TEN Arquitectos/ Enrique Norten

On a commercial street lined with high-end stores and office buildings, we were commissioned to convert a five-story 1950s apartment building into a thirty-six room boutique hotel. The result is a building that has gained an entirely new identity with a new wrapper - a frosted-glass box of mullionless rectangular glass panels floating several feet from the original façade. Sandwiched between the new and old facades are the original balconies and new corridors. This interstitial space between the two skins works as a climatic and acoustic buffer, regulating heat gain/loss and shielding the private spaces of the hotel from the hectic urban environment.

Small, randomly distributed unfrosted lines and rectangles are the new façade's only "adornment". These strategically stingy transparent slots give each room controlled views to the city beyond, framing the desirable and screening out the unsightly. At night, the entire building glows like a lantern with a changing checkerboard pattern of illumination, varying with the occupancy of the rooms.

New services and amenities - such as a swimming pool, gym, sauna, bar, and restaurant - were added to the roof on two superimposed planes [platforms] which appear to float above the existing structure.

The room themselves, looking outward to two planes of floor-to-ceiling glass [the inner transparent, the outer translucent], are imbued with natural light throughout the day, yet they maintain complete privacy.