Lower Manhattan Penthouse_02.Living Room

Attic_window overlooking Living room

Attic_view down to Living Room

Attic_view down to Living Room

Nest_at Third Level

Nest_view across bridge

Bridge

Nest and Adjacent Bedroom

Underside of Nest_Looking up

Living Room_with climbing holds on central column

Living Room

The four-story high living room can be ascended by climbing holds anchored to the original 1895 riveted steel structure -which is among the earliest steel frames used in a New York skyscraper. A sloping window fills one end of the fourth level Attic floor providing a vertiginous view down, past the upholstered balcony suspended in the steel beams at the third level, to the main floor level forty feet below.

David Hotson Architect
151 Lafayette Street, 4th Floor
New York NY 10013
Phone +1 212 965 8828
Fax +1 212 965 8830
info@hotson.net
www.hotson.net


OwnerDavid Hotson

The essence of architecture – from which the aesthetic, utilitarian, emotional, and poetic qualities of architecture all ultimately derive – is space. At is most essential architecture is the shaping of volumes of enclosed interior emptiness.

Interior space is inherently elusive, expanding beyond the boundaries of vision, eluding our ability to apprehend it all at once, and immersing the visitor in an enveloping environment that cannot be captured or reproduced for re-presentation elsewhere but must be apprehended directly, in the experienced present.

This immediate, present-tense, un-reproducible quality of spatial experience provides something invaluable in the contemporary world – an antidote to the infinite streams of simulated, endlessly replicated and re-presented modes of experiencing proliferating in contemporary life. Enveloping architectural space cannot be downloaded or experienced secondhand. It requires a pilgrimage, a first person experience, centering the visitor in the immediate subjective present of experienced time within the present of interior space. To realize its essential nature, and to maximize the unique value of this nature, architecture should focus on the creation of distinct legible spaces which amplify the sense of spatial immersion, and which provoke and heighten moments of immediate experiential clarity.

The office of David Hotson Architect employs a disciplined approach to the design of space, privileging emptiness over mass, void over solid, the immaterial over the material – treating empty, enveloping, concave, subjective volume – rather than rather convex objective form – as the primary medium of design.

This practice focuses on the manipulation of carefully delineated volumes of enclosed interior emptiness, configured to provoke awareness, pleasure, utility, and comfort.

David Hotson Architect is a full-service architectural design firm specializing in crisply delineated, impeccably detailed contemporary residential, commercial, and institutional architecture.

http://www.american-architects.com/en/davidhotson/en/domain:american-architects.com/catId:1/