130 west 12th street
130 West 12th Street was originally an administrative building for St. Vincent’s Hospital, which closed in June 2010. This building was the first conversion of an ultimately complete redevelopment of the hospital complex into new condominiums by Rudin Management. The building is in a New York City Landmark district and they took a strong interest in the aesthetics of this redevelopment. The architect for 130 West 12th Street was Cook + Fox Architects. With Landmarks in mind, they laid out several strong aesthetic challenges for the windows in this building.
One, we needed to maintain the narrow sight lines where they occurred.This presented its greatest challenge in the top transom. Because there were no major vertical mullions for support, the structure of the opening now had to be transferred completely to the horizontal mullion above the operable sash which resulted in some tricky structural and anchorage solutions.
Two, the windows needed to maintain the overall historic fabric of the original windows. So, in addition to maintaining proportional sight lines, we also included traditional features such as drip caps running over the operable windows and a classic black color.
And finally, a design feature that loomed large in the Architects’ minds was having narrow corner posts in the corner windows on the front facade. These corner windows stand proud of the balance of the front of the building affording a dramatic and expansive street view from inside plus a traditional and elegant interior and exterior aesthetic. Richard Cook, the principle architect for this project, challenged us to make the corners as narrow as possible. To accomplish this, we designed the corner with just a 1” corner post. However, this minimalist design required the corners to be prefabricated in our factory, shipping to the building and installed in one piece.
