Most mixed-use towers are an act of zoning. Hotel on these floors, residences above, a club in the podium, offices in the middle, retail at the street. The uses are stacked because the math says they should be, and a guest in one rarely has a reason to think about the others. Colocation, not connection.
The more demanding version starts with a belief rather than a stacking plan. At Hudson Yards the belief was self-improvement, taken seriously enough to organize an entire building. A hotel for people passing through, a club for people who live nearby, a spa, the corporate offices, and a coworking floor built with Industrious. Different programs, different leases, one shared idea about why a person would want to be there.
The guests and the members overlap in the common areas not because they were placed near each other, but because they want the same thing.
That changes what the common areas are for. They are not amenities bolted onto separate uses. They are where a transient guest and a local member meet because they are after the same thing, on the same morning, in the same room. The overlap is the product. The building is the argument that the belief is real.
Designing it this way means the brand, the program, the architecture, and the business cannot be settled in sequence. The rate, the membership, the floor plan, and the feeling have to be decided together, because each one is making a claim about the same idea. Get them aligned and the tower reads as a single place. Get them out of step and it reads as a list.
The hotel was later voted one of the fifty best in the world. That is a pleasant outcome, but it is not the point. The point is that a guest could feel, without being told, that everyone around them had signed up to the same thing. A brand had stopped being a logo on the door and become the place itself.
A.R.