565 Broome SoHo
565 Broome SoHo, designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, is a luxury residential tower rising nearly 100 meters above Manhattan’s historic SoHo district. As the firm’s first residential project in New York City, it brought a refined and contemporary presence to a neighborhood long known for its 19th-century cast-iron architecture. Composed of two slender, mirrored volumes with fully glazed facades and gently curved corners, the building reflects RPBW’s enduring values of lightness, clarity, and civic sensibility. Positioned near the Hudson River, the tower accommodates 115 upscale apartments ranging from 92 to 234 square meters, each offering panoramic views of the city and waterfront. The project exemplifies a sophisticated dialogue between architecture, structure, and urban integration.
Positioned near the Hudson River and Sixth Avenue, the tower sits at the intersection of urban density and openness. By breaking the volume into two distinct glass towers, we mitigated the building’s mass while creating a dialogue with the finer urban grain of SoHo. The verticality of the design contrasts with its low-rise neighbors yet remains respectful in scale due to its slenderness and transparency. The floor-to-ceiling glazing and gentle curves not only maximize views and natural light but also soften the tower’s impact on the streetscape. The architectural strategy was both contextual and forward-looking, offering residents visual connection to the city and the river, while redefining contemporary living in an arts-centric neighborhood.
The use of high-performance glass, subtle steel mullions, and curved corners highlights the attention given to tactile and visual experience. Interior spaces, designed by Paris-based RDAI, complement the tower’s outward elegance with refined material palettes and natural finishes. Each apartment benefits from the architectural envelope’s permeability, creating light-filled interiors with a sense of openness rarely found in urban residential buildings. The visual and spatial continuity between inside and outside reinforces the tower’s ethos of clarity and openness. In a district known for its expressive façades and artistic identity, 565 Broome SoHo stands out not through monumentality, but through precision and grace.
Engineering and Structural Innovation
565 Broome SoHo’s engineering solutions reflect a high level of technical refinement tailored to complex urban constraints. The foundation system transfers structural loads through reinforced concrete walls and shear cores to a deep, two-tier pile system, reinforced with concrete caps and permanent rock-anchored tension rods to resist hydrostatic uplift. A defining feature is the 66 cm-thick transfer slab at the 12th floor, enabling misaligned upper-level columns to transfer loads to the lower structure. Floor slabs, cast in place using high-strength concrete (55–69 MPa), vary in thickness (23–30.5 cm) and span, supported by a mix of circular and rectangular columns—some as large as 61 x 168 cm—reinforced with Grade 60 steel bars. These solutions ensure structural stability while enabling architectural flexibility.
Further complexities arise from cantilevered terraces, rooftop pools, and green loads, which necessitated custom-engineered steel tube profiles and hangers, especially at facade setbacks on floors 6, 8, 25, and 26. To support a double-height base facade, a tensile cable-net system stabilized by reinforced concrete beams and steel anchors was introduced, designed to withstand high wind loads. Interestingly, seismic loads were minor compared to wind forces, reducing the need for mass-saving strategies. Despite the intricacy, BIM was not employed; DeSimone Consulting Engineers relied on traditional structural modeling to navigate and execute RPBW’s demanding architectural vision.
Project Details
Status
Client
Bizzi & Partners Development
Design
Design: Renzo Piano Building Workshop
in collaboration with SLCE Architects (New York)
Design Team
E.Trezzani (partner in charge), T.Stewart (associate in charge), J.Pauling with D.Vespier, S.Ishida, T.Wilcox and B.Duglet; A.Pizzolato (CGI); F.Cappellini, I.Corsaro, D.Lange, F.Terranova (models)
Consultants
RDAI (interior design); DeSimone Consulting (structure); Ettinger Engineering Associates (MEP); ICS Mark Pasveer (facade consultant); Balmori Associates (landscape)
