152 Elizabeth Street Condominiums

This is the first residential building Tadao Ando designed in Manhattan. The developer, Sumaida + Khurana, a New York firm keen to commission renowned architects who had not yet built in the city, offered him a corner site in Nolita. Ando says the site and its scale, the opposite of the rush to build skyscrapers then sweeping New York, caught his interest. The construction took more than two years.

The prismatic seven-storey volume, about 3,000 m2 in all, holds a single home on each floor. Its cast-in-place concrete structure carries the small, evenly spaced holes left by the formwork ties; it is paired with a burnished metal frame and wide glass panels that wrap the building at every level. On the south side, a green wall brings a touch of nature to the street.

The vestibule is animated by a water wall of grooved glass, backlit by diffused daylight; behind the lobby reception, a fog and light installation was made with Gabellini Sheppard Associates, who also designed the interiors. Ando says he wanted to use the common building materials of our century, concrete, glass and metal, to make a distinctive building that would not overpower its neighbours.

It is a residential condominium: it cannot be visited and is seen from the street, at the corner of Elizabeth and Kenmare Streets.