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Four community-orientated New York City projects by Dattner Architects: Your Next Employer?

2024-09-30T09:46:00-04:00

Following our previous visit to BVC Architecture + Interiors, we are moving our Meet Your Next Employer series to New York City this week to explore the work of Dattner Architects.

A women-owned firm based in Midtown Manhattan, the firm describes its mission as to “enrich the urban experience, transform environments, and strengthen communities.” Last week, our news team reported on the firm’s inclusion in Archtober 2024, with their 425 Grand Concourse project being among those open for public tours throughout the month of October. Earlier this year, the firm also collaborated with Ennead on preliminary visuals for the Science Park and Research Campus to be developed on the East Side of Manhattan.

Over on Archinect Jobs, the firm is currently hiring for several positions to join their New York City team. For candidates interested in applying for a position or anybody interested in learning more about the firm’s output, we have rounded up four projects around the city by Dattner Archi...

Ennead and Dattner share first SPARC Kips Bay images ahead of 2031 completion

2024-05-13T17:01:00-04:00

Ennead and Dattner have shared preliminary project visuals to accompany the latest announcement of their winning bid to deliver the Science Park and Research Campus (or SPARC) Kips Bay to the East Side of Manhattan.

The project for the New York City Economic Development Corporation will culminate with a new 700,000-square-foot academic building to be used by three separate CUNY schools and a new high school for STEM careers. Close to two million square feet of educational spaces are being planned overall, and the project development will be complete with a new pedestrian bridge that fosters a connection to the East River waterfront.

Preliminary project visual. Image courtesy Ennead Architects + Dattner Architects

Ennead Partner Thomas J. Wong (the project's Design Lead) shared: “We bring a commitment to civic space, along with deep experience creating leading healthcare and education facilities to our work for SPARC Kips Bay, where, together with Dattner, we will develop an innovati...

Michael Kimmelman checks in on a case study for affordable housing in NYC

2024-02-13T17:49:00-05:00

It wasn’t a visual spectacle, but it was handsome and dignified, standing out with its prefab metal facade not just in a neighborhood of empty lots, aging apartment blocks and derelict rail tracks but also against a backdrop of dreary, bare-bones affordable housing developments all across the city. Most important, its goal was larger than itself: to reimagine subsidized housing for a new century. I promised in that column to report back on whether it succeeded. Did it?

The Via Verde redux is an interesting return to Kimmelman's very first Times column. He wrote the housing scheme’s developer Phipps “knows what it’s doing.”

Whatever is working has got to be scaled up and replicated rather quickly. As he points out, both the city and New York State failed to adequately fund and approve new housing starts to enter the construction pipeline in 2023 despite a present need for approximately 50,000 new units annually.

Kimmelman, whose personal mission to raise housing standards for New Yorkers is well known, is occasionally charged with promotionalism for writing such pieces. (It's worth noting that this is now the critic's second review of a completed Dattner project in as many years.)

Dattner debuts a record-setting new 26-story passive house high-rise in the Bronx

2022-11-14T12:35:00-05:00

Dattner Architects recently celebrated the opening of a new 26-story affordable housing project in New York City it says sets a new standard for the application of one of the building industry’s most sustainable techniques in the design of high-rise apartment structures.

Located in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, it has 277 total units with a host of on-site community services and is considered the largest passive house building in North America.

According to a city press release, the $178 million new structure at 425 Grand Concourse is meant specifically for the formerly homeless and those earning between less than 30% and 130% of the median income in an area in which 22% of all residents are considered food insecure.

Image courtesy Dattner Architects

“Our administration is focused on creating affordable housing for New Yorkers that doesn’t just help those who move in but enhances the entire community, and 425 Grand Concourse does exactly that,” NYC Mayor Eric Adams said dur...

Michael Kimmelman on some newer rays of light in NYC’s public housing stock

2022-02-07T11:59:00-05:00

Writing about Twin Parks in 1973, The Times’s former architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, speculated that the project might “turn out to be important in the history of housing design.” [...] design, however compassionate, can mean only so much against the obstacles that make up the housing problem today.” The calculus is the same half a century later. But the South Bronx isn’t. Gradually, it has been remade. Progress isn’t impossible, it’s a process.

Both observed South Bronx developments, 1490 Southern Boulevard and a transformation of the Lambert Houses, are seen as examples of high-quality and effective public housing that offers residents more than just desultory amenities. The Times critic broke down the new-ish developments by Dattner and Bernheimer Architects by first cautioning us with a history lesson about nearby Twin Parks (which Paul Goldberger predicted might “turn out to be important in the history of housing design” at its opening in 1973), adding that, in his view, the pair offer “templates for redoing” many of NYCHA’s 302 other campuses.

“It’s an 18-story building with 163 permanently affordable units and a doorman. The boxy, drab exterior, set a few steps up and back from the street wall, looks almost belligerently banal. But inside the building is comfortable, luxurious even, compared with the deteriorating apartments and hallways I saw in the old buildings. Crucial to the conversion, no tenants are being dis...

Dattner-designed Bronx high-rise will be New York City's largest residential Passive House

2016-05-02T14:08:00-04:00

In addition to housing for low- and moderate-income households, the mixed-use and mixed-income development will include a supermarket with healthy food options, a charter school, a medical facility, cultural and community spaces, a social services facility, and a rehabilitated playground that is currently closed. [...] The 24-story building is expected to be the largest residential Passive House built in New York City and use 70% less energy than conventional buildings.

Michael Kimmelman in praise of NYC's new garage-and-salt-shed complex: "Best examples of new public architecture in the city"

2015-12-22T14:14:00-05:00

After years of noisy protests, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s new garage-and-salt-shed complex has opened in Hudson Square, on the northern edge of TriBeCa. [...] The garage and shed have ended up being not just two of the best examples of new public architecture in the city but a boon to the neighborhood, whether the wealthy neighbors have come around to it or not. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed.