56 Leonard Street was designed by Herzog and de Meuron. It is concrete throughout, a core with flat plate slabs carried on columns and shear walls, and the slabs step and rotate slightly as they rise. The exposed slab edges and the glass cantilevered past them give every apartment its own terrace and give the tower its stacked profile.
The consequence of that stacking is structural and it reaches inside. Columns do not line up from one floor to the next, so loads are carried across by short structural walls that run one or two storeys, and the longest cantilevers, which project as much as twenty five feet, are held by trusses two storeys deep.
For anyone working here the first fact is that nothing transfers. There are 145 residences and no two share a plan, so a detail drawn for one apartment is a drawing for that apartment only. The second is that interior column positions are not where the floor below would suggest. They have to be taken from the plan of that floor rather than assumed.
The slab edge is left exposed at the perimeter, so the ceiling plane ends in structure rather than in a finished return.
Within walking distance
Building facts
Built
2007
Floors
57
Residences
145
New York City Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output, version 26v1. Tax lot 1001767501.