The Smallest Building of William Street
The largest building I have built in Manhattan is 2.5 million square feet. This is the story of the smallest — 800.
At 100 William Street in the Financial District, the bronze-glass tower that Davis, Brody & Associates completed in 1974 is bisected at its base by an eighty-foot-high arcade. The passage connects two streets and an entrance to the subway, and thousands of people cut through it every day. For years it was one of the darkest rooms in lower Manhattan.
In 2007, we were commissioned to design a juice bar downtown the size of a studio apartment. Food trucks were taking over downtown, and the juice craze was just beginning. The concept drew on both — a little building that looked as if an Airstream and a Chia Pet had a baby.
The enclosure is triangular in plan, fifty-five feet on its longest side, clad in silver metallic panels that hold a low, diffused reflection against all that bronze glass. The storefront is a forty-six-foot picture window: ten laminated glass panels, two of them gently curved so the glass turns the corner without a mullion. A single steel girder, assembled inside the arcade, spans the longest side — no columns inside, no columns at the glass.
Above the parapet: aluminum sea grass. 1,900 rods, nine feet tall, in a hexagonal grid, up lit by luminaires tucked out of sight. There is no off-the-shelf source for aluminum sea grass, so the contractor built a test piece on site to see how it would move in the wind. It moves beautifully — when wind comes through the arcade, the rods rustle and clink like a wind chime. The juice bar closed at night; the light and the sound kept the arcade alive after hours.
People who see the kiosk today assume it is new work — the curved glass, the parametric roofscape, the field of up lit aluminum sea grass. It was designed almost twenty years ago.
A city is mostly experienced at eye level — in passages like this one, between two streets, on the way to the subway, under someone else's tower. The smallest buildings often do the most public work.
What is the smallest space in your city that deserves the most care?
