Congratulations to Martin Hopp, NY Chapter member
Congratulations to Martin Hopp, NY Chapter member and supporter of the RIBA-USA for many years who has won a 2020 AIA NY Interior Award for his ingenious apartment design!
This garden-level apartment resulted from major structural repairs in the basement of a 1930’s building creating a space with an odd layout and challenging features, further complicated by the subterranean feel being partially submerged below grade and hemmed in by foundations giving only brief moments of natural daylight. The challenge was to transform an unremarkable listed 720 sf, including 30% corridor and bathroom, into the perfect one/ two-bedroom multipurpose apartment.
Extensive custom, locally built, millwork (folding and pivoting doors, rotating table, counterbalanced spring mechanisms, lots of storage) created transforming high-quality microelements producing a series of multifunctional light and bright spaces. The result balances extreme functionality with a pleasing white and wood aesthetic.
“It’s a Swiss Army knife of an apartment – everything kind of folds out and comes back in.”
– Marz Ann Lazarus, Juror
Achieving a carbon-neutral built environment needs to emphasize the adaptive reuse of existing structures and empower our most creative designers to imaginatively make these spaces highly functional for today. Retrofitting saves 50-75% of embodied carbon compared with new construction which takes between 10 – 80 years to pay back the construction generated embodied carbon emissions. The obsession with new forms needs to be supplanted by a fresh understanding of the opportunities involved in reworking existing structures.
The project created a flexible, ergonomic, and delightful home with a small-scale office and workspace and acts as a prototype for similar future renovation projects in other unremarkable locations. A series of small, hyper-functional spaces are transformed using flexible, microelements to create a multi-functional home that can adapt for the needs of its changing users.
