Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE

Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Windows, BeamUrban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Living Room, Sofa, ChairUrban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, BeamUrban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Bedroom, WindowsUrban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - More Images+ 40

New York, United States
  • Project Team: Andrew Heid, Chengliang Li, Chuhan Zhou, Feng Zhao, Kun Qian, Nadya Mikhaylovskaya, Theo Dimitrasopoulos, Trendelina Salihu, Wanpeng Zu, Xiangxiang Wang, Zhe Cao, Ziwei Deng
  • Collaborators: GMS
  • City: New York
  • Country: United States
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Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Windows, Beam
© Jisun Lee (Studio Gumjung)

Text description provided by the architects. Within an iconic tower at the edge of Manhattan’s West Village, we combined two units by first, redrawing all rooms into a cohesive “matrix plan;” and second, inserting a “garden folly” that relates the interior to the adjacent Hudson River Greenway. 

Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Living Room, Beam, Windows
© Jisun Lee (Studio Gumjung)

A conceptual thread running throughout NO ARCHITECTURE’s projects, the “matrix plan” prevents spatial inefficiency and social isolation by ensuring all adjacent spaces remain interconnected. Billed as a 4-bedroom, 4-bath apartment, the apartment in practice supports multiple programmatic configurations. Rather than “bedrooms,” the more ambiguous term “chambers” more accurately describes their open-ended, user-defined possibilities.

Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Living Room, Sofa, Chair
© Jisun Lee (Studio Gumjung)
Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Image 45 of 45
Plan

No longer passive occupants subjected to predetermined conditions, inhabitants actively participate as co-designers who control a system of bespoke “operable walls” that can modulate varying degrees of privacy or connectivity. Massive movable bookshelves, for example, mediate the thresholds between the double-height loft space and its adjacent chambers: one wall hangs from a built-in track, and the other rotates 360 degrees.

Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Table, Shelving, Chair
Courtesy of NO ARCHITECTURE
Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Closet, Table, Shelving, Chair
Courtesy of NO ARCHITECTURE

The entire length of a chamber also completely retracts to incorporate the adjacent corridor.  More subtly, this concept of “operable walls” informs the detailing for all doors, which appear as matching, full-height continuations of the Douglas fir paneling that runs throughout. Across these multiple iterations, the architectural question of the “wall” no longer functions primarily as separation, but also—through the added quality of motion—as connection.

Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Closet, Shelving, Facade
© Jisun Lee (Studio Gumjung)

Continuing to interrogate the fundamental nature of “partition,” the installation of a “garden folly” responds to the inhuman proportions found in the newly combined double-height space, which opens to the city through 22-ft tall glass walls on three sides, and takes on the scale of the landscape. To reduce this volume without sacrificing the desirable qualities of its light-filled open plan, we inserted two “tree houses” connected by a self-supporting spiral stair.

Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Bedroom, Windows
© Jisun Lee (Studio Gumjung)
Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Bedroom, Bed
© Jisun Lee (Studio Gumjung)

Elevated hammock-like platforms reveal new perspectives, including direct water views otherwise obscured by tree canopy. Negotiating relationships between architecture and nature, one tower aligns with the apartment’s interior walls while the other rotates to face the adjacent park and Hudson River beyond. Like inhabitable diagrams, these installations can be read as two fragments of a 3-D gridded matrix—the timber framework expressing x-, y-, and z- lines of interconnecting spatial relations.

Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE - Interior Photography, Living Room, Table, Sofa, Chair, Windows
Courtesy of NO ARCHITECTURE

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Cite: "Urban Tree House / NO ARCHITECTURE" 30 Jul 2023. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1004719/urban-tree-house-no-architecture> ISSN 0719-8884

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