This 11-story luxury condo project, in Manhattan's increasingly trendy Noho neighborhood, comes as one of New York's most anticipated architectural projects. Its Switzerland-based architects, Herzog & de Meuron, won the coveted Pritzker Prize in 2001, but had never worked in New York, nor had they realized a residential project in the U.S.

They divided the building into three types of spaces. On the ground floor, five three-story townhouses define the building's base, and feature 22-foot high living rooms, wood-burning fireplaces, and gardens. Above the townhouses, another section is composed of 22 apartments, ranging from 1,269- to 4,630-square feet. Each of these apartments features floor-to-ceiling windows, fully operable by tenants. At the top of the building, the architects called for a penthouse. Priced at $18.5 million, the space was purchased by Ian Schrager, who, with Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs, developed the property. Each of the building's 27 units has Austrian-smoked oak floors, "wet rooms" with seamless glacier white Corian walls, and kitchens with Corian countertops and smoked oak finishes. Residents have access to the services at the exclusive Gramercy Park Hotel, also developed by Schrager.

The exterior is as distinctive as the interiors are luxurious. Thick bottle-green glass tubes individually frame each of the windows, creating a strong presence on the street and recalling the area's cast-iron architecture heritage.

The building's most dramatic feature, however, is its graffiti-influenced aluminum fence that rises and falls across the building's frontage in front of the entrances to the townhouses. Its organic form is mirrored in the decoration of the building's lobby.