Feature: Above the Fray
November 1, 2007
Some architect-client relationships are minefields of aesthetic power games, fraught with battles over who possesses more visual refinement and taste. Others operate as efficiently as a machine, with clear delineations of tasks and obvious boundaries between the personal and professional. Then there are those rare instances of true symbiosis that flower into friendship, as in the case of this Ryall Porter Architects project—a 44th floor, three-bedroom pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
"The day I knew I was dealing with an exceptional client," remembers principal Ted Porter, "was the day he opened an electrical panel, pulled out the circuits and wiring and asked the electrician why he’d chosen one brand over another. We all just stood there, for a minute, in silence. It took a second for the electrician, who was totally surprised, to respond." With a chuckle, Porter adds, "At one point, we threatened to assign the client a desk in our office."
When the two met at the end of the 1990s, Porter’s client was in his late 40s, his permanent home an English Tudor in Chicago, where he lived with his investment-banker wife and their brood of children. The client’s wife had snapped up a job offer in New York, but the family decided relocation would cause too much upheaval in their lives. "She needed an apartment to stay in while in the city," the client says. "The idea was that we could visit mom during weekends and have room for all the children to stay." His wife actually ended up retiring from the company before the apartment was completed, but by then the husband was knee-deep in the renovation and totally hooked. "I’m an engineer by undergraduate training," he says. "I like to build things, to have a project."
Unimpressed with the original architect’s proposals, the client brought Porter on after seeing the firm’s work in a magazine. The two hit it off immediately. "I know what I like and don’t like about the mechanics of the process," observes the client. "I’ve built houses myself. But I don’t have the aesthetic sense Ted has, so I rely on him for the creative and artistic side of life."
Programmatically, the task was not all that complicated. "The existing apartment had a lot of Sheetrock walls dividing it into many small rooms with lots of floral wallpaper," recalls Porter wincingly. What is now an open-plan living room, dining room and kitchen, for example, was then four separate rooms—a cramped and windowless galley kitchen, a living room, dining room and study—with part of a hallway thrown in.
Additionally, explains Porter, "The client wanted to get away from the pedestrian materials the developer had used and have something more distinctive and durable. He was also interested in creating a sense of height in the ceilings."
The architect addressed the first issue by tearing down walls and opening the main living spaces to the spectacular Manhattan views. A large aluminum air-conditioning grate hogging one wall was also removed, the ducts rerouted into the soffit—where narrow, barely perceptible slits now function as outlets for cool and warm air. "There are so many windows, you almost feel like you’re moving above the fray," notes Porter, like being in the pilothouse of an enormous ocean liner gracefully making its way through Central Park.
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