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The Twenty Two New York preserves the 1891 street elevation of the former Margaret Louisa Home while placing a new nine-story hotel behind it. BKSK Architects restored and reconstructed the facade in distinct layers, then added a patterned ultra-high-performance-concrete screen that reinterprets an unrealized Romanesque Revival gable. The result is neither a full historic reconstruction nor an invisible insertion: original masonry, newly made historic-style stone and clearly contemporary work remain legible in a protected Manhattan historic district.
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What The Twenty Two New York is
The Twenty Two New York occupies a midblock parcel near Union Square West measuring approximately 50 feet wide and 180 feet deep. The completed project is reported at 80,000 square feet and contains 72 hotel keys. Its hospitality program includes a ground-floor restaurant and lounge organized around a skylit atrium, a private members club on the second level, and a public lounge with terraces on the ninth floor. Guestroom floors use double-loaded corridors around a central courtyard about 40 feet wide, whose walls are clad in white terra-cotta panels.
What makes the project architecturally significant is the way those uses are fitted behind a retained north-facing historic elevation. The street facade is the surviving front of an 1891, six-story dormitory annex for the Margaret Louisa Home. R.H. Robertson designed the annex and a neighboring YWCA building in the Romanesque Revival style. Rather than demolish that elevation, the client and BKSK replaced the structure behind it with a new reinforced-concrete building whose upper floors step back from the street.
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Architectural Record’s 2026 project feature reports completion in February 2025. Reuben Brothers bought the property in 2017 and hired BKSK in 2019; construction began in early 2021.
Three layers of the completed street facade
The project is easiest to understand when the facade is separated into three material categories. Treating every visible stone as equally old would misstate what was preserved and what was made for the hotel.
| Layer | What it is | How it appears in the project |
|---|---|---|
| Original fabric | Surviving portions of the 1891 street-facing elevation | Retained in place as the front of the new building |
| Reconstructed or replacement work | New masonry based on photographs, archival material and Robertson’s elevation drawings | Includes sandstone and granite at the ground floor, where 1950 alterations had removed the original ornament |
| Contemporary addition | New construction that does not pretend to be nineteenth-century fabric | The nine-story structure behind the elevation and the patterned UHPC gable screen above and behind it |
This distinction matters in a historic district. Retention conserves actual material, reconstruction restores a lost visual condition, and the new structure supplies the hotel’s circulation, rooms and services. The design makes those decisions readable instead of presenting the entire frontage as an untouched relic.
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The 1891 dormitory annex
Robertson’s original building served as a dormitory annex to the neighboring YWCA facility. Its Romanesque Revival vocabulary relied on heavy masonry, rustication and a strongly modeled street elevation. Robertson also drew an additional gabled level, but that portion was never built. Building codes at the time limited the height of lodging houses, so the proposed upper form remained an idea in the architect’s drawings rather than part of the constructed building.
The 1950 health-center conversion
In 1950 the property became a nonprofit health center. The conversion replaced interior layouts and detailing, altered the way the building met the sidewalk and added a rear-yard extension. At street level, ornamented stonework was removed and red granite panels were installed. Those changes meant that the building reaching the twenty-first century was already a hybrid of nineteenth-century and mid-century work, not a complete original interior and exterior.
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BKSK describes the former layout as incompatible with the proposed hospitality program, while zoning and accessibility requirements also affected the rebuilding strategy. Keeping the elevation but replacing the structure behind it allowed the project to meet contemporary planning and ADA needs without discarding the most prominent historic street element.
Why BKSK kept the street elevation
The architects’ strategy is a form of selective retention: preserve the public face that carries the district’s historic character, then construct a code-compliant hotel behind it. BKSK partner Todd Poisson explained the practical motive this way: “The goal was to create a modern hotel, with a certain number of keys, that took advantage of the site’s depth,” he said. He added, “We also sought to build upon BKSK’s legacy of not shying away from ornament as architecture and respecting context.”
The narrow, deep lot made that approach particularly consequential. A new building could occupy the full depth, but its upper floors had to be set back behind the retained elevation so the historic frontage continued to read from the street. Inside, the 40-foot-wide courtyard brings daylight and orientation to the rooms while the white terra-cotta cladding gives the new interior-facing walls a material identity distinct from the darker street masonry.
Restoration and reconstruction at ground level
The design team consulted historic photographs, archival material and Robertson’s original elevation drawings before deciding how to repair and remake the facade. Because the 1950 health-center work had removed the ornamented ground-floor stonework, that portion could not simply be cleaned or repaired. The project replaced the red granite panels added in 1950 with sandstone and granite shaped to resemble the original design.
Those new pieces should be understood as reconstruction, not surviving 1891 fabric. Their purpose is to recover the scale, color and visual weight indicated by the historical evidence while allowing the retained upper elevation and new work to coexist. Traditional Cut Stone is listed for the restoration work, and the project credits also identify Kansas Brick and Tile for brick.
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The lacelike gable screen
From an unbuilt drawing to a built surface
The most conspicuous new element interprets Robertson’s never-built gable. The team initially developed a metal screen, but the design evolved during review by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The built version uses dark-tan, integrally tinted ultra-high-performance-concrete panels with intermittent red staining. Its pattern is porous and finely scaled, giving the upper addition a lacelike effect without copying the historic facade stone for stone.
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How to read the screen from the street
- It is contemporary material. UHPC panels belong to the new construction, not the 1891 wall.
- Its pattern has historical ancestry. The source is a scan of Robertson’s proposed elevation, including the gabled form that was never built.
- Its texture echoes rather than imitates. The dot-matrix abstraction and tonal variation relate to rusticated masonry while remaining visibly different from carved stone.
- Its position marks the setback. The screen signals where the new hotel rises behind the retained street elevation.
Spring Valley Corp is credited for the UHPC. The intermittent red staining and dark-tan integral color give the panels a calibrated relationship to the facade’s masonry palette without claiming they are historic stone.
How the new hotel is organized behind the facade
Street and arrival level
The ground floor combines a restaurant and lounge with a skylit atrium. This public-facing program occupies the deepest part of the retained frontage and makes the entrance sequence an interior continuation of the street facade rather than a private hotel lobby alone.
Members club and public upper spaces
A private members club occupies level two. On level nine, a public lounge and terraces take advantage of the upper setback. These uses help explain why the project needed a new vertical structure rather than a simple interior renovation of the old six-story annex.
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Guestrooms and courtyard
The 72 guestrooms are arranged along double-loaded corridors wrapping the central courtyard. White terra-cotta panels line that courtyard, creating a controlled contrast with the historic street elevation and the patterned UHPC screen. BKSK’s project description also confirms the 72-room count and the courtyard-led organization.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Material choices and the carbon claim
The project team says it incorporated fly ash into the concrete mix and used recycled steel as reinforcing bar to reduce embodied carbon. Those are material strategies, not a quantified performance result. The published project information does not provide a percentage reduction, a lifecycle assessment or independent construction testing, so the building should not be assigned a measured carbon-saving figure on this evidence.
The distinction is useful for readers evaluating adaptive reuse. Retaining a facade can preserve material that would otherwise be demolished, but the replacement structure still requires substantial new concrete, steel and services. The Twenty Two’s documented approach combines conservation with selected lower-impact inputs; it does not establish a whole-building environmental rating or a verified lifecycle advantage.
Retention, reconstruction and the facadism debate
The project sits within a long-running architectural debate. Keeping only a street elevation while replacing the structure behind it is often called facadism. Critics argue that the method can turn historic architecture into a shallow screen detached from its original rooms, structure and social use. Supporters point to the practical value of retaining a district-defining frontage while accommodating elevators, accessible routes, modern mechanical systems and a viable new program.
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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallThe Twenty Two makes that tension unusually visible. The original elevation remains in front, but the ground-floor stonework includes reconstructed pieces, the upper floors are set back, and the gable screen openly belongs to the new building. It is therefore more precise to describe the project as historic-elevation retention combined with reconstruction and contemporary addition, rather than as a complete restoration of the former Margaret Louisa Home.
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| Approach | Historic material retained | New program flexibility | How the Twenty Two relates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retain and insert behind the facade | High at the street elevation; limited beyond it | High | The selected strategy |
| Reconstruct more of the original form | Would rely more heavily on newly made material | Potentially lower, depending on the reconstruction | Not documented as a competing proposal for this project |
| Replace the building entirely | Little or none | High | Would have lost the surviving street elevation |
No formal alternative proposal for a full reconstruction is documented in the project account. The meaningful comparison is between what the completed design preserves, what it remakes and what it adds.
Project team and documented responsibilities
BKSK Architects served as architect for Reuben Brothers. Child Studio handled interior design, and MJM Associates was the general contractor. The credited engineers and consultants include TYLin, Dagher Engineering, GZA GeoEnvironmental, Surface Design Group and Fisher Marantz Stone. Material and trade credits identify Kansas Brick and Tile for brick, Spring Valley Corp for UHPC, Traditional Cut Stone for restoration and EXO Surfaces for terra-cotta.
A practical way to inspect the building
- Start at the sidewalk. Look for the retained north-facing elevation and note where the lower masonry changes from the historic upper wall to reconstructed sandstone and granite.
- Separate old from remade. The 1950 red granite panels are no longer the ground-floor finish; the replacement pieces are shaped from historical evidence but are new work.
- Find the setback. The upper hotel structure recedes behind the street elevation, making the transition between old frontage and new volume easier to read.
- Study the gable screen. Its dark-tan UHPC panels, red staining and dot-matrix pattern reference Robertson’s unbuilt drawing without reproducing a nineteenth-century wall.
- Read the program vertically. Restaurant and lounge occupy the ground floor, the private club is on level two, guestrooms wrap the courtyard, and the public lounge and terraces sit on level nine.
What is established—and what remains qualified
The reported area, room count, dimensions, story count and completion date come from the Architectural Record project feature published in 2026; BKSK’s own project post corroborates the 72-room count and courtyard organization. The design quotations are attributed to Poisson and Russell in that project coverage. The available material does not independently verify hotel operations, current booking conditions, historic-district designation documents, construction testing or quantified sustainability outcomes.
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