The New York Times posted an interesting article today talking about how roommates in the city are dividing and conquering expensive rentals using temporary walls. This is obviously not a new practice. But it’s a good case study in what people will do in order to make living in a specific location affordable – in this case, Manhattan.

The first example is a one bedroom apartment that was converted to a 4-person apartment. Here is the floor plan (from the New York Times):

The living/dining room was divided up using a T-shaped partition wall – which is required to stop 2 feet shy of the ceiling – to create two additional bedrooms. The original bedroom is then shared via two twin beds. Et voilà. Now you have an apartment where the $3,750 per month rent becomes less than $1,000 per person.

Probably the most annoying thing about this setup would be the lack of acoustic privacy. Since the partition walls don’t go all the way up to the ceiling (photo here), you’d obviously hear everything. One person in the article described it as living in the same room as all of your roommates, but not being able to see anyone.

Of course, there’s also a space consideration:

Mr. Meyer, 23, has the smallest room by far. “It kind of feels like you’re living in Harry Potter’s cupboard,” said Mr. Meyer, who is in his freshman year at Columbia after serving for three years in the Israel Defense Forces.

The roommates, three of whom grew up together in Toronto, don’t mind the close quarters or the lack of privacy. “It’s definitely not for everyone,” Mr. Meyer said. “When you live with your best friends, it couldn’t be better. We hardly spend time in our rooms.”

I saw a lot of this here in Toronto while I was in undergrad. 55 Charles Street West was always a great candidate for these sorts of hacks because the units are large and because the building is filled with solariums. Inevitably, they became additional bedrooms. 

(Sidebar: My understanding is that there was a period of time in Toronto where solariums were excluded from gross floor area calculations. So developers used to always put them in to capture more area. That’s why buildings of a certain vintage always seem to have them.)

In any event, the above certainly makes the case for more micro units and co-living arranagements. Many people seem willing to deal with a variety of living situations in order to live where they want to live. Urban affordability is certainly a global concern.

The Spaces has a post up called: 7 carriage houses on the market in New York City. They’re all quite expensive. The house on East 63rd designed by Paul Rudolph is particularly interesting. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

As I was going through the photos – that’s what The Spaces does best – I thought of two things.

First, there’s a segment of the market that is obsessed with living in spaces that were not originally intended to be used as residences. That’s what (hard) lofts are. That’s what carriage houses are. And that’s partially why I would love to live in a laneway house (Toronto vernacular).

Backhouses, as they are also called, were initially designed to hold horse and carriage. But as horses disappeared from New York City, the structures got repurposed.

Here’s one theory for how that went about:

Barry Lewis, an architectural historian, theorizes that rear buildings became residences to accommodate the 19th-century immigrant population that moved into middle-class areas in Lower Manhattan in the 1830’s and into the Village and Brooklyn after the Civil War. “Backhouses seem to belong to the era of houses in Manhattan, not the era of apartments,” Mr. Lewis said. “The property owner probably shoved more immigrant families into the stable or workshed in the back. Other owners may have built a new backhouse just to get the lucrative immigrant rents.

The second thing I thought about is the potential parallel between this story and the one being written right now. It feels like a transportation revolution is upon us and changes in mobility always seem to rewrite the landscape of the city.

Hopefully that will mean more laneway houses in Toronto.

It was just announced that the full floor 8,255 square foot penthouse in the Rafael Viñoly-designed 432 Park Avenue (New York) has closed at a sale price of USD$87.7 million. That works out to be just over $10,600 per square foot.

It was purchased by Fawaz Al Hokair and is currently the most expensive sale in the building. However, the most expensive sale, ever, in New York remains the penthouse of One57, according to Curbed. It was purchased for $100.5 million.

Architecturally though, I much prefer 432 Park Avenue. I love its simplicity.

Each floor plate is 812 square meters. But because of the building’s height (424 meters / 1,395 feet) it appears a lot smaller. The ratio of building width to building height is about 1:15.

Because of this “slenderness ratio” the building is split up into 7 distinct volumes with a void between each. These voids – which are completely empty save for the building’s core – reduce wind loading and help with the building’s overall structural stability. (I’m sure it’s fine.)

The structural system is the exposed concrete grid. This leaves the interior of the floors completely column-free. Every window within this grid is exactly 10 square meters. 

Here’s a good interior example of that:

On a none architectural note, the building also features a private restaurant. I am curious how a private restaurant can operate sustainably in a building with 100 and some apartments owned by many people who probably don’t spend all (or much?) of their time in New York. Perhaps it’s partially carried by the ~$2.10 per square foot monthly maintenance fee.

Occupancy is available immediately if you happen to be in the market.

Images: 432 Park Avenue