432 Park Avenue Residential Tower New York, NY - 2012 Rafael Vinoly Architects
57th Street Facade : The composition of a pure tower was interrupted by a seven story building which was designed to take advantage of it’s frontage on 57th Street.
Plaza and Retail : Model showing retail at first floor and first cellar. The cellar is designed to conect the Plaza and 57th Street Retail entrance connecting the three entrances for the development.
Plaza and Site Entrance : In this design iteration, the entrance to the residential component was isolated from the larger plaza design to create a semiprivate entry sequence.
432 Park Avenue is an extraordinary project being built by Harry Macklowe at the corner of Park and 57th that will be the tallest residential structure in New York City on completion. This 1,400 foot tall mixed use tower has many features that have never been tested previously in the marketplace or in the construction industry. Its footprint is less than one hundred feet square. From its inception this project was modeled three dimensionally with Rhino, Max and printed on 3D printers, including all of the engineering that was used to test the structural, mechanical and enclosure systems as well as the aerodynamic properties. The tower has an 18 to 1 slenderness ratio, setting it apart technologically from all of its predecessors. The development is primarily residential with a commercial component at its base. The structure is reinforced concrete at strength of 14,000 psi. The design mix is a concrete known as SCC, or Self Consolidating High Performance Concrete. The columns at the base are close to six feet square and they taper as they reach the top. The floor to floor height is fifteen foot six giving the residential floors large volumes. The windows, like the footprint of the structure, are square. The glazing units are three lights thick, which was necessary to meet the energy code. With six openings per side the glass was engineered to the maximum sheet size. At 2,100 pounds each, the glass was designed to bear its own weight without cracking due to the large size. Park Avenue Building : A floating cube at the corner of Park and 56th marked the main ground level.
Mechanical Systems and Fenestration: Given the small footprint of the building and the adjacent lots placement of air intake and exhausts were compositionally challenging. The color coded illustration above shows where louvers were placed.
Exterior Wall Systems
Lot Line Windows: The western facade has a lot line condition which imposes programmatic restrictions for types of spaces allowable in the tower due to fresh air requirements of habitable spaces.
Retail 57th and Plaza: The 57th Street conditions require special street wall requirements. Due to the nature of 57th Street the facade has to maintain the commercial facade to be colinear with adjacent buildings. Additionally the height of the building has also been set by the zoning envelope of the commercial corridor.
Systems and Subsets: To maintain the regularity of the facade the design of the window accomodated many varied envelop conditions depending on usage of facade in the tower.
Mechanical Plant and Entrance:anchoring the corner with the same proportional motif and module using transparency opposed to porousity of the tower. Programatically limited by footprint and corner location. Roof had the cooling towers for the lower half of building.
432 Park Entrance:a underpass cut though the building allowing for the Park Avenue address. Also a escalator from street to lower level retail. Possibly a food venue.
Park Avenue Details: facade designed completely of glass framing making the box almost transparent.
Park Avenue Building
Amenities for Residence: Just above he Residential Lobby was the amenities for the residential tower. Due to zoning and use the stairs went from in the core to flanking the tower. The orange shows the distribution of the spaces including the blue lower level commercial entity. Mechanical spaces are shown in grey and illustrate the intense integration required to get all the services into the narrow tower ans at the same time keep elevators intact while shifting stairs to a pressurized type allowing for commercial use.
Pre-function and Dinning
Spa
Pool
Lobby and Amenities Section:
Residential Floors and Studies: The residential component took up 70% of the program space. The tower had one scissor stair in the middle freeing up space in tower for a smaller core. The Elevators were single shaft and were the first of there kind in use as high speed very tall building design. The combination of core size in small tower and the large windows governed the layouts. There were many constraints making layouts very challenging. Ventilation and thermal comfort were also issues that needed timely research to maintain the thermal conditioning need for the large volumes.