Bronx Children's Museum
Excellence in Adaptive Reuse – Winner
Location: Bronx, NY
Developer: New York City Department of Design and Construction
Owner: Bronx Children’s Museum
Architect: O’Neill McVoy Architects
Photo Credit: Paul Warchol
In a setting as powerful as its shell, the Bronx Children’s Museum aims to ignite a sense of discovery. Perched near East 153rd Street, the museum sits in a remade raw industrial space within a vacant 1925 Historic Powerhouse that in its heyday housed electrical equipment for the then-bustling Bronx Terminal Market. Since its December 2022 opening, the museum has welcomed scores of families through its double-height lobby entrance facing the Harlem River. At interactive art, role-play, and scientific exploration exhibits reached by playful ramps, they play, learn, and connect to urban culture and the natural world. A second–floor exhibit space flooded with natural light offers sweeping city and river views, providing context for the Waterways exhibit where children can build modular boats and bridges. Other exhibits include “Bronxtopia” for dance with digital avatars before visiting a simulated city block with bodegas and casitas, punctuated throughout by Spanish and English signs and maps. The LEED Gold structure, steps from Yankee Stadium and the magnificent Grand Concourse walkway, features natural and renewable materials including stone, glass, cork, and Forest Stewardship Council-certified cross-laminated timber. Operable windows, super-efficient HVAC systems and green electric power curb carbon. Like the iconic Electric Company 1970s show, reimagining a space linked to a power utility—here, one that met a vibrant wholesale produce market’s needs—is helping young minds explore their world, and learn, through new materials and technologies, how choices can change the future.
Vital Brookdale
Excellence in Affordable Housing Development – Winner
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Developers/Owners: MDG Design + Construction, Smith & Henzy Advisory Group, The New York Foundling
Public Partner: New York State’s Vital Brooklyn Initiative
Architect: Dattner Architects
Landscape Architect: Starr Whitehouse Landscape Architects and Planners
Photo Credit: Dattner Architects/Pavel Bendov
For the new Vital Brookdale project, holistically fortifying human and planetary health in the low-income Brooklyn enclave of Brownsville guided all design decisions over the transformation of a relatively unused parking lot into a 185,000–square-foot development. The human health priorities ranging from open space and recreation to healthy food, economic empowerment, and education, to community-based health care and resiliency are addressed in apartments, their environs and 25,000 square–feet of space dedicated to health-focused community services. Of note are job and food training and outdoor gardening programs, and an on-site outpatient space for both nearby Brookdale Hospital and New York Foundling. The latter, one of the City’s oldest child welfare programs, provides valuable support to the developmentally disabled and children aging out of foster care. Tenants in 160 units, 133 of which are at 30 to 60% of AMI and another 26 units at 80% of AMI, share a lobby, outdoor terrace, courtyards, game room, cold and bike storage, a library/workspace and fitness room. Renewable and energy efficient measures include 100 kilowatts of solar power, green roofs, and low-flow water fixtures, saving some $200,000 annually which is primarily passed onto residents in lower utility bills. Vital Brookdale, the first housing project in the State’s $1.4 billion Vital Brooklyn Initiative—which aims to address chronic social, economic and health disparities—shows how targeted interventions through supportive housing can change life trajectories.
Columbia Business School
Excellence in Institutional Development – Winner
Location: New York, NY
Owner: Columbia University
Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Architect and Sustainability/LEED Consultant: FXCollaborative
Photo Credit: Iwan Baan
Transformation in education meets transformation in learning and meeting places at the new LEED Gold Columbia Business School in West Harlem. In its remake, the school sought tighter interdisciplinary connections to real-world problems, practitioners, and the local community through innovative design, technology, and programming. Now airy, open workspaces invite students, faculty, and visitors in to collaborate in greatly improved air, light, and thermal comfort conditions. In sharp contrast to the school’s prior fenced-in home some 10 blocks South, Columbia Business School on the university’s new Manhattanville campus is now integrated into West Harlem with fluid, immersive entry points into sun-filled event spaces shared with the University’s Climate School and World Projects. There, they tackle connected areas that both challenge and bring opportunity. The on-campus Columbia-Harlem Small Business Development Center, serving local entrepreneurs through counseling, provides porous connection to the surrounding city. Green building features include a high-performance envelope, a chilled beam system with energy recovery, and locally sourced materials with high recycled content when available, including steel, gypsum, concrete, and glass liner. The 40,000-square–foot Square, a public park with drought-tolerant native plants is, with the perimeter streetscape, the largest green space on all of Columbia’s campuses, with stormwater management and lounge and performance spaces. Key to Columbia Business School’s success was a Community Benefits Agreement, which welcomed local input for local programs and resulted in affordable housing, new jobs, services, scholarships and legal assistance. Through this intricate, community-oriented planning, Columbia has rewritten the book on campus extensions and redevelopment.
One Clinton
Excellence in Market-Rate Housing Development – Winner
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Developer: The Hudson Companies
Public Agency Partner: New York City Economic Development Corporation
Architect: Marvel
The genesis of 38-story One Clinton in downtown Brooklyn near mass transit was the Brooklyn Heights library’s decision to sell land on which it sat after repair costs became prohibitively costly. Planning, heavily informed by residents and experts made building the limestone condo building possible. Numerous consultations, surveys, and workshops addressed community needs and led to a masterplan for several projects funded by land and condo sales. These included the new Brooklyn Heights Library, its more-than-suitable interim substitute at a local church, 114 affordable homes at 60 to 125% of AMI at two other sites, one new DUMBO library, and $40 million for nine libraries’ deferred capital needs. Today, One Clinton hosts the new Brooklyn Heights library on its ground floor with its entrance on the Cadman Plaza West façade of the flatiron shaped building; its double height reading room faces the plaza promenade. At 27,000 square feet it is the largest library in Brooklyn. Street level retail and a 9,000-square-foot STEM lab for local students make up the other sides of the triangle, along with four-story duplexes on Brownstone-filled Clinton Street, referencing the homes they face. On the floors above are 134 condos with majestic city and harbor views. Among One Clinton’s sustainability features are high-performance exterior walls, programmable HVAC thermostats, window shades, large operable windows, a landscaped outdoor roof terrace, and charging stations in 40% of parking spaces. The public-private partnership shows what is possible when all stakeholders reimagine space and financing that can concurrently meet many pressing community needs.
Wireworks
Excellence in Mixed-Use Development – Winner
Location: Newburgh, NY
Developer/Owner: BOM Newburgh LLC – a joint venture between Baxter Building Co., Sisha Ortuzar and Mapos Architects DPC
Public Partner: City of Newburgh
Architects: Mapos Architects DPC
Photo Credit: Kyle J Caldwell
19th century manufacturing meets creative co-working, art, and retail space at a rebuilt three-story spring factory in Hudson Valley’s Newburgh. The 1895 Wireworks building’s rebirth trails 20 years sitting empty, decades as a warehouse, and fifty years as the home of Staples and Hanford Wireworks, makers of springs and carriage cushions until its 1950s closure. Fast–forward 70 years as artists and the self-employed decamp from New York City to more placid and affordable environs. With this influx came demand for more living, work, and socializing options. Enter Wireworks, which today in its 21,000 square feet hosts on its ground floor a small retailer and several live/work artists’ studios. First earmarked for a restaurant and coffee roaster or baker, the building’s flexible design allowed the ground floor’s use to be changed due to uncertainty caused by the pandemic. Above are light-filled co-working spaces with floor-to-ceiling windows, meeting rooms for tenants and community groups, and seven upper floor loft-style units all below 80% of AMI, ranging from studios to one-bedrooms, some with mezzanines, all under a pitched roof with timber trusses. Noteworthy in this adaptation was peeled back wall and ceiling sheathing for historical masonry and roof timbers and preserving the spirit of a collapsed exterior room in an enclosed outdoor space— “the ruin”— that is now both a workspace and tenant gathering space when warm—plus landscaping for stormwater management. The building, 60 miles north of New York City, speaks to a post-industrial area renaissance following manufacturing decline and efforts to climate proof all structures at all scales.
Zero Irving
Excellence in Office Development – Winner
Location: New York, NY
Developer/Owner: RAL Development Services, LLC
Public Agency Partner: New York City Economic Development Corporation
Architect: Davis Brody Bond
A singular vision of a sleek, low-carbon and human–scale digital tech hub in Union Square birthed Zero Irving. Replacing a low-rise PC Richards appliance store is an airy 21-story tower with 261,000 square feet of rentable space and services to seed, grow and celebrate New York City’s creative sectors. Intentionally set near subway lines linked to creatives’ outer borough enclaves, Zero Irving aims to bring new to a central location close to other elements in the creative ecosystem. Today, the building’s expansive 10,000–square–foot-street level Urbanspace Food Hall provides porous connection to busy passersby who sample fare behind a folding glass façade and in a backyard terrace. Roughly 25% of the Urbanspace booths are operated by first-time or early-stage vendors. Fintech, data analytics, AI and venture capital talent and 85,000 square feet of workforce development space fill upper floors, of which 72,000 square feet are class A office space. Noteworthy are infinite reconfiguration spaces and a roof–to–ground interior view of some 60,000 passing through Irving Place daily, for real world context. LEED Gold also meets technology via abundant natural light and a permeably landscaped and usable roof with rooftop solar panel and sail to generate both energy and attention. The lobby’s 9’ x 40’ digital display lists indoor air quality, solar production, and occupancy. Zero Irving’s arrival has injected vibrancy and afterhours energy into an otherwise uninspiring stretch of 14th street by Union Square, and into priority industries so that they will flourish.
Little Island
Excellence in Urban Open Space – Winner
Location: New York, NY
Developers: Hudson River Park Trust, Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation
Architects: Heatherwick Studio, MNLA
The Meatpacking District’s Little Island magically reflects all that is New York. The riverside park’s design is imaginative. It surprises and delights. It showcases resilience, inclusion and creativity in local artwork, performers and plants breathing life into a pier Superstorm Sandy destroyed. Little Island’s mix of riverfront retreat with dramatic views, playful performance space and secret gardens strives to foster a love of nature, culture, and community. Just eighteen months after its mid-pandemic opening, 2.9 million visitors had ambled across its undulating hills and paths, exercised, or relaxed among 35 mostly native plant species, or celebrated great performances like circuses and concerts at its two stages. This is remarkable for an abandoned area, more so for the heavy thinking and lifting that made Little Island’s debut possible. The 132 unique tulip pots dotting its 2.4 acres alone took a year to install after piecemeal arrival by barge. So did bronze railings, weathered steel, and soil and boulders. All came from New York State. All designs and installations — some 1,000 pandemic-era jobs were required — similarly hail from the Empire State. To date Little Island has employed over 1,200 artists, counting those for free and low-cost performances. The local sourcing and barge delivery meant lower emissions—a priority for the project. Granular planning and Pier 54’s rebuild above year 2100 projections for sea level rise and storm surge future-proof the park for all, for all ages.