343 47th Street — Hells Kitchen
New York, NY, USA |
Mixed-Use Residential | New Development | 12,250 sf
,
1,000 sm)
Project Lead: Jiageng Guo
Design: Will Sun, Xinyi Xie, Jerry Zhu
CM: Airitan Management
Status: Under Construction
Set within Hell’s Kitchen’s dense tenement fabric, 343 47th Street stands just 2 % off from its context. The project reinterprets the familiar brick façade of New York’s tenement housing typology through calibrated misalignment—window shifts, planar recesses, and cladding depths that produce subtle yet deliberate dissidence.
Adjacent to Raymond Apointe Playground and a row of early-20th-century walk-ups, the building finds its expression through negotiation. The entire façade folds inward, a gesture that internalizes the city’s regulations as spatial rhythm. What might have been a constraint becomes an opportunity to form a civic edge.
Within the 2 % OFF framework, the project operates as a study in controlled deviation—two percent off the tenement typology, the theatre-district nostalgia that shaped it, the symmetry that defines housing repetition, and the Manhattan grid itself. The façade reads as both compliance and critique: a thin architectural membrane where policy, proportion, and expression cohabit. In plan, this offset becomes a mode of authorship; the building shifts subtly to create moments of depth, reflection, and entry—just enough to be seen, and to question the rules that prescribe sameness in the city.