The Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) New York office and developers Brookfield Properties and Park Tower Group have broken ground on a new 745-unit, dual tower complex on the Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn.
The housing towers, rising to 300- and 400-feet respectively, feature 8,600 square feet of ground floor retail spaces that connect to a new one-acre extension of the burough's waterfront park system.
The complex brings more than 40,000 square feet of new public green spaces designed by James Corner Field Operations to the district, according to a press release. Part of the plan includes extending an existing street that currently dead-ends into the site through the project, completing a broad esplanade that connects the waterfront to the inner reaches of Brooklyn. The portion of the site that will contain the new street is being donated to the city in perpetuity by the development team.
“We’re excited to begin construction on what will be a new hinge point between Greenpoint and the waterfront. The two towers are flanked by smaller buildings – 7 stories at the corner and 3 stories at the water – to create a continuous yet shifting perimeter around the block. This variegated edge will extend Dupont and Eagle streets to bring activity and access to the East River,” says Jason Long, OMA Partner-in-Charge, via press release.
The towers are designed to offer 30% of their residential units at affordable rates. Made up of a pair of blocky, shifting geometries, the complex is uniformly wrapped in customized precast concrete panels that include 8-foot by 8-foot windows. The panels change slightly based on orientation and present folded geometries around the main entrances to ground floor areas.
For the project, Marmol Radziner is the interior designer and landscape designer for the buildings themselves, while Beyer Blinder Belle will act as the executive architect and unit interior designer.
A project timeline has not been announced.
5 Comments
Hey, they copied my toddler's stacked block concepts! Someone hand me a phone, I need to lawyer up.
OMA NY is a totally different animal from the OMA of yore - even the Prince Ramus version was more intellectual. Now they compete with BIG for stacked block towers.
What a shitty building. Are they going to line the Brooklyn shore with these eye sores to let the rich fawn over the Manhattan skyline while the humane scaled neighborhoods beyond are blocked out? NYC really needs to get a handle on this, but the all mighty dollar corrupts all.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The problem isn't that these buildings are physically blocking anything out, or even that they are large and ugly. The problem is that they're filled with high income residents that turn historically working class neighborhoods into luxury playgrounds filled with dull expensive restaurants, cocktail bars, and luxury boutiques. These newer businesses that cater to newer residents are usually lame because newer residents also tend to be more conservative/normative and risk averse. Lower income artists and designers (perhaps they were also gentrifiers, but to a lesser degree) actually have good taste, and an appreciation for camp and kitsch. New large waterfront developments also change the politics of this area, usually shifting it to the right, meaning toward a more MSNBC-style mainstream/complacent liberal politics (pro-Clinton, pro-Cuomo, skeptical of unions)
Cool project
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