Manhattan Penthouse Shows Living With an Algorithm on 4 Stories

Running along Manhattan’s skyline is a vein of private spectacle, accessible by invitation only. Mostly, it’s a place of generic luxury, where a fortune buys a bigger room, a higher ceiling, a better shower head. One couple, though, has turned four full stories atop an 1896 skyscraper into a palace of ideas.

At the 21st floor, the beaux-arts building culminates in grand arched windows and stone angels supporting a sharply pitched roof, Bloomberg Pursuits will report in its Spring issue. Inside this conventionally gracious shell is an utterly contemporary space, a 7,000-square-foot (650-square-meter) penthouse apartment that combines mathematical complexity with childlike playfulness and reduces privacy to an antiquated foible. It’s architecture for the age of social media.