Located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at the edge of the exclusive Sutton Place residential neighborhood, between 1st and 2nd Avenues, 433 E 56th Street is a mid-block ten story apartment building built in 1962.  As with many buildings conceived in that era, it is based on Functionalist principles, meaning that its architectural expression is derived from the program within, in this case apartment units, as expressed in the tripled, doubled and single window units, corresponding to the living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchen or bathroom.

Accordingly, little or no importance is given to the urban context in determining the architectural form.  As a result, the façade is continuous from the roof terrace set back straight down to the sidewalk. No distinction is made between the various conditions attributable to human scale at the street level or urban scale when the building meets the sky, and no account is taken of neighborhood buildings.

While it is possible for Functionalism to result in a thought-provoking opposition between Modernist building and traditional context, such was not the case in this instance.  Rather, a simplistically employed functionalism had caused a significant problem of legibility for the building, resulting in it being all too easily confused with an institutional building such as a hospital, causing the ownership to seek an architectural solution.

In the renovation design, the principal objective was to provide residential character to the building and to connect it to the street in a way that increased its urbanistic presence.  To achieve this, new Valders limestone piers were used to articulate a base to the building, topped with a wrought iron railing that creates a strong horizontal counterpart to the insistent verticality of the original composition and which helps connect the building to its Sutton Place neighbors.

This horizontal line is reinforced with an arrangement of variegated marble panels at the 2nd floor level.  The limestone piers are also articulated with urban scaled decorative bronze light fixtures. These are designed to appear as though they could slide up and down the existing piers, visually connected to the decorative horizontal band of railing in the manner of the Bayard Building, Louis Sullivan’s only work in New York. These elements add a rhythm to the building that is related to the scale of a pedestrian and which create an intimacy to the building quite missing from the original, especially in the evening.

The idea of the variegated marble panels is derived from Romanesque monastery cloisters, in which the columns supporting the roof of the perimeter ambulatory are individuated, frequently by the use of different marbles.  The intent is to give to the space of the street a similar meditative character, so that the inquisitive passerby may reflect on the nature of the individual, the city and its buildings.