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Can turning office towers into apartments save downtowns?
Nathan Berman has helped rescue Manhattan’s financial district from a “doom loop” by carving attractive living spaces from hulking buildings that once housed fields of cubicles.
The entrance was renovated twenty years ago by the building’s original owners—the Rudin family, a New York real-estate powerhouse—and featured a revolving door, white marble walls, harsh Kubrickian lighting, and a long security credenza. One of Cetra and Ruddy’s signature moves, they told me, is to adorn a public space with a modular shelving unit that contains small sculptures and ceramics that “feel like they could have been picked up on a trip overseas.” The architects also include a pile of art books—“Jazzlife,” “Helmut Newton: Work,” a book of Ai Weiwei’s installations. On the twelfth floor, near another modular shelving unit, there was a bright-white machine labelled “Tulu: Your Smart Rental Store.” Using your phone, you could rent household items like a toaster or a vacuum cleaner, or buy something you’d run out of: tampons, Tide Pods, Doritos.
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