An Architecture Professor’s First Free-Standing Building Attracts Attention

Neil Denari’s HL23 (Image from HL23)

Neil Denari, a former director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture who is now an associate professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California at Los Angeles, is watching his first free-standing building go up — in New York City.

The building, called HL23, is a striking, 14-story condominium that cantilevers out over the High Line, an old elevated railroad line that is being converted into a mile-and-a-half long urban park. Rising from a 38.5-foot-wide site on 23rd Street near 10th Avenue, HL23 will have 11 luxury apartments whose glass walls will be interrupted by the angled steel members of the building frame. Two of the apartments will be duplexes. The building is expect to open in 2009.

A New York real-estate magazine, The Real Deal, says Mr. Denari designed the building in two months. The project required several zoning variances that make building on such a narrow site feasible, the magazine says, but the developer “knew the planning commission would be sympathetic to thoughtful design.” The Los Angeles Times says the idea for a building that starts on a small footplate but widens as it rises is one Mr. Denali has discussed in exercises with his students at UCLA.

And the prices? They start at $2.65-million for the smallest apartments, which have about 1,900 square feet of space.