Christoff: Finio reimagines the classic New York town house for The Heckscher Foundation for Children

摘要

The town house is a Manhattan icon, and from the outside, The Heckscher Foundation for Children on East 70th Street looks like an exemplar. But it takes only a step inside to find that the building's gut renovation by local firm Christoff:Finio Architecture diverges from the norm. "This was an effort to carve out a new type of town house," says Taryn Christoff. "It's a rethinking of how a town house can be organized," concurs partner Martin Finio, AIA. The 1902 building on the block known as Millionaire's Row was designed by Samuel Trowbridge, the architect of the B. Altman department store (now the New York Public Library's Science, Industry, and Business Library) and the St. Regis Hotel, for himself. The Heckscher Foundation is nearly as old. In 1921, developer, industrialist, and philanthropist August Heckscher established the endowment that today awards grants to children's arts and educational programs. Just as a new generation of leaders has recently taken the foundation's helm, Christoff:Finio's design bridges old and new incarnations of the institution itself. "It's an old foundation, and it bought an old building, but it's moving into a new time," Christoff says. "It's a stuffy building on the Upper East Side and all that represents, but it can still carry something new." The Heckscher Foundation's white steel-and-glass interior serves as a Modern jewel box that holds light while framing carefully selected fragments of the historic institution, such as grand, gilt-framed canvases, original fireplaces, and French windows.