Building on a Difficult Lot in The City

New York, NY - Franny Wentzel - Monday, March 29th, 2010 : goo

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They're rarely the buildings you see in books but the problem of fitting a halfway decent looking building to an irregular lot has been a vexing one to architects for years...

One of the oldest surviving skyscrapers is the 1896 Park Row Building designed by Robert H Robertson...

it presents a lovely façade but turn the corner...

...of Anne Street and you see this slender façade

There was no air conditioning back in the day so light courts were mandatory...

It spent most of its days as a speculative office project also known as the Ivins Syndicate Building...

...but recently floors 11 - 25 were converted to apartments as this plan shows

The City Investing Building had a sizable lot but could only get a small frontage on Broadway thanks to one small holdout

A trio of solutions to shapes imposed by the street...

L to R - The Municipal Bldg - US Courthouse - base wraps around a church - hexagonal NY Courthouse

The Art-Deco Mills Building was a replacement to an earlier structure of the same name

Like its predecessor, it extended a putative wing towards Wall Street

A couple buildings along the wall of Exchange place took advantage of a back alley to provide air to an extra wing

Sometime in the late 1920s early 1930s the old Hanover building was demolish and an infill structure was wrapped around the Bankers Trust building

When Rockefeller Center was built there were two tiny holdouts on the north and southwest corners...

...that survive to this day

With the arrival of the International Style and its limited vocabulary the problem off irregular lots grew that much more vexing as these two buildings show

The MGM Building stood for the anonymous headquarters of the United Broadcasting System in the movie Network...

...and wraps a clammy hand around the Warwick Hotel

The Squibb Building had a 57th Street frontage almost twice as wide as 56th Street

It also was oblidged to wrap around an older building

Too bad the architects didn't take a design cue from the 4 Gateway Center building in Pittsburgh

Another wrapround of note is 888 7th Avenue

It 'embraces' a former artists loft

Another style leader is the Edificio Copan in Sao Paulo, Brasil

The building it wiggles behind was built some time after the Copan was completed

New York City has it's own wiggler...

...the Chatham Green apartments

One of the best odd-lot buildings of course is the crystaline form...

of Tower 49

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A.: Excellent post, Franny!

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