Michael K Chen Architecture Completes Renovation of an 1879 Upper East Side Townhouse

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New York, NY — Michael K Chen Architecture (MKCA) has completed the gut renovation and architectural re-invention of a significant 1879 Neo-Grec townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side totaling 9800 square feet. The building, which came badly degraded and in disrepair, was revived by careful negotiation between its historical context and the desire for a forward-looking, high- performing, contemporary residence.

Conceived as both a family home and a setting for large-scale entertaining and events, the house is organized around multi-directional circulation and enlivened through light and air. Generous vertical openings and glazed double-height spaces emphasize the building’s grand proportions and create visual and spatial connections between floors. Details such as a lacquered and robotically-milled ceiling provide a contemporary corollary to the machine-produced decoration and crisp, incised ornamental surfaces characteristic of the Neo-Grec style.

The house is also defined by a collaborative approach, the highlight of which is a site-specific work by artist Sarah Oppenheimer, commissioned by MKCA when the building was in design. C- 010106 (2013-2017) is comprised of a black anodized aluminum manifold, a mirror, steel and aluminum supporting structure, and a walkable skylight integrated into the roof terrace of the building. The piece reflects a perpetually vertical slice of sky into the space of the main stair and library, and introduces a skewed angle into the overall geometry of the building.

Not only the work, but the architecture around it, including the position of the building’s rooftop penthouse, were determined through a collaborative and iterative process between MKCA and Sarah Oppenheimer’s studio. The negotiation of vision, circulation, and optics concentrated around the artwork established critical angles that determined the geometry of the rooftop stair and the orientation of the rooftop pavers and plantings. The piece is the first of Oppenheimer’s works to be permanently incorporated into a high-performance building envelope.

“Sarah is a friend whose work I had admired for a long time, and it was so exciting to be able to work together on this project”, says Michael K. Chen, founder and principal of MKCA. “She created an opportunity for a thoroughly unique experience in the project that we would never had conceived of; and we were able to help to really knit the artwork into the fabric of the house in a way that was new for Sarah. The top floor of the building was shaped by key angles of the artwork when both the installation and the building were still in design. So there is this intense marriage of art and architecture that originates before either existed.”

Another collaborative highlight is the facade, which makes extensive use of sculpted terracotta elements, and incorporates a vertical garden, designed in collaboration with SUNY conservation botanists, that features a host of native woodland flora. Some plantings used are federally endangered species due to the impact of climate change, and are being propagated for the first time as a test case in urban conservation gardening. Intensive environmental analysis informed the geometry of the facade and planter elements which creates passively differentiated nano gradients of temperature, exposure, and moisture for a variety of native plantings.

Throughout the house, MKCA has integrated works of design by emerging and independent American designers and studios with significant works of modernist design from Italy, Scandinavia, and the United States. Much of the contemporary furniture was custom-designed by MKCA, or custom-commissioned for the house by MKCA.

Project Team

Michael K Chen Architecture, Architecture and Interior Design

Buro Happold, Structural, MEP, and Façade Engineering

Local Office Landscape Architecture, Landscape Architecture

Brian Orter Lighting Design, Lighting Design

Prudon and Partners, Preservation Consultant

IA Construction Management, General Contractor