Prior to its renovation, 401 West 14th Street was a badly-weathered mercantile warehouse just inside Manhattan`s newest Landmarks Preservation District, the Gansevoort Market. While its shell was integral to the neighborhood`s commercial legacy, the building had little future as an empty, unusable warehouse. To retain the Arts and Crafts style market building as a working part of the historic fabric, virtually every element of the building was replaced while preserving the integrity of the whole.
To upgrade the building to the standards of a high-end tenant, the multi-lite windows with operable, center-pivot sections were replaced in kind with a modern, insulating glass equivalent – preserving the thin profile while radically improving their thermal and acoustic performance. Several thousand damaged Hebron bricks were replaced with originals discovered in a Midwestern brickyard. The façade`s terra cotta medallions and distinct stucco panels were also cleaned, restored, or replaced to original conditions. The building`s facades were redesigned to restore original street-level connections. Along 14th Street, a broad sidewalk canopy of corrugated glass replaces an older canopy of corrugated metal, recreating an element distinctive to the Gansevoort Market while letting daylight pass through to pedestrians.
In cooperation with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, an office space of approximately 5,200 SF was added to the roof, almost entirely concealed behind the existing billboard. Street-level simulations were used to study the impact of alternate schemes so that the structure is minimally visible from all sides. Its standing seam construction speaks a material language similar to the steel supports of the billboard that conceals its presence, and also recalls metal shipping containers and other industrial artifacts relevant to the site.
