443 Greenwich

The qualities and sensibilities of European residential building garden courts inspired 443 Greenwich Street's central garden court. Set within one of TriBeCa's most distinctive residential use adaptations of the late nineteenth-century light industrial buildings, it is an unexpected garden discovery. The garden’s three-sided and central location creates an all-encompassing presence upon entering the building's lobby. Imagine the surprise of discovering a slice of Hudson Valley woodland preserves inserted within the building's windowed central court. Tall native columnar Tulip tree groves accentuate the courtyard's volume. The garden's shade-loving woodland habitat offers seasonal floral, textural, and evolving colors to attract residents' daily attention as a reminder of its refuge resource. The grove's thicket of trunks and leafy canopies provide sun protection for south-facing apartments, some filtered privacy, and visual and spiritual connections to the garden's seasonal evolutions.

HMWhite's innovative rooftop landscape design establishes a shared landscape structure that provides privacy between penthouse garden terraces and duals as the building’s common amenity roof terrace’s landscape framework. A mixture of punctuating shade trees and drifts of flowering shrubs, and a visually binding wildflower meadow threads and weaves through the common roof terrace to establish spatial continuity for a variety of distinct social-gathering nodes. The historic building's loading limitations required the application of shallow-rooted plant typologies sustained within thin-growing medium profiles. These plantings cap bold, undulating landforms that mask roof parapets and bulkhead structures. The continuity of this garden framework mystifies the rooftop's spatial confines, creating a landscape continuum and a larger sense of space. This rooftop landscape destination provides residents with enhanced well-being benefits and a common resource to enhance a greater sense of community.