Glass House Should Throw Stones (Towards East River)

With the death knell of Santiago Calatrava’s South Street Seaport residential tower all but rung, is the era of daring residential development coming to an end before it got started? Philip Johnson’s Urban Glass House, “a discreet, twelve-story glass and steel structure” is being built at 330 Spring Street at Washington. Johnson’s very last building (he died in January 2005) will have 40 residences ($1.6 to $10 million) designed to evoke his famous “pared-down but modernist luxury” Glass House in New Canaan, CT. But more importantly, the developers actually BROKE GROUND recently (sales are being handled by The Sunshine Group). Apparently, earlier designs flirted with more adventurous geometries, but the discipline of modernist principles ruled the day. And that’s probably why it’s getting built.

Annabelle Selldorf is handling the interiors -- 1,400-3,400 square feet -- who characterizes the style as "free of the sort of gratuitious gestures that masquerade as important design today." Cast those stones! (Click to enlarge lovely interior rendering by Carlos Grande at Hypertecture.)