Some neighborhoods in New York City, brownstone neighborhoods, for instance, are likely to maintain a certain uniformity, they tend to be more or less the same. But in the Lower East Side, buildings go up and down, in and out. They are designed in diverse styles and serve diverse uses—the eclectic nature of the Lower East Side’s building stock cannot be ignored. 150 Rivington embraces these conditions and finds a language to express the vitality of its context.

Mediating the desire for openness and views and the domestic need for enclosure and protection, the team explored patterns of open and closed sections, akin to keys on a piano. Apartments in the building do not always align from floor to floor, so when programmatic elements were mapped onto the façade, unexpected patterns began to appear, breaking down the vertical sections and helping to scale down an otherwise monolithic facade.