372 Lafayette Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 372 Lafayette Street by Carter Horsley

This handsome, 6-story apartment building at 372 Lafayette Street on the southwest corner of Great Jones Street in NoHo was completed in 2016 and designed by Morris Adjmi.

The developer is Great Jones Lafayette LLC of which Noah Shemel is a principal.

It has 11 rental apartments and is distinguished by its gray metal façade with red-brick accents on either side of its mullions on the 2^nd through the 5^th floors.

Mr. Adjmi employed an aluminum façade also at the Sterling Mason development in 2015 in TriBeCa.  His other major projects in the city include the Scholastic Building on Broadway between Prince and Spring streets with its bright and broad red spandrels and the askew low-rise office building at 837 Washington Street near the High Line.

This building is just to the north of 10 Bond Street designed by Anabelle Selldorf, which was under construction at about the same time, and directly across Great Jones Street from the great 1889 Schermerhorn Building that is notable for its fat and low columns, tie-backs and two-tone façade by Henry J. Hardenbergh and its lavish Lafayette restaurant and sidewalk café.

These buildings along with nearby 40 Bond Street, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, and 25 Bond Street, designed by BKSK Architects, make this area a pocket of significant architectural interest.

Bottom Line

Unlike the pretty showy ambiance of the High Line strip of new construction, this building continues the rather sophisticated aesthetic of this much smaller group of new buildings that has transformed what was once a fairly unattractive area into one of the city’s choicest.

Description

The building’s top floor continues the façade treatment of floors 2 through 5 except that its girder-like mullions are not flanked by red brick and that the spaces in between them are open as the penthouses structures are recessed.

The top of the façade is a triple-bandcourse while the lower bandcourses, which line up nicely with the terracotta bandcourses at 10 Bond Street next door, are girder-like.

The end corner columns at Great Jones Street are rounded, which is a subtle variation.

The ground floor has retail spaces on either side of the central entrance on Lafayette Street.

This building is one floor shorter than 10 Bond Street whose top floor is recessed but is surrounded by a pergola-like overhang, creating a surprisingly nice contextual relationship with the open top floor at 372 Lafayette.

History

In 2006, the City Planning Commission approved a plan for a similarly massed building made out of shipping containers by architect David Wallance.