Contemporary Architecture in the Meatpacking District

Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District
designed by Polshek Partnership

What makes Manhattan crazily beautiful is this frenetic mix of disparate styles: brutal, unexpected, careless about any taste, about any balance, and thus sophisticated. It is about architecture, it is about people: Manhattan is life, just life.

The Ground Floor: Restaurant & Garden Cafe
(Photo: Matthew Weinstein for the NY Times)

A new hotel with a SciFi lounge on the eighteenth floor comes over the abandoned elevated freight railroad (the High Line). The restaurant and a garden cafe are positioned under the old trackage. From the garden patrons have a view of the railroad underbelly.

The Lounge
(Photo: Matthew Weinstein for the NY Times)

Actually the Standard Hotel is the first project in a string that will make use exactly of this old trackage. The High Line will become a park running through such hotels.

Elevator Bank
(Photo: Nikolas Koenig)

Nicolai Ouroussoff has this article in NY Times:

It would be easy to dismiss the new Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District as a final shout-out to the age of excess. The entire area, whose trendy shops and cafes must still contend with the occasional whiff of rotten meat, reflects a development culture run amok.

Well, that would be a mistake. The boutique hotel, designed by Polshek Partnership, is serious architecture. The first of a string of projects linked to the development of the High Line, a park being built on a segment of abandoned elevated rail tracks, the new building’s muscular form is strong enough to stand up to both its tacky neighbors and the area’s older industrial structures. Its location, on Washington Street at West 13th Street, exploits the clash of scales that has always been a gripping aspect of the city’s character.

In short, it is the kind of straightforward, thoughtfully conceived building that is all too rare in the city today.

Part of this is due to its stunning position. The partially open hotel — 19 floors and 337 rooms — is the only new building that rises directly over the elevated park. The towering structure is supported on massive concrete pillars, while a ground-floor restaurant and garden cafe are tucked underneath the High Line’s hefty steel frame.

I admit to some mixed feelings about the restaurant. Clad in recycled brick, it’s meant to reflect the neighborhood’s old identity as the city’s meat market. A slick black metal canopy is a spiffed-up version of the decrepit canopies that once lined the neighborhood’s sidewalks, without the beef carcasses. The garden’s brick paving and industrial light fixtures look quaintly European. Over all the effect feels about as genuine as a Hollywood back lot.

Still, Polshek smartly plays up the contrast between these spaces and the tough brick, concrete and steel structures that surround it. From the garden cafe people can look up at the High Line’s gorgeous steel underbelly. One of the most enticing fire stairs runs down the side of a concrete leg supporting the hotel, crashing down on the restaurant’s roof before tumbling out on the sidewalk.

Polshek was also careful to segregate the various entries — to the hotel, restaurant and a lounge that will open this summer on the 18th floor — so that hotel guests won’t feel as though they are trapped in an entertainment hell for 20-somethings. (The Standard’s owner, André Balazs, is negotiating with the city to create a more direct connection between the hotel and the High Line, which would significantly diminish this effect as well as compromise the park’s public quality.)

It’s only once you get off the ground, however, that you appreciate the design’s true flair. The hotel is set at a slight angle to the High Line (part of which is to open in June), creating a delicious tension as its deck passes underneath. The building bends slightly near the center, giving it a more streamlined appearance in the skyline and orienting the rooms toward the most spectacular views. To the southwest the facade is angled toward a sweeping view across the Hudson River to the Statue of Liberty. To the northeast, guests look out across jagged rooftops to the Empire State Building.

This sense of floating within the city is reinforced by the arrangement of some of the rooms. The rectangular ones on the south side of the building are laid out with their long side along floor-to-ceiling windows. The effect is to bring you up closer to the glass, so that you feel as though you were suspended in midair, with the city just underneath your feet. (Mr. Balazs confessed to an instant of vertigo when he first stepped into one of these rooms.)

These are simple but powerful moves. And they are a reminder that enveloping a structure in a flamboyant wrapper is not always the most effective way to create lasting architecture. In the wrong hands, too much creative freedom can be outright dangerous.

With the Standard Hotel, Polshek Partnership joins a handful of other midlevel firms that are beginning to find the right balance between innovation and restraint. These include the designers of the Bank of America building in Midtown and 1 Madison Park, two projects under construction that suggest a revival of the kind of smart, sleek and confident architecture popularized by architects as diverse as Morris Lapidus and Gordon Bunshaft in the 1950s and ’60s. Those architects didn’t want to start a revolution; they wanted to make glamorous buildings.

Whether this trend will survive the current financial climate, of course, is another matter.

(Photo: Nikolas Koenig)

(New York, New York)

(Contemporary Art)