41st Street Apartments

Setting the Scene
The concrete grain silos neighboring our small apartment building were (and are) massive. They felt like loud reminders of our extractive manner of living. We wanted our work to balance out the silos through head-of-class sustainability measures and an overall warmer feel — a stake in the ground that we can live with a lighter touch.

Making It Happen
The silos were hard to ignore, so in some ways, we embraced them. Designing apartments that actually harmonized with the silos meant borrowing from their form and materiality — bringing in cylinders, raw unabashed concrete, and structured unit layouts. But we brought balance, too, with humanizing elements like wood accents, warm lighting, and small haptic touches.

Although the height of the silos cast a considerable shadow on the building’s rooftops, early energy modeling found that a 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.