Claremont Hall, a 41-story luxury residence on the campus of Union Theological Seminary in Morningside Heights, can be easy to overlook. In a sense, it was designed to be. The neighborhood is the closest thing New York has to a Gothic Quarter; among the weathered stone and brick of the seminary, the nearby Teachers College and — directly across Claremont Avenue — the soaring Riverside Church, a showy newcomer would have stuck out like a rude guest. Claremont Hall fits in as though it’s lived there for ages, although it was only completed in June.
Developed by Lendlease, LMXD and Daiwa House Texas and designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects with interiors by CetraRuddy, the building offers private residences ranging from one to four bedrooms. Some have private terraces, and the amenities include a 48-foot swimming and lap pool, art and music studios, a gym, a children’s playroom and a 68-car garage. Prices on the remaining units range from $1.25 million to $5.225 million.
Sarge Gardiner, one of the lead architects, is known for blending new construction into historic neighborhoods. For Claremont Hall, his team’s challenge was to place Morningside Heights’s tallest tower not beside, but within the Gothic Revival seminary campus, and to complement but not upstage it.
“One of the things that we’re very intentional about is looking at the physical materials that we’re building with before they go into place,” Mr. Gardiner said. Prototypes of the custom-made, stone-hued brick walls were trucked to the site for a viewing, to ensure that they looked correct in situ, not just under factory lights. The doors to the garage are fitted inside a pair of Gothic archways with decorative upper panels, or tympanums, like those on medieval cathedrals. “We used that as a place to delight the eye,” Mr. Gardiner said. “Parking entries can look fabulous.”
Preserving elements of the original building was also a priority, perhaps best exemplified by the saltwater swimming pool. It was constructed inside the seminary’s former refectory, an airy space with high timbered ceilings, wide leaded windows and an immense fireplace, all of which were retained. (The fireplace was painstakingly relocated from the opposite wall, where it originally stood.)
Ximena Rodriguez, of CetraRuddy, added limestone flooring and lustrous bronze wall tiles to echo the bronze of the chandeliers — the originals, fully restored by Remains Lighting Company. To preserve the refectory structure, a section of the residential tower was cantilevered above it.
Claremont Hall is divided into several distinct but connected spaces. The ground floor features a study and a library where residents and students can gather or find solitude; the next six floors contain classrooms and apartments for seminary faculty and staff, who were formerly housed off-campus; and the upper floors contain the private apartments and amenities. The idea was to encourage intermingling among students, teachers and residents. “The building has an architectural sense of history, but it also is a welcoming and open space,” said Claire Johnston, chief executive of Lendlease Americas. “You don’t feel like you shouldn’t be here.”
The project has revitalized Union Theological Seminary, which was established in 1836. Its current campus was constructed in the early 1900s. By the 1980s, many of the buildings were in disrepair, but an effort to sell the school’s air rights to pay for their restoration fell apart. Claremont Hall closed the circle: Funds from the project have allowed the seminary to embark on multimillion-dollar repairs and improvements, and community groups received financial support.
“Hopefully we have secured this place for the next 50 to 100 years,” said Frederick A. Davie, senior adviser to the president of Union Theological Seminary, “and so those folks who are coming after us, maybe they’ll have some good things to say.”
Claire Johnston, C.E.O., Lendlease Americas
You have to go in, on any project like this, knowing that some things are going to be gone when it’s done, and find the ones that the community says are important and keep them. That’s one of the most important things around buildings like this — preserving the history with integrity, and then molding the new around it and making people feel good about that and want to be here.
Sarge Gardiner, partner, Robert A.M. Stern Architects
We’re taking the detail of the street and the wonderful detail that you find at the base of Union Theological, and we’re putting it up on top of the tower. We always pay very specific attention to the base of a building and to the top, because it needs to fit in the cityscape and it needs to look great in the eyes of the people living there. They need to look up and say: “I could live up there. I could live at that bay window.” When you just have an anonymous glass box, people don’t think that it’s home.
Ximena Rodriguez, principal and director of interior design, CetraRuddy
I do have a special place in my heart for the pool, because I have this feeling of standing in the room as it was and thinking about what it could be. It was a little abandoned. It felt rundown. But when you see this amazing historical space with the great bones and you’re asked to design a new amenity, you’re like, you’re serving me this fantastic opportunity? This can be reimagined to be amazing. This can be the best pool in New York.
David Calligeros, founder and owner, Remains Lighting Company
When I first saw the images of the fixtures, I was convinced that they were made of plaster, because that’s usually how that scale of fixture for that type of institution would be made. But when I actually went to kick the bricks and put my hands on them, they were solid bronze — hundreds of pounds of really unusually finely crafted metalwork. You can tell, when you look closely at things, what’s merely good and what’s great. And those fixtures are in the great category.
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