1100 Architect

The Avant Chelsea, a 40,000-square-foot, twelve-story residential condominium, occupies a tight and challenging site in New York City. The design maximizes the building size allowed within zoning regulations through an unconventional array of setbacks that add bedrooms and exterior terraces to the uppermost four stories. Artful proportioning of a standard window wall system on the street facade balances the scale of the user with that of the building at large. The anodized aluminum curtain wall is surrounded by a ribbon of fiber-cement board panels in nine different shades of indigo. Along the southeast facade the ribbon unfolds into a pixelated color composition of 2,500 fiber-cement panels that range from white to dark blue. The exterior color scheme provides a distinctive identity to a building type ubiquitous in the New York City landscape.