Parlour's atmosphere is rooted in a memory of the past. Its design is driven by a rigorous modernism of the present and its planning motivated by the future of residential design. The Parlour conflates prior, now, and forward-thinking. It is a memory palace. Here the combination of the historical marker of the arch and the vault are wrung through a filter of a clean and essential contemporary-ism that produces a hybrid that speaks to the forward thinker that refuses to forget the past. Today we shop in stores across the globe, wander the virtual living rooms of Instagram and share recipes across our national borders. We revel in the mash-up that it is to be human today. The Parlour is just such a mash-up, an all-too-human hybridity.
The limestone townhouses that surround Prospect Park otherwise known as the “greystone” belt were a strong influence on the development of the Parlour facade. We became particularly enamored of No. 21 Prospect Park West with its fine limestone work, regular geometries, arched windows and restrained refinement. The parlor-level arches on this structure, that face the park, were in many ways the progenitor of the Parlour facade, as was the colonnade, or loggia, found at the top floor of No. 17 Prospect Park West. The famous “arched bridges” of Prospect Park were also an important inspiration for the development of the lobby. Specifically the extraordinary experience of walking underneath them. Although rendered decoratively as arches on the exterior, these structures are in reality simple extruded vaults and directly influenced the shape and proportion of the lobby floating vault.
The windows are the largest single-unit tilt and turn available on the market and are fabricated in a hybrid of wood on the interior for the warmth and aluminum for performance on the exterior. They are imported from Europe and are triple glazed. We struggled to find a manufacturer that could provide a single uninterrupted sheet of glass for an operable window of this size. Imagine the dimensions of a classic parlor level townhouse window developed as a single abstract arch. The proportion alone will be the single most dramatic aspect of the project.
You’ve heard of muscle memory. We suggest that spatial memory works in much the same way. Here the arch and the vault in their purest form are mobilized to invoke a physical experience with an emotional impact. That emotional response is born in the recognition of the familiar, presented in an unfamiliar manner. A physical anamnesis if you will. The arch and the vault in this context are as much visual symbols as they are viscerally evocative psychological catalysts. Inspired by the vaulted bridges of Prospect park, the Parlour lobby, floating vault, is at once grand and modern: “grand” because of the associative connotations of a vault, “modern” because it floats miraculously overhead.
Material Used :
1. Lazer Marble - Stone and Tile
2. Custom Plumbing Fixtures - Watermark
3. Metalwork - Architectural Metal Fabricators Inc.
4. Exterior Brick - Belden Tri-State
5. Windows - Open Architectural Windows & Doors
