Peek Inside David Chipperfield's First New York City Condos

Celebrated British architect David Chipperfield may be better known in New York for his revamp of Valentino's Fifth Avenue flagship or his forthcoming gut job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but that might all change soon. Chipperfield's first New York City residential building is now on the rise across the street from Bryant Park, where he's designed a hotel and condo building for developer HFZ Capital. For a project that's existed since the late aughts, views of the tower have been limited; but a New York Times piece on the 33-story building rising at 16 West 40th Street brought to light a new rendering of the tower's facade—and a little supplementary digging turned back a first interior rendering for the project. Whether the rendering, which shows how the facade's honed precast concrete panels will also appear inside the building, depicts one of the its 57 condos or one of its 230 hotel rooms is unclear, but our bet's with the former.

The Times describes the building's facade as "precast concrete terrazzo panels featuring a mosaic of marble and sandstone chips that have been honed to a soft matte finish." "We tried to go away from the glass tower," Chipperfield explained, saying that instead he chose to design a more traditional building that utilized the grid with stacked floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors and windows.

The Bryant, as the project is now known to the chagrin (and legal protests) of the Bryant Park Hotel's operators, is expected to launch sales this October. The one- to four-bedroom condos, which will begin on floor 16, will start at $2 million and surpass $9 million. The building's two setback duplex penthouses will ask more than $16 million; a figure that can only be offset by their location on the last developable lot along Bryant Park, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
· On Bryant Park, David Chipperfield's First New York Building [NYT]
· David Chipperfield to Design Long-Stalled Bryant Park Condos [Curbed]
· The Bryant [official]
· All 16 West 40th Street coverage [Curbed]