50 West Street was designed by Helmut Jahn, sixty four storeys in the Financial District holding 191 residences, with interiors by Thomas Juul Hansen.
The tower is glass and it curves. Around three thousand panels were installed, five hundred of them curved, running from street level to the top, each framed in aluminium and braced with stainless steel. The corners are rounded rather than square.
A rounded corner changes the room behind it more than a flat glass wall does. There is no corner to place anything into, the glass turns continuously, and a plan that assumes a right angle at the perimeter has nowhere to resolve. The double height spaces at the southwest corner compound it, since the glass there runs two floors and the wall is uninterrupted top to bottom.
None of that perimeter carries load or takes a fixing. Anything needing a wall goes inboard, and the acoustic and thermal work falls to what is put in the room.
Within walking distance
Building facts
Built
2014
Floors
64
Residences
191
New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1000177501.