163 Charles Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 163 Charles Street by Carter Horsley

The three very similar modern apartment buildings designed by Richard Meier for two different developers on West Street between Perry and Charles Streets have been widely credited with ushering in an era of "starchitect" projects that significantly upgraded the fabric of the city's new architecture in the 21st Century.

That design renaissance spread not surprisingly to the immediate neighbor of the southernmost of the Meier trio, the mid-block property at 163 Charles Street where an art dealer, Kenny Schacter commissioned a nine-story residential building from Zaha Hadid, a recent winner of the prestigious Pritzker Price for Architecture and one of the most famous architects in the world best known for her flamboyant and fascinating architectural drawings of extreme perspectives.

The Schacter/Hadid scheme, however, was eventually abandoned and Mr. Schacter sold the site to Barry Leistner for about $5,900,000 and he then commissioned Daniel Goldner Architects for the project.

The Goldner design was considerably less complex than the Hadid scheme but its clean-cut modern line complemented the design of the Meier building with floor-to-ceiling windows with a Mondrianesque-pane pattern.

The 8-story, 22-foot-wide, Goldner design had a two-story base with a step-down entrance and four balconies with a total of two duplex apartments, ground floor commercial space and a triplex apartment.

In the press, the building was described in some articles as "Mini-Meier."

Its design in comparison with the Meier buildings is quite diminutive and demure as its tower is considerably setback above its base and its four balconies are quite deep.

The building fronts on Charles Lane, which was described by John Freeman Gill in an August 29, 2005 article in The New York Times as a "quirky one-block thoroughfare just 15 feet wide," that "contains one of the most striking juxtapositions of old and new to be found in the evolving Far West Village."