M127, 127 Madison Avenue: Review and Ratings

Review of 127 Madison Avenue by Carter Horsley

The conversion of the 7-story commercial building at this site into a 12-story residential condominium building was completed in 2007.

The mid-block building is located at 127 Madison Avenue between 30th and 31st Streets.

127 Madison Partners LLC, of which Trevor Stahelski is the manager, commissioned SHoP Architects PC to add several floors to the existing 7-story brown-brick building and create 9 condominium apartments.

The project is notable for the dramatic and unusual window treatment of its base. SHoP has angled the windows in the base of the building slightly towards the south while indenting them a bit at the south end of the façade and projected them somewhat at the north end. The entrance has a similarly angled metal canopy that projects further from the building than the windows above it but a large window at the entrance is angled to the north.

SHoP has also designed a new building project at 290 Mulberry Street for the same developer, which is known as Cardinal Investments, that will feature a very unusual undulating façade pattern that indents the upper right corner of most of the windows.

SHoP was the architect of The Porter House, a 10-story condominium development at 66 Ninth Avenue noted by its irregular fenestration and façade illumination pattern that dominates the north end of the Meatpacking District and is one of the most interesting combinations of old and new architecture in the city.

The Madison Avenue property will be known as M127, which, according to Bruce Ehrmann, executive vice president of Stribling & Associates, is a friendly tribute to the city s system of bus signage.

Prices for the full-floor units in the building are expected to range from about $1.5 to $1.9 million and the two duplex penthouse units will be "considerably more," according to Mr. Ehrmann.

It is just to the south of the attractive Roger Hotel and just to the north of the red-brick apartment building at 121 Madison Avenue. It is across the avenue from the handsome American Academy of Dramatic Arts building that was built in 1907 as the Colony Club.

The building's design is something of a variation on the zig-zag façade of the Switch Building at 109 Norfolk Street, which is nearing completion and was designed by nArchitects.

Another major SHoP project in the city is the very attractive Rector Street Bridge over West Street at Battery Park City.

An article in the May 2001 edition of Metropolis magazine observed that "You might know that the firm's organizational chart essentially doubles as a family tree, given that SHoP was founded by twin brothers, the wife of one of them, and another married couple - all of whom met at Columbia University in the early 1990s...Like a few other partnerships made up of architects in their thirties, SHoP has a breezy collective title. An acronym cobbled together from the partners' last names, it combines the S in William and Christopher Sharples, 37-year-old identical twins, and Coren Sharples, 35, who is William's wife; the H in Kimberly Holden, 34; and the P in Gregg Pasquarelli, 35, Holden's husband. The SHoP name is also meant to suggest that despite the firm's command of technology it wants to maintain an explicit connection to tactile reality."