Located on Madison Avenue, just north of Madison Square Park, m127 is a residential development collaboration between Cardinal Investments and SHoP Architects.
Designed by SHoP Architects, the 12-story high-rise conversion project has already garnered notoriety as one of the significant architectural developments in Manhattan. m127’s contemporary design distinguishes itself from the Madison Avenue postwar mid-rise structures through its juxtaposition of modern materials and construction techniques against a 90-year-old ornate brick façade.
Every detail of the building’s design is a dialogue between old and new. Large existing openings from the original structure are exploited as a way of expressing the modern infrastructure from within. Huge steel window boxes traverse the old brick spandrels. They are cantilevered on one side and angled back to create a window nook that allows the occupant to inhabit the space facing Madison Avenue. The upper addition of m127 engages this idea further by reversing this relationship. Here, the building’s support areas peel away from the façade, creating a virtually transparent glass wall facing the street.
A retail/gallery space occupies the street level. Instead of attempting to mimic what was created in the past, the idea behind m127 is to use the context as a subjective marker from which to draw. In this case, the Madison Avenue street wall acts as a datum from which the new infrastructure is woven.
m127 is scheduled for completion in February 2007.
