CLIENT WORK · NEW YORK CITY, USA
279 East 44th Street
A conceptual office tower for Midtown East — large floor plates, full-height glazing, green terraces, retail and shared amenity floors. Concept commission for NJU Dev: I led the architectural concept, the key interior spaces and all visual communication, including exterior and interior imagery and 360° interactive tours.
CLIENT
NJU Dev
ROLE
Architectural concept, interiors, art direction
SCOPE
Exterior & interior CGI, 360° tours
01 — THE BRIEF
The site sits in Midtown East, one of New York’s key business districts, currently occupied by the postwar rental Olympia House. The brief was a credible office proposal for the Midtown East rezoning area — a building that answers what tenants now ask for, at a height in the range of the neighboring Chrysler Building.
The answer: deep, flexible floor plates, high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling glazing onto East River and skyline views, with planted terraces and shared amenity floors cut into the slab. The imagery had to show that as a real building — at eye level, in weather, in a working day. CityRealty later ran the project in its Future New York series as a proposal for the rezoning area.
02 — TERRACES AND AMENITY FLOORS
The green terraces are the tower's argument: leisure and outdoor space held inside a commercial floor plan. Every camera on these levels was framed from seated or standing height, so the planting and water stay in the near field and the city reads as backdrop.
03 — INSIDE
Retail and a public-facing cafeteria at grade, workspace above. Timber soffits, board-formed concrete and dark steel — a restrained palette so the planting and the light carry the image, and so the same materials hold in a daylight frame and a blue-hour one. The key interiors were also delivered as 360° interactive tours.
04 — BLUE HOUR
The twenty minutes after sunset are the reason to build in New York. The interior lighting and the city come up to the same value, the glazing stops being a mirror, and the floor plate reads as one room open to the skyline. Each daylight frame was lit a second time for this hour — same camera, same materials, a different building.
05 — FROM THE SKETCH
Every frame was drawn before it was modeled. The sketches fix the horizon, the crop and what the eye lands on first — decisions that are cheap on paper and expensive in a render queue.
Selected Works
LINKEDIN · INSTAGRAM · BEHANCE · ARTSTATION
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