Commercial Real Estate; Turning Radiator Building Into a Boutique Hotel

The former American Radiator Building overlooking Bryant Park was practically born to the role of a hotel for the smart set. After all, it is clad entirely in black and highlighted in gold.

So powerful that it inspired other works of art, like Georgia O'Keeffe's ''Radiator Building -- Night, New York,'' the 23-story tower designed by Raymond M. Hood is now being converted into a 130-room boutique hotel.

The developers are Philip Pilevsky, formerly a partner of the hotelier Ian Schrager, and Brian McNally, the restaurateur who owns 44 at Mr. Schrager's Royalton Hotel. The architects are William B. Tabler Jr. of New York and David Chipperfield of London, who is known for extremely minimalist design.

The hotel is to open next March. Saving the public relations splash for spring, Mr. Pilevsky will say nothing now about the project, at 40 West 40th Street, other than that ''it will be a very high-end, upscale hotel.''

There will be a restaurant on the ground floor, two bars, shops, a screening room and a gym, according to a change-of-use application approved by the City Buildings Department on June 28.

The project offers an intriguing glimpse at the challenge of transforming a 75-year-old landmark office tower into a modern hotel, while preserving the qualities that once made it New York's most talked-about building.

The first stumbling block was the very stuff of the building itself: those unusual black bricks, made of clay, dipped in manganese and then fired. To close about 40 holes that had been punched through the facade for air-conditioners, the architects needed hundreds of bricks.

''It really was daunting,'' said William J. Higgins of Higgins & Quasebarth, preservation consultants to the project. ''We went to every distributor we could find. Many have black bricks, but black is really a million different colors. None of them had the right combination of color and texture.''

Then, in a moment of serendipity, the contractors discovered that some sections of interior walls on the upper floors had been made of the same black bricks used on the exterior. These were dismantled and stockpiled for use in plugging the holes.

Faced with the question of cleaning the bricks, the architects decided to leave them alone since the manganese crust is extremely thin. ''We don't know the chemistry of the brick,'' Mr. Higgins said. ''We're not sure what would happen. We thought, 'Let's not mess around with it.' ''

As dark and sober as the main tower was supposed to be, the pinnacles and finials and parapets were meant to gleam. The ''gold'' highlights were apparently made of a bronze powder that had been applied to cast stone, with a scintillating effect. After experimentation, the architectural team settled on a commercial mica powder called ''Sparkle Gold'' in an acrylic medium.

The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission approves. ''The developers have proposed an exemplary restoration for this prominent Art Deco skyscraper which will allow the passer-by to appreciate Hood's dramatic use of color,'' said Terri Rosen Deutsch, the commission's chief of staff.

Just why the building is black and gold has excited much discussion over the years. The client was the American Radiator Company, which later merged with the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company. (The successor corporation, American Standard, sold the building in 1988.)

''Built for a company which manufactures heat appliances,'' Architecture magazine said in 1925, ''its very atmosphere is symbolic of its function -- the black of the main structure suggesting a huge coal pile, and the gold and yellow of its higher points the glow of flames of an unbanked fire.''

Mr. Hood, who later designed the striking McGraw-Hill Building at 330 West 42d Street, said he had drawn his inspiration in part from a visit to Brussels, where buildings blackened by age had been ''completely transformed'' by gold highlights applied to their ornamentation.

But the racial symbolism of an all-black building was not lost in the mid-1920's, when the Harlem Renaissance was in full flower and race consciousness -- and animosity -- were generally running high. Writing in The New York Times Magazine in October 1925, Orrick Johns said Mr. Hood ''has broken through the color line.''

Hugh Ferriss, the most influential architectural illustrator of the period, said of the building in 1929 that it ''has one undeniable virtue: it has undoubtedly provoked more arguments among laymen on the subject of architectural values than any other structure in the country.''