Spring Place

Spring Place is a 24,000-square-foot members-only club organized on two floors of a Tribeca building in New York City. It is comprised of a social component which covers the upper floor, and a shared office component at the lower floor. The design concept behind the project derives from the brutalist architectural feats of the 20th century. At the core of that architectural design movement was unpretentious honesty of materials and form. In that framework, we devised a system of concrete walls which intersect while never turning a corner. All walls are expressed as free-standing and stand-alone objects, whose architectural expression lies in their intersections with other such walls... they support them or become supported by them. This diminutive language, offering no apparent opportunity for negotiation of forms, is explored [challenged]through a series of spacial moves. At times, these walls separate into beams stretching into dramatic cantilevers... and defy the density of the cast-in-place concrete in a gesture of remarkable lightness. At times they run parallel [while at different heights], thus layering light and scaling shadow... to deliver a fragile space, a soft balance of quiet purity. The lower floor is dedicated to work areas and lounge areas. The architecture of the space follows the same brutalist framework of concrete planes which scale and navigate the space in different spacial gestures. As it is the case on the social/hospitality floor above, the system of concrete planes is counterpointed by a system of blackened steel surface at the ceiling. These reveal the infrastructural systems behind them and scale the space to define areas. The social component at the upper floor includes a main dining area and several event spaces and private dining rooms designed to offer different experiential values and settings. Credits: - bluarch - Juhee Chung - bluarch - Masashi Kobayashi