MVRDV has unveiled final images of the Radio Hotel and Tower in upper Manhattan, marking the Dutch firm’s first completed building in the United States. Located in New York’s Washington Heights, and delivered for developer Youngwoo & Associates with Stonehill Taylor as architects of record, the scheme is described as a colorful “urban village” providing “much-needed hotel, office, and hospitality amenities” for the area.
The 300 million-dollar mixed-use scheme is composed of a series of stacked blocks whose proportions were derived from the site’s surrounding buildings. The tower is further distinguished by its bold color scheme, which sees eight different colors of glazed brick; colors chosen in reference to the greens, yellows, blues, reds, and oranges of local shopfronts.
“Washington Heights has a unique and exciting character, very different from the other Manhattan neighbourhoods further south,” MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas described in a statement. “The design of Radio Hotel and Tower is inspired by that character — we took the smaller blocks that are typical in the neighborhood and stacked them into a vertical village. Add to that the bright colors that you see all around the area, and the project is like a beacon celebrating this part of the city.”
The building’s distinct exterior is reflected inside the 221-room hotel, whose interiors were designed by Workshop/APD. The color scheme for hotel bathrooms matches the brightly-colored blocks outside, while the building’s stacked form creates multiple outdoor terraces and roof decks for each block.
The interior also offers ground-level retail units and over 16,000 square meters (172,000 square feet) of office space, while the highly-visible ‘blue block’ on the tower’s 12th floor contains a dedicated event space named ‘Above The Heights.’
The Radio Hotel and Tower is one of several recently-completed MVRDV schemes to feature in our editorial. Last month, we took a look inside the firm’s newly-opened Valley towers in Amsterdam, while in July, we explored the firm’s post-pandemic interior redesign for Shopify in Berlin.
12 Comments
Would it have killed them to recess a few of those windows to help animate the giant masonry surfaces? The use of colour is nice... but it is no substitute for façade design.
the tallest yellow mass is especially unfortunate
michael graves actually cared...
A weak effort when compared to their European projects. Mind-boggling that it cost 300 million to build.
Does that include land and all the city fees?
Look at the pretty colors! Disregard the banality of its design.
Looks too much like some stacked boxes. Personally, I do not think architecture should imitate things of smaller scale - sculptures and alike... in this case, stacked boxes in my building's lobby?
Hahaha, Heatherwick built a career out of scaling smaller things to the size of a building - with no corresponding increase in fidelity.
Nuts - scale it up! A plant pot? Scale it up! Lanterns? Scale 'em up!
Next, they should scale up a scale! it'll be so damn literal!
-accidental Mitch Hedberg.
The UAE plans to scale up a scaled up scale.
The interior is just creepy.
Indianapolis called, they want their transformational urban development back.
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