The Interior as Urban Possibility

Recently, I spent some time on the 23rd floor of The Downtown Athletic Club in New York, a place that conjures the image of men in boxing gloves, eating oysters, naked; every student of architecture can recall seeing this in Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York. The absurdity of it made me chuckle then—and it still does. A surrealist collision of appetites, ambition, and power, an idea that still occupies the heart of architectural practice and urbanism. A building that makes anything possible within a metropolis already bursting with possibility.

Nearly twenty years on in my career, much of my thinking has turned to the interiors of these metropolitan towers—each an opportunity in the singular and the plural. Yet none embodies this vertical city of possibility more fully than the mixed-use tower. Its defining quality is precisely what its name suggests: mixing refuses separation. Not just retail, not just office, not just residential, not just hotel, but all of these at once, and more.

In a mixed-use building, each program carries its own distinct parameters: different scales, rhythms, and emotional registers. But the real opportunity seems to lie in the interstice between them. This is not a place for a singular vision or a singular architect. Today’s mixed-use projects are both dynamic and broadly inclusive, expansive, at once extroverted and introverted, public and private, familiar and surprising.

In the interior, that overlap becomes tangible. The lobby is also a living room. The amenity floor is a workplace, gym, and neighborhood café. The rooftop is a private refuge and a public spectacle. Mixed-use interiors must hold contradictions with grace—shifting scale, mood, and material register from floor to floor, sometimes from room to room. Lighting, texture, and threshold become choreographic choices, guiding people through worlds that were never meant to be separate. — Darina Zlateva, AIA, Director