Future Green Studio

345 Meatpacking_Marquee2

345 Meatpacking

Manhattan, NY

Design

Future Green’s design for this dramatic residential building in Manhattan’s gritty-to-glamorous Meatpacking District inserts a sustainable and colorful landscape into a highly-visible urban site, embracing future resiliency as well as the neighborhood’s unkempt history. Our design drew inspiration from the neighboring High Line and historic meatpacking loading canopies—robust industrial infrastructure that welcomed vines, wildflowers, “weed trees”, and a rugged vision of urban wilderness. For the building, Future Green designed a densely-planted entrance marquee with wild Sumac trees and trailing plants spilling through a pattern of openings, bringing light and vegetation to the streetscape below. At the common roof garden, meadow-grasses are sustainably irrigated through rainwater collection. The palette for these overgrown spaces, as well as the building’s integrated parapet plantings, makes use of rangy and resilient species like Goldenrod, Blazing Star, and Butterfly weed, providing fuel for pollinators while integrating grit with glamor, the natural with the built.  

Photo Credit: K. Taro Hashimura | © Nikolas Koenig/OTTO