The Standard, High Line
The Standard, High Line, formerly The Standard, is an 18-story luxury boutique hotel located at 848 Washington Street between West 13th and Little West 12th streets in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, New York City. It stands above street level, above the High Line, a former elevated railroad track reconstructed into a linear park. The hotel, which has 338 guest rooms, was designed by the architects Ennead Architects and was completed in 2009. Architype Review, an online architecture publication, heralded the hotel as being "straightforward, thoughtfully conceived, that is all too rare in the City today."
History
Hotelier André Balazs commissioned the building of the Standard. Although he owns a chain of hotels, this was the first he has actually built from the ground up. The hotel is located within the Meatpacking District. Most of the area is occupied by two-story 19th and 20th century manufacturing lofts and industrial buildings which were once predominantly occupied by meat packers and butchers, but which now house restaurants, boutiques and high-end retailers. The clients and architects wanted the hotel to "reflect the historic feel of the neighborhood." Josephine Minutillo, a critic for Architectural Record noted, "the Standard is sleek and gritty at the same time, echoing its Meatpacking District neighborhood, where high-end fashion showrooms and pricey art galleries have supplanted bloody butcher shops and no-frills warehouses."Design
The hotel is raised above street level on pilotis, five massive sculptural piers, which hoist the building thirty feet over the park below. On the east side of the structure " single, sloped concrete pier, along which a tantalizing set of fire stairs runs, supports the building by the hotel entrance." The elevation of this structure is one clear distinction from the orthogonal street grid of Manhattan. Another was hinging the two concrete slabs which make up the structure. The hinge technique was not only a stylistic choice but also a functional one. Because of the angle of the two slabs all 338 guest rooms have unobstructed views of Manhattan: the New York City skyline, the Hudson River or the Empire State Building. Balazs explains the choice for hinging the slabs as such: "It us to squeeze in an extra room per floor, but more significantly, it provides a variety of view corridors while retaining as many views as possible of the Empire State Building."The two prevalent materials used were concrete and glass. Two techniques of concrete pouring were used, pour-in-place and board form. The grid of the concrete serves as a frame for the water-white glass. The combination of the two materials creates a curtain wall for the façade of the structure. Architype Review notes that, "the juxtaposition of the building’s two materials…reflects the character of New York City: the gritty quality of the concrete contrasts with the refinement of the glass."