Memory Vault

Parlour's atmosphere is rooted in a memory of the past. Its design is driven by rigorous modernism of the present, and its planning is motivated by the future of residential design. The Parlour conflates prior, now, and forward-thinking. It is a memory palace. Here the combination of the historical marker of the arch and the vault are wrung through a filter of a clean and essential contemporary-ism which produces a hybrid that speaks to the forward thinker that refuses to forget the past. Today we shop in stores across the globe, wander the virtual living rooms of Instagram and share recipes across our national borders. We revel in the mash-up that it is to be human today. The Parlour is just such a mash-up, all too human hybridity. You've heard of muscle memory. We suggest that spatial memory works in much the same way. Here the arch and the vault in their purest form are mobilized to invoke a physical experience with an emotional impact. That emotional response is born in recognizing the familiar, presented in an unfamiliar manner. A physical anamnesis, if you will. In this context, the arch and the vault are as many visual symbols as they are viscerally evocative psychological catalysts. Inspired by the vaulted bridges of Prospect Park, the floating vault, the Parlour lobby is at once grand and modern: "grand" because of the associative connotations of a vault, "modern" because it floats miraculously overhead.

From

2015 to 2021

Project Team

Adam Rolston, Claire Mo, Drew Stuart, Gabriel Benroth, Hilary R Kroll, Lindsay M Mannion, and Riley M Miller

Services

Architecture, Interiors, FF&E, Exterior, and Core & Shell Design

Featured in

NY Yimby 2019Architect Magazine 2019New York Post 2019

Part of

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