A Disguised Penthouse That Really Should Be Seen

<A Disguised Penthouse That Really Should Be Seen>

While its dark color, picked up a generation ago with a coat of charcoal-gray paint, makes Obsidian House, as it is called, an outlier on a block of cream-to-buff-to-red-brick buildings, it is thanks to a recent renovation that the building has one-upped the neighbors again. Its owners hired the small, design-forward firm WORKac, run by the married architects Dan Wood and Amale Andraos, to develop the former factory and warehouse into modern apartments, and to design a new penthouse on the roof. (Andraos is also the dean of Columbia University’s architecture school.) The 13-year-old firm has gained attention for innovative alternatives to complicated problems — if anything, the duo seems to thrive on constraints — and the proposed penthouse provided such an opportunity. Because much of TriBeCa is a landmark historic district, any addition has to be low enough to not be visible from the street.

From “The Glass Apartment Hidden in Plain Sight” by Christopher Bonanos for The New York Times, 2016; Photos by Bruce Damonte (@brucedamonte)

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