Central Park Tower

Positioned as one of the “postcard” images for a planned NYC residential luxury tower, this diversely programmed amenity terrace landscape is the social hub for Central Park Tower’s residents. Knitted within a visually complex commercial building block context, HMWhite’s garden wall and trellis design masks “back-of-house” utility structures to establish a unifying garden framework. To offset the towering presence of Manhattan’s tallest residential building, a common architectural language of stone and timber introduces relatable human-scale natural world elements to capture eye-level attention. The garden wall also supports an upper-level roof garden that buffers neighboring buildings and creates a bold gateway opening to a wet bar lounge and children’s play space. The complementary juxtaposition of multi-stemmed flowering native trees and espaliered flowering vines with the garden architecture entrenches human scale and natural world connections further. A spatially orientating central open lawn promotes flexible social gathering activities while fostering a shared sense of community. Smaller lounging and break-out areas surround the lawn and offer social engagement options while maintaining visual connections to their common landscape context. Passive and active recreational activities are accommodated by the continuity of garden paths’ fluidity and seamless accessibility to the terrace’s collection of distinct garden rooms.

Empowered by the belief that design intelligence inspires social engagement and positive civic behavior, the building’s terrace landscape performs as the residents’ “village green.” The network of high-performing native-based plant communities highlights visual and sensory seasonal qualities contributing to its natural resource as a sanctuary destination. Multi-level planted roofs, and garden structures showcase a restrained planting palette that further fuses landscape and structure – resulting in a peaceful and harmonious anecdote to mid-town’s dense and overpowering skyline landscape.