In this issue:
· Silver Towers Obtains Landmark Status
· Children’s Aid Breaks Out Holiday Cheer with New Center
· Tapestry Weaves Mixed-Income Residential in East Harlem
· Mixed-Use Defies Rock and Hard Place
· High School Serves Athletes… on Roof
· Labs Plug and Play into the Future
· Double Skin Reveals Highest Non-Enclosed Observation Deck in Shanghai

Silver Towers Obtains Landmark Status

Silver Towers.

Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation

The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) unanimously voted to designate the I.M. Pei & Associates-designed Silver Towers complex and its central sculpture, “Portrait of Sylvette” by Picasso, NYC landmarks, ending a five-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP). According to the advocacy group, while the LPC has recently payed increasing attention to Modern architecture, Silver Towers is the first post-war urban renewal “superblock” development in NYC to be landmarked. Originally known as University Village, the 1967 residential complex, set on five acres north of Houston Street between Mercer Street and LaGuardia Place, was designed by James Ingo Freed for New York University. Three identical 30-story, reinforced concrete towers built in the Brutalist style encircle a 36-foot-tall concrete sculpture. The towers cover a small percentage of the site, reflecting the influence architect Le Corbusier.

Children’s Aid Breaks Out Holiday Cheer with New Center

Children’s Aid Society Center.

BBG-BBGM

BBG-BBGM completed the renovation of three visitation rooms and a multi-functional conference room for the Children’s Aid Society Center in the South Bronx — a project they performed pro bono. The firm raised funds and pro bono donations of materials from vendors and other entities to finance the renovation. During the course of several days, the partners and staff carried out the design and construction from start to finish. Despite space limitations, lack of natural light, and small budgets, the firm tried to achieve functional and creative designs with themes from a garden to an island oasis.

Vendors that donated include: Advantage Sports Flooring, Artistic Tile, Benjamin Moore, BestArt & Mirror, County Draperies, Design Communications, Drapery by LORE, Design Tex, DFB Sales, Evan Shatz Sales Associates, Haig Lighting, Hightower Group, InterfaceFlor, Johnsonite, Kellex Corporation, Knoll Textiles, Koroseal, Liora Manne, Milliken, Myriad Fine Art, Osborne & Little, P Kaufmann, Pavarini McGovern Construction Company, Richard J. Fasenmyer Foundation, Selective Surfaces, The Erwyn Group, Ultrafabrics, Wolf Gordon, and 3-FORM.

Tapestry Weaves Mixed-Income Residential in East Harlem

Tapestry.

Jonathan Rose Companies

Jonathan Rose Companies in partnership with Lettire Construction, has broken ground on Tapestry, the first affordable and mixed-income residential rental development designed for LEED Silver certification in East Harlem. The 12-story, 185-unit apartment building will be located at the foot of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge (formerly the Triborough Bridge), and will offer a mix of market rate, middle-income, and low-income apartments. Designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects and MHG Architects, the project will contain studio through three-bedroom apartments, underground parking, a gym, accessible green roofs, a media/children’s playroom, bike storage, and 8,000 square feet of retail. The project is part of the 125th Street river-to-river rezoning, a multi-city agency rezoning effort to infuse the area with cultural, retail, entertainment, and affordable housing for Harlem residents. Tapestry is the first development to result from the rezoning, which was passed this past April.

Mixed-Use Defies Rock and Hard Place

Roscoe C. Brown, Jr. Apartments.

Meltzer/Mandl Architects

Despite a 30-foot-high rock outcropping covering nearly half the site, the Roscoe C. Brown, Jr. Apartments in the Bathgate section of the Bronx is currently under construction. Meltzer/Mandl Architects designed the 279 units by carving out a section of the rock for a lobby and allowing the remaining building to “float” above it onto a series of shear walls. The result will be a glass lobby that looks on a geological rock garden. The complex, which also features a latticework façade of articulated brick forms and two-story glass with metal panel accents, will offer studios through three-bedroom rental homes. There will also be 6,100 square feet of ground-level retail space, administrative offices, and on-site parking. Two outdoor recreation areas and community rooms are included in the 254,000-square-foot development. Completion is scheduled for 2010 under the sponsorship of Phipps Houses.

High School Serves Athletes… on Roof

Union City high school.

HOK New York

HOK New York and RSC Architects have designed a 366,550-square-foot high school to be sited on the former Roosevelt Stadium in Union City. The new school features an athletic stadium, complete with a grandstand area, on the roof for baseball, soccer, and football. As Union City’s only high school, the new structure will contain 66 general classrooms, small-group instruction space, cutting-edge science labs, and home economic labs. The athletic component of the high school also includes a three-station gymnasium, weight rooms, and locker rooms. The media center, located off the courtyard, creates both indoor and outdoor study areas, and will serve the general community by functioning as a public library. In addition, there will be a 980-seat auditorium, a small black box performance space, dance studio, and musical and choral studios for students.

Labs Plug and Play into the Future

RMJM Hillier

Washington University’s Bauer Hall.

Washington University in St. Louis recently broke ground on Bauer Hall, a 150,875-square-foot building for its School of Engineering & Applied Science, designed by RMJM Hillier. The new building will house the School of Engineering’s Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering (EECE), provide space for the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy & Sustainability (I-CARES), and expand the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

RMJM Hillier combined its expertise in state-of-the-art “plug-and-play” laboratories and historic preservation into a unified concept. Two-thirds of the space will be dedicated to research laboratories designed to maximize flexibility across the range of aquatics, aerosols, synthetic chemistry, and biomedical research activities. A plug-and-play casework system — including moveable base cabinets, removable tables, and ceiling-mounted service panels — improves ability to accommodate both bench-top and floor-mounted equipment while reducing the cost of future renovations as research priorities change. One feature will be an 85-seat distance-learning classroom available for use by all academic departments. Completion is expected in 2010.

Double Skin Reveals Highest Non-Enclosed Observation Deck in Shanghai

Shanghai Tower.

Gensler

Shanghai Tower is adjacent Jin Mao Tower and Shanghai World Financial Center in the Luijiazui Finance and Trade Zone, an area poised to be China’s first super-tall district. The 632-meter Gensler-designed tower, organized as nine stacked cylindrical buildings, will house Class-A office space, retail, a luxury hotel, cultural venues, and the world’s highest non-enclosed observation deck. The inner layer of the double-skin façade encloses the buildings, while a triangular exterior layer comprised the envelope. The spaces between the two layers create atrium sky gardens. Much like plazas and civic squares in traditional cities, the atria contain restaurants and convenience stores. The Shanghai Tower Construction & Development is the project’s developer, Thornton Tomasetti is the structural engineer, Cosentini Associates is the MEP engineer, and the Architectural Design and Research Institute of Tongji University as the Local Design Institute will support Gensler. The development is slated for completion in 2014.