Spring Studios

Steve Lastro lead the Technology Design for Spring Studios from the design phase, to construction, to launch. He created a state of the Art experience in terms of sound, visual technology and broke a $2 million dollar sponsorship deal with Barco. He turned concepts into reality and enabled the production team to work on the biggest Fashion Shows (CK, DVF, Michael Kors...) and Events (Gods love we deliver dinner, Tribeca Film Festival)... Making Spring Studios, one of NYC's key new destination.

Mark Loy opened the original Spring Studios in north-west London’s Kentish Town in 1996. Housed in the former Winsor & Newton artists’ materials factory, the industrial space started as three photography studios for rent, but over the past two decades it has evolved into a multidisciplinary studio, event space and creative agency. ’I had a clear vision of wanting to make an amazing studio facility with in-house businesses that cater to the luxury and creative industries,’ Loy says. This year, Spring officially expands across the pond in New York. ’Over time I broadened the vision and built our creative agency, production, digital development and e-commerce. And that became a successful content-generation business,’ continues Loy. Spring’s evolution reflects the changing nature of the creative industry - where photography studio equals event space equals content production firm equals art gallery, a merging of cultural spaces and professional expertise that has become almost standard.

In New York, Spring’s industrial feel is about the only thing in common with the London location. ’Spring New York is much more outward looking and upfront in feeling,’ says Loy. The 120,000 sq ft outpost in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighbourhood was built out of the former Verizon building, but the look and feel is monumental - slick and bright column-less studios, with floor-to-ceiling windows, 30ft-high ceilings, glass-fronted green rooms, and extras that could only be found in a space this big and ambitious, such as mechanical black-out shades, private kitchens, en-suite bathrooms that are larger than most New Yorkers’ apartments, and an epic rooftop with views of Lower Manhattan’s West Side.

Architect Aldo Andreoli, founding principal of AA Studio, was enlisted for the project by Loy and real estate developer Estate 4, run by Alessandro Cajrati Crivelli (the developer of Zona Tortona in Milan and Howick Place in London), a friend of Loy’s who found the site. Andreoli, an Italian transplant who has lived in the US for over four decades and worked on many spaces in Tribeca, was tasked with creating extra-high studio spaces. ’The main request from Mark Loy was to have at least 17ft-high spaces for the studios. So we started designing the concept and decided to remove the slab between the fifth and the sixth floors,’ explains Andreoli. When they removed the columns in the existing space, Andreoli discovered a set of ’beautiful trusses that were hidden in the ceiling. A portion of the building was a theatre in the 1930s; that’s why there were these trusses. We decided to keep them and they are still visible now in the sixth-floor main space.’

The anchor of the space is a towering black steel staircase that connects the fifth floor to the rooftop (currently undergoing renovation to become a 12,000 sq ft event space, set to open in early 2016). The blackened steel, a favourite material of Loy’s, recurs throughout the building; Andreoli highlights it in details like doors and mouldings, as well as the staircase. ’It was fabricated in Italy and was then shipped over piece by piece,’ Andreoli explains.

A few example of past events at Spring Studios - where the technology design was done by Steve Lastro

Spring Studios opened in September 2013.

Location:

Spring Studios 6 St John’s Lane New York, NY 10013

Articles:

Wallpaper*: https://www.wallpaper.com/fashion/lofty-ambitions-tribecas-spring-studios-multidisciplinary-evolution