150 Charles Street

1938 warehouse, adapted 2015, 91 residences across 16 floors.

150 Charles Street, 10014

150 Charles Street is the former Whitehall Storage warehouse of 1938, adapted and reclad by COOKFOX and completed in 2015. The warehouse was concrete, brick and glass, and it was kept rather than cleared, so the building standing now is the old frame carrying a new envelope.

The structural grid of the warehouse survives and sets the plan. Each bay of that grid defines one townhouse along Charles Street and West 10th Street, which is why ten of the residences have their own doors to the street rather than a route through the lobby. Working in one of those means the party walls are the original concrete frame, and the bay is the unit of the plan whether or not the layout wants it to be.

A concrete frame fixes window positions and gives deep reveals. The openings land where the frame allows, and the reveal depth is a real dimension, deep enough to detail into for blinds, shutters or a seat rather than something to be papered over.

Above the streetwall the building steps back in stacked volumes, and the setbacks carry planted terraces. Anything built on those terraces is sharing its space with soil and irrigation, so the loading and the drainage are settled before the joinery is.

Keeping the frame cost the plan its freedom and bought the street its scale. On a block of nineteenth century houses that is the trade worth making, and it is legible from the sidewalk in a way a replacement building would not have been.

Within walking distance

Building facts

New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1006367503.