Other changes were more unexpected. Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman redefined the Sony Atrium and Public Plaza as an accessible enclave of activity with a strong presence on Madison Avenue. Enclosing the soaring, 60-foot-high arcades flanking the north and south sides of the original building with aluminum-framed bay windows recast the previously open spaces as two entertainment retail stores. The special interior features of the retail spaces incorporate superscale images and exhibition, media, and display systems, as well as banners, flags, neon lights, and music.

The former annex building contains a series of new spaces, including a newsstand, commissary, ticket booth and the Sony Wonder Museum. Organized around theatrical motifs, the museum is an interactive, state-of-the-art attraction featuring electronic display signs and graphics meant to enhance visitors’ understanding of communication through technology.

In the ground-floor lobby, sheets of dramatic black glass have been inserted into arched recesses to offset the original granite walls and Lutyens-patterned inlaid marble floor. Black glass paired with anegre veneer recurs at significant points throughout the 35 floors. Color-coded elevator lobbies clearly express each Sony division—yet materials, colors and interior detailing provide a cohesive visual impression. The original perforated metal pan ceiling detail installed by Philip Johnson and the basic core organization were retained. What is new is a rigorous architectural approach to layering the space, both vertically and in plan, as well as in the custom-designed workstations and reception desks.

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The academic and research areas, located on the middle five floors, include classrooms, lecture halls, computer labs, offices, and study areas. The top floors house administrative offices, a boardroom, and a conference center, organized around the central dining facility with views of the Empire State Building.

The academic heart of the campus is the 92,000-square foot research library, which occupies the entire second floor and portions of the ground and lower levels. It has its own internal vertical circulation system and a separate entrance from the main lobby.

Library facilities include open shelving for over 250,000 periodicals and monographs, 1,000 work stations of which more than half are wired to support either lap-top or desk-top computers, fully equipped state of the art Electronic Training Rooms, group study areas, miscellaneous special collection rooms, dissertation archives and music listening stations – all supporting the diverse and highly specialized academic departments.

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The transformation and expansion of the center, a 1935 neo-Georgian campus landmark, significantly expands and updates the students’ facilities. The center now provides student lounges, a food court and dining area, a movie theater, an expanded campus bookstore, a multi-purpose great hall, meeting rooms, a game room, a café, a restaurant and the central campus kitchen. The renovation preserves several of the landmark’s historic elements including the façade facing the central commons, the original shed roof and its distinctive cupola. Its expansion was accomplished by wrapping the building in a circular form, which mediates disparate context and topography, and by replacing a previous addition with a new, more efficient structure. The primary organizing element is a new, three-story skylit atrium, a dramatic space where students can see and be seen. The center’s circulation core is an open stairway rising in the middle of the atrium, which was created by cutting through the building’s floors and stripping the central area to its structural elements. Glazing replaces much of the original gabled roof, flooding the atrium with natural light and exposing the original cupola above. The upper floor houses a conference center with flexible meeting spaces arranged around the new atrium. Beneath the new skylight at the quadrangle level of the atrium, an open lounge provides a place for informal meetings and performances. Additionally, this level offers computer stations where students can work in an informal social setting. On the Main Street level, a student dining lounge adjoining a food court features a two-story glazed wall overlooking the stadium. The dining facility surrounds a 200-seat theater, which occupies the bottom of the atrium with direct access off the new Main Street pedestrian promenade. The lower level of the student center houses a game room and provides access to the newly created Stadium Plaza. The new south wing houses the relocated campus bookstore, a restaurant, the central campus kitchen, and a new multi-purpose great hall accommodating up to 1,000 people for various events. Download project pdf for more information

Initially intended to be the north wing of a large, symmetrical arts complex that was never realized, the “old” Henry now contains the permanent collection galleries, Reed Study Center and curatorial offices. Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman’s three-story addition offsets the original structure with textured stainless steel, cast-in-place concrete and cast-stone. It houses flexible, top-lighted galleries, administrative offices and loading, storage and conservation spaces, as well as a new lobby, museum store and lecture theater.

But perhaps most important, the intervention visually separates the museum and addition from adjacent structures, affording a legitimate transition, a new sense of place, an expectant and enriched entry sequence and an integration of site, circulation and context.

In counterpoint to the original Henry, the new main gallery constitutes a memorable form to be re-experienced from within. The addition also acts as a carving away of a solid, revealing fragments that interact with the original Henry to re-site it as the asymmetrical—though primary—object in a new contextual frame, unifying the multiple architectural and site issues at the end of Campus Parkway.

Finally, the intervention is an architectural collage that unifies disparate elements in both contrapuntal and asymmetrical variations. The variations reestablish the primary site axis to Suzzallo Library, reconcile the vertical transition from the street to the plaza level and integrate the original Henry facade both with the new sculpture court and gallery entry and with the campus entry. As fragments, the forms imply but do not directly reveal their spaces. Thus anticipation, sequential revelation and memory become as crucial to the experience as the physical manifestation of the complex.

Associate Architect: Loschky Marquardt & Nesholm

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The owner, with a family of 7, specified a dense program, providing us with an opportunity to investigate and reinvent unique design elements throughout the space. One of the primary design strategies is the relationship between the dining and library spaces around the double height living room, compositionally integrating the staircase, cantilevered piano off of the balcony, the art wall wine display, the glass and gunmetal wall and railings. In addition, the moving bookcase between the library and study, allows natural light to the powder room while providing desired privacy to the study. From the master steam shower one can see through the electromagnetic glass, across the apartment to Central Park.

The material palette establishes a consistency throughout, while maintaining the formal parti and compositionally rich sculptural intervention, simultaneously rendering the space as a serene, private oasis separate from, but visually engaged in the city.

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The mandate was to accommodate a family with four children’s bedrooms and sitting room, two working offices, master bedroom suite, living/dining, gallery space, kitchen/breakfast space with connecting sitting room, with both a sense of privacy and loft-like volumetric expansiveness, while simultaneously allowing the installation of a major modern art collection.The goal, through both the material palette of white Venetian integral plaster, stainless steel, maple floor, and white lacquer cabinets and the sculptural spatial articulation would both engage and counterpoint the spectacular 360° panoramic views of the city and beyond with a sense of serenity within a unique oasis environment.

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This public room, comprising entry gallery, dining/sitting, and living, is modulated by a new black slate stair, dark-gray lacquer cabinets, and a single round column. These elements, along with the art, all act as primary objects within the oak-paneled frame.

The perimeter wall, which reinforces perceptual unity throughout the apartment, is deeply recessed, with articulated oak columns integrating the black slate sills and the dropped heads with stepped capitals. The design reaffirms the possibility of a dialogue between abstraction and traditional architectural language.

In addition to a living/dining space, eat in kitchen, master bedroom suite and a private guest room, the program stipulated separate studies for the writer couple, storage for an extensive book collection and exhibition space for an important African sculpture collection.The parti was similar to Whig Hall at Princeton in that the existing frame was modulated by the intervention of a complex new object that accommodates both studies as well as the master bathroom and dressing room, while articulating the dining, living, gallery and book storage spaces. The kitchen and guest bedroom occupy the service zone. The use of glass block, oak, cabinetwork, interior clerestory windows, and slidding mirror pocket-doors, reinforce the transformation of a horizontal, cellular interior into a complex, dual scaled pavilion that serves as a house, office and gallery.