Experience design agency HUSH has partnered with luxury real estate developer Toll Brothers City Living and Gemdale Properties and Investments to craft an engaging visual installation that reinforces the distinctive, prismatic design and vibrant surroundings of the company’s property 121 E 22nd in New York City. Slated for completion in Fall 2018, the 18-story tower marks the first residential building in Manhattan designed by the OMA, the world-renowned firm founded by Rem Koolhaas and led in New York by partner Shohei Shigematsu.
Based on a design language developed by the architects and in collaboration with Toll’s branding agency Brooklyn United, HUSH designed an immersive introduction to the building’s design and its location at the nexus of two sought-after neighborhoods, Gramercy and the Flatiron District. “Because the design language is so strong, we decided to leverage it in several other digital and visual ways so that buyers would perceive everything through its lens,” HUSH Founding Partner/Creative Leader David Schwarz explains.
HUSH’s installation required the design agency to employ several complex techniques. Producing a shoot across multiple locations generated a sizeable amount of 6K footage. Each shot was meticulously composed to work within the installation’s angular symmetrical form. To further express the building’s iconography, the agency created a prismatic refraction effect using the building’s exact geometry. “In a quick glance, or a longer engagement, the piece aligns buyers with the power of architectural in a way impossible to do with only models, plans, and renderings,” Schwarz says. “We helped merge design language and environment in a way that will inspire potential buyers with a vision of their future.”
In addition to Schwarz, credits include Erik Karasyk, Partner; Dan Rodriguez, Director of Engagement; Dev Harlan, Design Director; David Lehman, Art Director; Travis Craw, Producer; Nicki Ishmael, Associate Producer; Adam Kruckenberg, Systems Designer; Caleb Seppala, Director of Photography; Mike Senften, 3D Animation / VFX; Ish Nazmim, Compositor; Dan Phakos, Editor; Yi Lai, Jr. Designer; Fengyi Zhu, Jr. Developer; Kelvin Kottke, Jr. Designer.
