Lit Planes
| New York, NY | 2020 |
| Residential Renovation | Built |
Lit Planes combines two one-room studio apartments into a single L-shaped living space. Located in New York City’s Central Park West district, the apartment overlooks a north-facing courtyard with limited daylight access. Previously, the units were two separate hotel rooms situated at the inverted corner of a narrow, shaft-like building courtyard with no park views. The design focused on looking inward while enhancing the quality of daylight. The challenge of this project was to create a surface geometry that maximizes the perception of interior volume, reorients the views, and brings in more daylight. The tilted planar geometry emphasizes rhythmic continuity between interconnected spaces. The newly constructed wrapper uses existing walls and protruding ceiling beams as physical constraints to create new geometry that enhances a sense of lightness and spatial expansion while supporting the reflection of daylight. Tilted planar geometry wraps the structure’s hard edges, creating a fluid, undulating effect supported by embedded cove lighting. Using subtly angled planes, the interior provides new perspectival views through clerestories, increasing the sense of volume and merging natural and artificial light reflections to heighten visual depth and illumination.