Part of an interior design project overlooking the rooftops of Manhattan, winner of the “Best of the Year 2013” award of the magazine Interior Design, the cladding of the external spiral staircase, a custom-made ‘organic’ skin of mirror-polished stainless steel, provides a sculptural connection between the small central courtyard faced by the spaces of the large penthouse and its outdoor area, a sort of geometric garden created on the roof. Wooden decks alternate here with paved zones and greenery; in this context, the fractal cocoon covering the staircase becomes a striking architectural folie, in the sense of the term in the 19th-century tradition of the romantic garden, a light, reflecting volume that emerges at the central level, caroming the different tones of the daylight and forming mutable, evocative shadows in the interiors.
The complex geometry of this unusual enveloping steel skin has been designed mathematically by means of an algorithm of reference that has generated the elliptical and circular openings on the triangles that form the dynamic of the overall volume, a reminder of the organic world and a reinvented nature.