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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.
Location: New York, NY
Developer: The Howard Hughes Corporation
Public Agency Partner: New York City Economic Development Corporation
Design Architect – Interiors and Exterior Graphics: Roman & Williams Buildings and Interiors
Design Architect – Core & Shell: SHoP Architects
The Tin Building, now a three-story marketplace on Pier 17 overlooking the East River, is an adaptation feat. Over a meticulous five-year process, the historical structure was moved 32 feet East for higher ground and more open space. The project faced numerous challenges in this step-by-step process. The Neoclassical 1907 former home of the Fulton Fish Market in the historic South Street Seaport had been abandoned following Superstorm Sandy flooding, an earlier fire, and the arrival of the Robert Moses-designed FDR Drive inches from its awning. First, cast iron columns, frames and awnings were retrieved from the first floor and mezzanine of the structure on 100-year-old decaying pilons. Remnants were catalogued, stored, and then relocated to a safer, future-proofed site seven feet higher on a newly constructed steel-supported pier above the post-Sandy 100-year flood plain. Finally, portions of the soon-to-be LEED Silver structure were built into a grand 53,000-square-foot marketplace overlooking the East River Esplanade. Since its July 2022 opening, tenants including an Asian speakeasy restaurant, art gallery, a sustainably sourced marketplace, and a French brasserie have welcomed more than 500,000 guests. The Tin Building’s popularity is a testament to what is possible with intricate, coordinated design in urban revitalization programs.
Location: Queens, NY
Developer: Phipps Houses
Public Agency Partners: New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, New York City Housing Development Corporation
Architect: Marvel
As malls struggle, a retail–to–residential conversion shows how using brownfield space can breathe new life into tired town centers. Transforming an underused 400-car surface parking lot abutting a failing shopping plaza made Rockaway Village a reality. Through designation as a special zoning district, 537 new affordable housing units and 10,000 square feet of retail space cover a portion of the prior 722,000–square-foot site near a historically popular main street near mass transit. Shared amenities like concierges, playrooms and bike storage clustered around courtyards allow for smaller-than-traditional floor plates emptying out onto Mott Avenue, at the A subway train terminus and a Long Island Railroad stop. Dwellings, from four stories closer to Mott Avenue, to 16 stories further away feature multi-shaded bricks and unique courtyards and lobbies to humanize spaces. Rooftop solar and green areas, and large high–performance windows improve energy efficiency. Back-up elevator power in each core and higher elevation generators and boilers avoid flooding, while stormwater infiltration chambers slow runoff. The development also features new sewer infrastructure, roadway sidewalk reconstruction and a new public library. Hard work and a vision for underused space brought new housing and communal ties close to transit hubs.
Location: Bronx, NY
Developer: The Hudson Companies, Gilbane Development Company, Mutual Housing Association of New York (MHANY)
Public Agency Partner: New York City Economic Development Corporation
Architects: WXY Architects, Body Lawson Associates Architects and Planners
From the Bronx’s Spofford Juvenile Detention Center’s ashes comes a vibrant highly affordable housing, commercial and cultural development at two sites spanning the Center’s prior 5.5 acres. The Peninsula project’s 183 units and accompanying services are fostering the development of new jobs, small businesses, artwork, and green technology. Following the brownfield site’s clean up and rezoning, Peninsula 1A’s 57,000 square feet hosts Bronx-based small businesses including bakers, coffee roasters, noodle producers, and foodie entrepreneurs in a shared kitchen. Some 100 new jobs in and around Hunts Point are expected from other project businesses within five years. In the 197,000-square–foot Peninsula 1B parcel where all rentals are located, 90% of units are between 30% and 80% of AMI, while the remaining 10% of units are reserved for the formerly unhoused. Also in Peninsula 1B are multiple subsidized rehearsal, studio and gathering spaces for community artists. Native plants, benches and walkways dot the development; shared amenities range from outdoor terraces to bike storage, to fitness centers and playrooms. The Peninsula’s solar panel, green roof, low-flow appliances, heat island reduction, floodplain avoidance and rooftop rainwater harvesting plus the City’s first aerobic food waste-to-fertilizer digester put it on track for LEED Gold certification. The Peninsula’s new chapter attests to the potential of repurposing space to foster empowerment and growth.
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Developers/Owners: MDG Design & Construction LLC, Smith & Henzy Advisory Group, The New York Foundling
Public Partner: New York State’s Vital Brooklyn Initiative
Architect: Dattner Architects
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–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.
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.
Location: New York, NY
Developer: RFR Realty
Owner: Fotografiska NY
Architect: CetraRuddy Architecture
Photo Credit: David Sundberg/Esto Photo
For Fotografiska, which celebrates immersive photography experiences by curating and displaying images in novel settings, the right structure as backdrop for its forthcoming NYC exhibitions was supremely important. After an extended search the US branch of the Swedish museum selected an unoccupied iconic 1890s cast–iron and terra cotta building at 281 Park Avenue South in Gramercy Park for its new home. Prior to move-in, Fotografiska took painstaking efforts to strengthen the structure while respecting the architectural integrity of the building. This was no small feat. No archival drawings or documents could be found. So Fotografiska conducted forensic floor research to determine and understand building materials, design, and engineering. Thorough analysis pointed to a new internal structure, or an endoskeleton, as an ideal solution following cadenced demolition of select portions of the building and installation of modern plumbing, electrical and mechanical systems. In parallel, elements deemed to be too historical to lose, such as stairs, columns, and floors, were encased in steel over the reinforcement stage. Today, in rotating exhibits, visitors enjoy photographic expression in a space that celebrates the destination as a frame for art.
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Owner and Developer: Avery Hall
Co-Developers and Project Investors: Aria Development Group, Allegra Holdings
Executive Architect: SLCE Architects
Few properties better illustrate the mid-pandemic pivot than One Boerum Place, a 22-story brick tower in a dense downtown Brooklyn blockfront near plentiful mass transit. In 2021 the developers changed all 245,000-square feet of its 138 condos into mixed-income rentals with 70% at market rate and 30% at middle-income. This helped meet demand for the flexibility and outdoor space residents sought in an uncertain world. One Boerum Place’s luxury multi-bedroom rental apartments now command record high rents. The project is also noteworthy for tower placement in an odd geometrically shaped lot with tight dimensions. It overcame this obstacle and other legal, light and air condition challenges by buying air and cantilever rights, light and air easements, deep excavation, and adding outdoor spaces, balconies, soft facades, and curved lines. As a result, the building appears as three distinct volumes formed each as setback cuts. Other aesthetic aspects include windows gradually growing larger from bottom to top, and laterally, North to South. The site’s underground robotic parking system and pool and rooftop terrace with dramatic city and harbor views also merit mention. By staying nimble over unexpected challenges, One Boerum met its key aims with aplomb in a turbulent market. rket rate and 30% at middle-income. This helped meet demand for the flexibility and outdoor space residents sought in an uncertain world. One Boerum Place’s luxury multi-bedroom rental apartments now command record high rents. The project is also noteworthy for tower placement in an odd geometrically shaped lot with tight dimensions. It overcame this obstacle and other legal, light and air condition challenges by buying air and cantilever rights, light and air easements, deep excavation, and adding outdoor spaces, balconies, soft facades and curved lines. As a result, the building appears as three distinct volumes formed each as setback cuts. Other aesthetic aspects include windows gradually growing larger from bottom to top, and laterally, North to South. The site’s underground robotic parking system and pool and rooftop terrace with dramatic city and harbor views also merit mention. By staying nimble over unexpected challenges, One Boerum Place met its key aims with aplomb in a turbulent market.
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.
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Developer: RXR
Architect: Perkins Eastman Architects
Photo Credit: Garrett Rowland
Imaginative design, engineering and partnerships made the downtown Brooklyn 34-story tower of The Willoughby and its accompanying projects a reality. The soaring structure on concrete columns sits on and above a prior 2.27-acre Long Island University athletic field. The field is now perched thirty feet above its former level on the roof of a new low-slung structure abutting the tower, housing both university classrooms and a 564-car garage. From 476 middle-income rent-restricted units in the tower and a series of terraces, residents, spectators, and students enjoy magnificent views of Brooklyn harbor, its bridges, the Manhattan Skyline and Fort Greene Park and its brownstones, restaurants, and shops. The new 445-foot tower, steps from many transit lines, also houses academic and office space, and an outdoor terrace with grilling stations and fire pits. With dialogue and dealmaking, creative solutions to much–needed mixed–use space in dense urban cores are possible.
Location: Newburgh, NY
Developer/Owner: BOM Newburgh LLC – a joint venture between Baxter Building Co., Sisha Ortuzar and Mapos Architects DPC
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 white flight, and efforts to climate proof all structures at all scales.
Location: New York, NY
Developer/Owner: Related Companies
Owners: Oxford Properties Group, Mitsui Fudosan America
Architect: Kohn Pedersen Fox
Photo Credit: Connie Zhou
55 Hudson Yards’ class A office space merits mention for its sleek design, and for challenges it overcame to rise 51 stories amid coveted destinations and mass transit. Anchoring the Northwest corner of the largest private real estate development in US history, the tower’s solid gunmetal façade and concrete interior echo historic cast-iron structures in the neighborhood’s industrial past. Floor-to-ceiling windows shower interiors with light and serve as lens for expansive city and river views. The 1.3 million square feet of 55 Hudson Yards adds to its connective tissue by also linking to the lush Hudson Boulevard and River Parks, and by stretching to the city center on the extended 7 subway line. However, 55 Hudson Yards’ build was not easy. Challenges included site constraints due to a nearby viaduct, railyard and public park, and a subway ventilation and operations building in the foundation’s footprint. After careful consideration, the building was encased under the Tower’s envelope with louver panels and its critical infrastructure placed between the subway station and platform. As for sustainability, the 780-foot-tall LEED Gold structure boasts 93% of workspaces day-lit by exterior views, low-emitting finishes, rainwater capture for potable water use, 91% of waste diversion from landfill over construction, and 24% of materials sourced from 500 miles away. From creative solutions to structural obstacles, 55 Hudson Yards is a design feat.
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 lower Manhattan 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.
Location: New York, NY
Developers/Owners: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, Columbia Facilities and Operations, Manhattanville Development Group
Architect: James Corner Field Operations
Photo Credit: Amir Hamja, Bloomberg
When 250-year-old Columbia University extended its campus beyond 120th Street to a six-block stretch ending at 131st Street, it did so with a vision quite different from that used for its main Morningside Heights home. There, stone buildings and fences reflect the then-prevailing idea of a protected sanctuary. At the new Manhattanville Campus, which houses the University’s Business and Climate Schools and interdisciplinary World Projects initiative, gone are perimeters and hard edges. Instead, softer, more intimate open spaces and a contiguous green corridor give way to fresh air and open skies at the Hudson River to the West and urban grid to the East. Three distinct public spaces with benches, movable furniture, and Wi-Fi, framed by several soaring buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows on ground floors at the 23,000–square–foot circular lawn invite faculty, students, visitors, and the neighborhood in for repose and enjoyment of events–44 as of February 2023. Along the way, great pains were taken through Community Benefit Agreements to meet the needs and wants of locals living near the new campus to ensure a stake in enjoying and benefiting from the new green space. Outcomes include work opportunities with 6,400 people forecast to hold Manhattanville jobs by 2034. As a result of a 20-year leadership-led process to promote harmony between the new campus and its neighbors, feedback is overwhelmingly positive.
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.