120 Allen Street is a minimal residence located in New York, New York, designed by Grzywinski+Pons. Located on an infill lot in a classically gritty LES tenement block, the property — while very narrow — is block-through and as such has frontage on both Allen and Orchard Streets. In order to accommodate the allowable floor area on such a narrow footprint, we bifurcated the mass on the north-south axis creating a slender ten-story tower on the Allen Street side (a far wider thoroughfare with arresting skyline views) and a five-story volume on narrow Orchard Street which are contiguous in plan. While the west facing tower isn’t strictly non-contextual (there are a few other far bulkier “finger buildings” on the block) we did see the upper portion of our tower as heterogeneous and decided to design the building accordingly. By treating the top five floors conceptually as a vertical augmentation to the neighborhood’s historical typology we elected to create a different skin for it.