to my list of daily feeds. ;-)

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  2. Just took a better look at the pics. The bookcase might be my favorite part, followed by the lighting.

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