Award of Merit - Hospitality

Hotel Gansevoort

The 108,600-sq.-ft., 13-floor Hotel Gansevoort, completed in May at a cost of $60 million, demonstrates that the two-acre Gansevoort Meat Packing District - one of Manhattan's last frontiers for development - has arrived.

The luxury hotel is at West 13th Street, Hudson Street, and Ninth Avenue, built on what had been a parking lot. It heralds new life for an area west of now trendy Greenwich Village that 100 years ago had 250 slaughterhouses. Its blocks still largely have low-rise 19th Century row houses and early 20th Century lofts, warehouses, and manufacturing buildings.

The building aims to integrate a modern facility in an historic neighborhood. The design respects the industrial tradition by incorporating exterior Belgium cobblestones into the flamed granite of the lobby floor and with a canopy that evokes those from nearby meatpacking buildings. "They've done a nice job," said one judge.

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Most other features in the hotel - including its motorized, two-story-high, glass revolving door and the internally illuminated glass columns rising to the 5,000-sq.-ft. rooftop development - are cutting-edge designs.

The reinforced concrete structure has zinc-colored metal panels and glass set in metal frames. The façade is richly articulated with projecting window bays, glass-sheathed balconies, and deep recesses that create a constantly changing shadow pattern as the day goes on. "It has nice scale and good proportions," a judge said.

Creating that scale and proportion was another story altogether. A high water table limited foundation depth, restricting the slab-on-grade structure to only one cellar level.

To deal with the limited cellar and subsurface water conditions, the project team placed the mechanical, electrical, and HVAC systems in a mechanical room constructed at the top of the building - an expensive but necessary accommodation. The team also drove sheet piles around the elevator footings - which went below the slab foundation - in order to minimize settlement and the impact of dewatering efforts for adjacent buildings.

The building has an 8-in. concrete slab flat-plate structural system with spans measuring about 23 ft. The spans had to function without spandrel beams as supports in order to allow design flexibility. The team cambered the slabs to address deflection resulting from not having spandrel-beam support.

The crowning achievement is the rooftop, which includes a 45-ft. outdoor pool with underwater music, a rooftop garden, and an events loft. The team had to tweak the support system, because the pool footprint did not line up with the building columns. Its solution was installing 3-ft.deep concrete transfer girders, which shifted the load of the pool frame to the columns.

"The architecture was innovative and unusual," one of the judges said.