134 Wooster
26,000 square feet
7 stories
New York, New York
Unbuilt
With a design that offers a unique interpretation of traditional
cast-iron and masonry architecture, 134 Wooster Street introduces contemporary office and retail space to the SoHo–Cast Iron Historic District.
Located on the site of a former one-story brick garage that had been repurposed as a commercial storefront, 134 Wooster’s unadorned glass and steel elevation celebrates SoHo’s nineteenth-century cast-iron façades, but with a sparseness appropriate for this specific streetwall.
Many buildings in this part of SoHo incorporate arched windows or arched recesses to help articulate the traditional tripartite façade. 134 Wooster employs arches as the building’s primary organizing principle. The two-part façade comprises a stepped glass curtain wall behind a steel screen of stacked arches that change in rhythm and depth to express distinct base, middle, and top sections.
As in many historic buildings, the ground-floor storefront features large openings that maximize display area. A seventh-floor penthouse, clad in dark gray brick, is pulled back from the front façade to ensure the continuity of the Wooster Street cornice line.
The minimalist arches at 134 Wooster seem to share little with the classically inspired ornamentation found throughout the Soho–Cast Iron Historic District, but the façade has a surprising depth reminiscent of the deep recesses that characterize traditional freestanding cast-iron building fronts.
Image Credits
- Morris Adjmi Architects
