Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architectural firm that has put a glass fa??ade on the east side of the travertine Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts where it is also creating seating areas raised at angles from the ground, has designed a three-unit, 7-story building at 277 Mott Street in NoLiTa that will have sliding exterior panels of glass blocks.

The project is just to the south of East Houston Street and is a 20-foot-wide "sliver" between some tenement buildings. The 10,000-square-foot structure will have seven stories and contain two duplex apartments, a simplex and two retail levels. The site is a few doors north of the Old St. Patrick s Roman Catholic Cathedral between Mulberry and Mott Streets on the north side of Prince Street.

According to the architects' website, "the site is subject to local historic district zoning restrictions that mandates building facades to be at least 50 percent masonry. In order to bring natural light into the narrow and deep building lot, the east-facing street fa??ade is floor-to-ceiling glass. To satisfy local restrictions, the curtain wall is veiled by a system of operable, glass masonry screens. Custom made glass blocks in a running bond pattern with staggered voids are threaded on roads like beads and suspected from tracks on front of the glass wall at every floor slab. These hefty textile screens can be drawn mechanically by tenants like grand mineral curtains. Light and view can be regulated by overlapping the brick curtains to various degrees of porosity, always maintaining the requisite 50 percent masonry coverage. The open floor apartments utilized built-in furniture and transformable wall elements to maximize the use and perceptual space of the units."

Diller Scofidio + Renfro is the archiects of the High Line Elevated Park in West Chelsea and the recently completed Museum of Contemporary Art on the Boston waterfront.

The long vacant site is owned by Karl Kopp of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who owns Kopp's Frozen Custard and Bar 89 on Mercer Street in SoHo.