First Look at Morris Adjmi’s Romanesque Design for Soho’s 134 Wooster Street

This past December, Premier Equities, with Morris Adjmi as the architect of record, filed new building permits to construct a 26,000-square-foot, seven-story office building at 134 Wooster Street. Thanks to an online version of the presentation the team will show to the LPC, we have our first look at Adjmi’s design. The Wooster Street facade is articulated by a repeating successions of Roman-arched windows, referencing the area’s signature cast-iron fronts. Since the site is squarely situated within the Soho-Cast Iron Historic District, the development team will need to muster the approvals of the Landmarks Preservation Commission to build their vision.

A commercial retail space would occupy the cellar and first levels, followed by five stories of offices with an average floor plate of 2,700 square feet. The seventh floor office penthouse will be setback 20 feet from the streetwall, and its front will be mostly glazed according to drawings. To the top of the rooftop mechanical bulkhead, the building will be 114 feet tall.

District References- Facade Elements. All drawings & renderings courtesy of Morris Adjmi Architects

Many of these facades show subtle design variances from level to level, and Adjmi’s scheme proposes the same. The ground level has four arched bays, floors two through five have five, and the the sixth floor will have six bays of windows. Adjmi has used the simplified neoclassical motif in many of of his previous works such as 408 Greenwich Street and 83 Walker Street in Tribeca.

Photograph of existing structure at 134 Wooster Street, courtesy of Sinvin

Google Earth rendering via CityRealty

The boutique development would replace a mid-block parking lot and one-story retail space formerly occupied by an Adidas store that Premiere acquired for $10.87 million in 2009. The project is also a few buildings south of where KUB Capital was recently granted approvals to build a similarly scaled eight-story condo at 150 Wooster Street. A handful of new pint-sized office buildings are underway in Soho, including BKSK’s 529 Broadway, COOKFOX’s 300 Lafayette Street, and S9 Architecture’s 19 East Houston Street.

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