41st Street

Taking Something Gray, Making it Green

The neighboring concrete grain silo for this small apartment building was an asset and an inspiration, helping to shape the building’s forms and rhythms and adding to the unique nature of the project. We hoped to capitalize on this built-in uniqueness by differentiating in other ways as well, namely by making this gray thing as green as possible. 

The neighboring concrete grain silo served as something to both play with and resist. It’s form and materiality inspired, so we borrowed the strong vertical rhythms of cylinders and the fields of raw unabashed concrete and structured unit layouts accordingly. But its scale and sheer carbon footprint overwhelmed. So whereas the silos overshadowed and alienated, we wanted the building to humanize: with wood accents, warm lighting and small haptic touches. And where the concrete behemoth reminded us of our past (and current) extractive and exploitative manner of living, we wanted this building to serve as a counterpoint. A stake in the ground that we can live with a lighter touch.

Although the height of the silos cast a considerable shadow on our rooftops, early energy modeling found that a rooftop solar array was still warranted. We combined this with triple glazed window units, heat pumps, and the greater thermal efficiency of the insulated precast walls to inch closer to the ultimate goal of a net zero apartment building. 

The combination of an uncanny context, a unique form, and head-of-class sustainability measures sets this dense living apart from other apartment buildings.