By Carter B. Horsley
HL23 is a 14-story residential condominium
building at 517 West 23rd Street in Chelsea that was developed
by Alf Naman and has been designed by Neil Denari.
It is one of the more dramatic buildings rising
around the High Line Elevated Park.
View from the north next to the High Line
The building is just to the east of the narrow
High Line 519 residential condominium building that was designed
by Lindy Roy and features cloud-shaped scrims on its balconies.
Mr. Naman is the developer also of 100 Eleventh
Avenue, which is now in construction and has been designed with
a curved facade of differently sized and angled windows by Jean
Nouvel across 19th Street from the sail shapes of the recently
completed IAC office building designed by Frank O. Gehry.
The Denari design rises from a very narrow
base and cantilevers out over the High Line and has diagonal columns
and stainless steel panels with some soft, almost folded, curves
on its facade.
The building has two duplexes on its
bottom and top floors and 9 floor-through apartments ranging in
size from about 1,900 square feet to 2,600 square feet. The penthouse
unit has 3,700 square feet and a terrace.
Apartments are initially priced from about
$2.65 million to $10.5 million.
Living rooms face south and bedrooms and
master baths will face north and the north and south facades have
motorized window shades.
Mr. Denari is based in Los Angeles and was
the director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
He was the author of "Gyroscopic Horizons," which was
the best-selling book in 1999 for the Princeton Architectural
In a September 19, 2007 interview with Orhan
Ayyuce at archinect.com, Mr. Denari commented on "deformation"
and his interest in "folds." "...de-forming means
to make something incorrect for the normative world....My stuff
is aggressive but not in a polarizing way. It does things without
shouting, but when you kind of look at it you realize something
is going on spatially, appearing as something new or uncertain.
One client calls it as walking around being drunk."
Marc Rosenbaum is a collaborating architect
for the project and Gruzen Samton Architects are consulting architects.
initial renderings indicated that the building would be all all glass
and stainless steel but when the building was completed much of its
east facade overlooking the High Line was plain white. The
angularity of the design, nonetheless, is interesting and quite
dramatic especially on 23rd Street where it looks like the buiilding
has really sucked in its tummy at street level.
The building was praised in an April 4, 2011 article by Christopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic of The Los Angeles Times: