Archinect - News

Studio Libeskind's refreshing social housing development debuts at the Sumner Houses in Brooklyn

2024-05-24T18:25:00-04:00

Studio Libeskind has inaugurated its new social housing development in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, called The Atrium at Sumner, after a three-year, $132 million construction. The 11-story, 132,418-square-foot development yields 190 total units, with an 8,309-square-foot community space located on the ground floor along Marcus Garvey Boulevard.

Image: Hufton+Crow

The building’s design features a dramatic interplay of opening and solids in a folding form finished in distinct optic white EIFS facade cladding that distinguishes it from the brick buildings on the 66-year-old NYCHA campus. A year-round interior garden gives name to the development, which features a host of amenities included to support aging-in-place alternatives for senior residents of the studio and one-bedroom apartments, 25 of which come fully adapted for those living with disabilities or who are visually or hearing-impaired.

Image: Hufton+Crow

The project came together through a consortium of stakeholders that includes the New...

Glazed brick accentuates Shakespeare, Gordon, Vlado: Architects’ new Brooklyn apartment complex

2023-11-24T09:00:00-05:00

Shakespeare, Gordon, Vlado: Architects (SGVA) has offered an insight into their completed multi-family housing scheme in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Named The Garnet, the project is defined by a gray and black masonry facade punctuated by jewel-toned glazed-brick accents.

Image credit: Alexander Severin

Built on a 15,000-square-foot lot adjacent to the Fulton Street subway line, the scheme holds 103 apartment units above a 12,000-square-foot ground-floor retail space. A second-floor roof terrace seeks to strengthen the residents’ connection to the outdoors, adding to an overall mission of creating “housing that feels expansive and liberating, rather than constrained by its affordability.”

Image credit: Alexander Severin

From the outside, the eleven-story structure is clad in textured masonry with bright accents to form a “pleasant and visually engaging street wall.” A red motif first established on the facad...

SCAPE, ARO, and Colloqate design Brooklyn high school campus with a hydroponics greenhouse and outdoor teaching spaces

2023-05-05T14:40:00-04:00

A team comprising SCAPE, Architecture Research Office (ARO), and Colloqate has unveiled a vision for a high school campus in Brooklyn with anti-racism, climate action, sustainable food systems, environmental justice, and experimental learning at the heart of its curriculum. The Launch School at Floyd Bennet Field will be constructed on a former airfield along the shores of Jamaica Bay, and will see a series of connective outdoor hallways knitting together buildings and landscapes.

Image credit: SCAPE

The design of the 7-acre campus embodies a ‘learning by doing’ approach featuring a refurbished and modernized central building, an urban farm and outdoor classroom, and a harvest and sensory garden. The campus will also hold a greenhouse with hydroponics, a central community hall, and spaces for outdoor art, teaching, performance, and exploration.

Image credit: SCAPE

“Launch at Floyd Bennett Field is an unprecedented opportunity to build a world-class educational ecosystem for communitie...

David Adjaye designs revitalized Bedford Stuyvesant campus to fight racial disparities in Brooklyn

2023-02-17T11:44:00-05:00

Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation has unveiled plans for an Adjaye Associates-designed Restoration Innovation Campus in Brooklyn. A re-imagination of the milestone corporation’s longtime Fulton Street home, the 840,000-square-foot campus will be dedicated to closing Brooklyn’s racial wealth gap.

The project will include a significant expansion of Bed-Stuy’s cultural center and the Billie Holiday Theater, new public open space, and two commercial buildings serving private, nonprofit, and government partners focused on addressing the racial wealth gap. 600,000 square feet of office space will be offered in the new hub alongside 190,000 square feet of retail, while a publicly-accessible rooftop will accommodate cultural programming and events.

Image credit: Adjaye Associates

Since its opening in 1972, the center has served as “a beloved town square for one of the country’s largest African American communities.” Once a milk bottling plant, the center now attracts more than 1.5 m...

Adjaye's Restoration Plaza project gets a little clearer in Brooklyn

2023-01-30T18:11:00-05:00

First announced in 2019, the project spans a block of Fulton Street between Brooklyn Avenue to the east and New York Avenue to the west. Plans call for the construction of three buildings featuring approximately 840,000 square feet of offices, educational, cultural, and commercial space. While the project would roughly double the size of the existing 1970s structures at Restoration Plaza, the property's namesake open space would be retained by building up, rather than out.

According to Urbanize NYC, the Restoration Plaza development will include two 13- and 16-story mixed-use structures separated by a 4-story community building to house art galleries, a dance studio, and other cultural spaces. This will be Adjaye Associates’ next New York project, after 130 William, the Carriage House, the Studio Musem in Harlem, the Sugar Hill Mixed-Use Housing Development (also in Harlem), and the 2015 Pitch Black office and studio space project for artist Lorna Simpson.

"We want this to be the tech hub of Central Brooklyn that’s very similar to downtown Brooklyn, that’s very similar to the Navy Yard," Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation CEO Blondel Pinnock told THE CITY. Current estimates are for an eight-year construction timeline.

Daniel Libeskind’s first New York City building may be affordable senior housing in Brooklyn

2018-03-29T13:16:00-04:00

Though he's called New York home for decades, Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind has yet to see a NYC building to completion. But it appears that will soon change with his first ground-up building, a 197-unit affordable housing project on the Sumner Houses in Bed-Stuy. A January press release credits Studio Daniel Libeskind as the designer of the 10-story building-to-be, and a rendering shows an angular white-colored building done in the firm’s signature un-orthogonal style.

"Humanitarian emergency": Michael Greenberg looks inside New York City’s housing crisis

2017-08-01T15:47:00-04:00

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the Humanitarian Coalition of large international aid organizations as “an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people.” New York’s is [...] a “complex emergency”: man-made and shaped by a combination of forces that have led to a large-scale “displacement of populations” from their homes.

"What makes the crisis especially startling," author Michael Greenberg continues in his latest piece for The New York Review of Books, "is that New York has the most progressive housing laws in the country and a mayor who has made tenants’ rights and affordable housing a central focus of his administration."

Brooklyn, say hello to your new neighbors!

2016-08-24T18:10:00-04:00

You’ve always wanted to call Brooklyn home. But it’s complicated. You’re not really the pioneering type. Brooklyn can be rough around the edges. Amenities are lacking. We understand. Industrial-chic finishes are important in life. So are 25-year tax abatements. And European-style, car-sized parking turntables.

Failed Architecture takes a closer look at Brooklyn's wildly sprouting 'developer architecture':

Photographs by Cameron Blaylock. Find many more examples of subtle contextualism over on failedarchitecture.com.

Explore the history of Brooklyn in "One Block"

2015-11-24T13:38:00-05:00

From farmland to stately brownstones to battleground for million-dollar bidding wars, Brooklyn’s transformation has fundamentally altered the city’s geography—and the way New York now thinks of itself. It has also altered the lives of the residents who call the borough home. To understand those changes, we dispatched a team of reporters to find a place where Brooklyn’s past and future are next-door neighbors.

New York Magazine has a fascinating and highly addictive piece looking at how Brooklyn came to be Brooklyn, combining personal stories, shoe-leather reporting, and data studies to craft a compelling, interactive story of "One Block" in the borough's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

For more news from Brooklyn, check out:

Bed-Stuy In Memoriam

2014-11-10T15:46:00-05:00

Neighborhoods of contemporary New York are primarily defined by the choices and actions of the people who call them home. They are collages fashioned from layer upon layer of small accretions that we plaster and paint onto our environments. Sometimes, this paint is literal [...] rich diversity of murals in memoriam found throughout Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn — public artworks that reflect a particular history of violence, racial prejudice, and, in some cases, the mixture of the two.

Related: Bed-Stuy Prices Soar

Bed-Stuy Prices Soar

2014-08-06T13:51:00-04:00

As prices rise in Brooklyn, brokers in Bedford-Stuyvesant have been breaking sales records left and right since March [...] Nine of Bed-Stuy’s top 15 residential sales in the past five years are from 2014 [...] Meanwhile, the median sales price during the second quarter rose to $630,000, up from $425,000 in the second quarter of 2013. In June of this year, the median asking price was even higher, according to StreetEasy data: $895,000, a 50.4 percent increase from June 2013.