When architect Henry Smith-Miller showed off his new facade proposal for the hotel project rising at 25 Great Jones Street earlier this week, the Community Board 2 Landmarks Committee liked most of what it saw. The bamboo garden screen out front: Sure! The undulating picket fence along Bond Street: Go for it! (Carter B. Horsley liked it, too, welcoming the arrival of some additional "architectural pyrotechnics" on Bond Street.) Committee members voted 7-1 to grant its approval, but even though metal mesh is the happening thing in the neighborhood, seen up and down the Bowery, CB2 wasn't completely sold on the building's botanical scrim.
The Landmark Committee is urging Smith-Miller to re-work the perforated stainless steel skin (complete with sexy leaves pattern) into a tripartite look, hoping to minimize the building's verticality and create a structure that's a more contextual companion to its neo-classical neighbors. The next stop is the Landmarks Preservation Commission, where Smith-Miller plans to stress the transitional nature of Noho architecture, pointing out that it is home to a hodgepodge of styles (unlike the far more cohesive and generally shorter buildings of Soho to the south).
On view along Bond Street, Curbed's 2007 Block of the Year, is some of NYC's strongest new architecture. A new six-story commercial building in glass and steel from BKSK Architects, set to rise next door to the Great Jones Hotel, will anchor the corner (new model shots in the gallery above). Together these two new additions?and yet another hotel that might go in across Lafayette Street?could create a strong bookend to this block, and buttress an intersection that has been an urban scar since buildings were knocked down and the roadway widened for subway installation over 100 years ago.
· Noho's Great Jones Hotel Gets a Dramatic Facade Facelift [Curbed]
· More architectural pyrotechnics on and about Bond Street [City Realty]
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