AN January/February 2024

The Architect's Newspaper January/February 2024

In Columbus, Indiana, IwamotoScott clads Moravec Hall in white brick for Ivy Tech page 9

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Siblings Nina Cooke John and Sekou Cooke speak about their life and work page 12

AN heads to Brooklyn to visit ARO’s new office and see ongoing projects page 14

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DEMOGO adopts a theatrical approach for a commission in Bologna, Italy page 16

8 11 46 47 50

Open Facades+ 2024 preview Marketplace Essay: Levittown Now Q&A: Daniel Libeskind

A COLLECTIVE ENDEAVOR From Kansas City to London, architects take on the task of designing spaces and institutions that work for the people they serve.

Read on page 21.

NAHO KUBOTA

PHILIP VILE

BRUCE DAMONTE

Alafia Under Construction

Co-op City Turns 50

If you take the 2, 3, or 4 train to the end of the line at New Lots Avenue in East New York, you’ll pass through a grid of industrial warehouses before Fountain Avenue bends along Betts Creek into Shirley Chisholm State Park. Previously a landfill, the park now tops a hill that offers views over Jamaica Bay. On this journey, just before reaching Seaview Avenue, you’ll pass a 27-acre parcel that used to be the Brooklyn Development Center, which housed individuals with mental health issues. Today, it’s a construction site for Alafia, a new wellness-oriented resilient development realized as the largest component of New York State’s Vital Brooklyn initiative.

In a city starved for housing, Alafia will deliver 2,400 affordable units in addition to medical services, retail, recreational spaces, bike lanes, walking paths, and an urban farm to an underserved Brooklyn neighborhood. (The name Alafia means something like peace or health in Yoruba,

New York City has 7,197 cooperatively owned buildings that contain a total 364,720 homes.

Over the course of his 60-year career, architect Herman Jessor designed 40,245 of those limited-equity units, composing 11 percent of the city’s total supply of cooperative housing. Jessor’s buildings include the Bronx’s Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses (1926) and United Workers’ Association Houses (1926–29); East River Houses on the Lower East Side (1956); and Rochdale Village in Queens (1966), among many others.

In 2023, Herman Jessor’s boldest feat turned 50: Co-op City. Here, 15,732 homes are spread across 35 high-rise towers and seven low-rise townhouses on a sprawling 320-acre site in the north Bronx. The Ville Radieuse–inspired ensembles coalesce around shared green space, bike paths, a co-op grocery store, shopping center, schools, and playing fields. The estate was built on top of a former amusement park, Freedomland, and was backed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller continued on page 48

Archi-Tectonics Goes Big in China

Two stadiums and a park for Hangzhou. Read on page 17.

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JACK MURPHY

After participating in Stratosferica’s Utopian Hours conference in Turin, Italy, last fall, where The Architect’s Newspaper was a media partner along with Monocle and Bloomberg, I had the chance to cross a site off my bucket list of architectural destinations. On an overcast Monday, I visited Ivrea, where the Olivetti campus is spread across the hills south of the town center. The company’s factory buildings and social programs are impressive but not widely known, though the complex did become a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018. The citation is clear about the rationale for recognition: “Ivrea expresses a modern vision of the relationship between industrial production and architecture.”

Olivetti, founded by Camillo Olivetti in 1908, got its start manufacturing typewriters. The company first worked from one brick factory but eventually commissioned a series of expansions by rationalist architects Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, including a curtain-walled section that Le Corbusier envied.

The Olivetti brand flourished under the leadership of Camillo’s son Adriano. Olivetti built architect-designed factories and showrooms around the world—from New York’s 5th Avenue store by Milanese architects BBPR, featuring a sculpture by Costantino Nivola, to the Venice showroom along St. Mark’s Square by Carlo Scarpa.

Olivetti was concerned with its employees’ well-being. In Ivrea, it built housing for workers, a school, and a canteen complete with a library. Factory employees weren’t fired, just reassigned. Adriano was a socialist and distanced himself from both the Fascist and Communist parties. As explored by Meryle Secrest in The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti, during World War II, Adriano was a CIA informant and plotted against Mussolini. After the war, he founded his own political party, Comunitá, but it quickly foundered.

Adriano was on a mission of expansion before he died suddenly on a train in 1960, followed by the death of Mario Tchou, the company’s leading computer engineer, in a car crash the next year. Some, including Secrest and members of the Olivetti family, suspect foul play in both cases. A deal to take over Underwood left Olivetti in financial crisis. Still, after a series of its own takeovers and partial sales, Olivetti pressed on: It wasn’t until 1968 when Ettore Sottsass’s Valentine

typewriter became a hit. Still, it lost steam in the 1990s and ultimately was absorbed into an Italian telecommunications company.

Today, several businesses occupy the campus’s buildings, but some remain vacant. I visited the nursery—featured in MoMA’s 1952 exhibition Olivetti, Design in Industry—whose restoration was nearly complete. In another building, a cafe serves lunch next to a gym; old machines and archival material mingle with paper cups and placemats, as seen in the accompanying image, a still life that speaks to the promise of a bygone dream of cooperative existence.

In this issue, AN explores a similar spirit of collectivity, which is needed now more than ever. Our features take on recent housing projects from Nashville to London and organizational developments in both architectural practice and a long-running New York nonprofit. Our Focus section showcases four new dwellings—from a single-family home on a scenic site in Nova Scotia to an affordable housing complex in Los Angeles—in addition to an in-depth set of residential products. Up front, we visit ARO’s new studio (page 14) and explore new projects in Bologna and Hangzhou (pages 16–19). Finally, we offer a preview of this year’s exciting Facades+ events (page 11).

The back of the issue contains three pieces closer to home in New York: an essay describes new additions to Levittown and contemporary real estate pressures (page 47); a portfolio by photographer Zara Pfeifer, with an accompanying essay by AN’s associate editor, Dan Jonas Roche, celebrates Herman Jessor’s Co-op City at 50 (page 48); and Roche interviews Daniel Libeskind about his upbringing and work on affordable housing (page 50). Studio Libeskind’s newest project, an affordable senior housing project in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, is due to open soon.

Our families shape us in deep ways. Last year, I spoke with architects and siblings Nina Cooke John and Sekou Cooke about their upbringing and work (page 12). We were fortunate to be joined by their parents, Leroy and Cynthia, who added their perspectives to the conversation. If any other architects are brave enough to be interviewed alongside their parents, my inbox is open.

Jack Murphy

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COURTESY 3A COMPOSITES

Our Best of 2023 issue printed the incorrect photograph of the Facades: Structural System honorable mention: ALUCOBOND EasyFix. An updated photograph is reproduced above.

The issue also omitted the names of two collaborators on Another Seedbed. The design team included Ignacio G. Galán and Jesse McCormick in addition to Future Projects.

The issue also misprinted EL Studio’s name: It is EL Studio, not El Studio.

6 News

The Architect’s Newspaper

Litigation between Valerio Olgiati and Markus Breitschmid over Virginia house continues

At Wyoming’s Jackson Hole Airport, CLB Architects combines home and travel hub

Rottet Studio draws inspiration from a midcentury home for the design of its new office in Houston

A Western District of Virginia judge recently granted Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati’s motion to dismiss a defamation countersuit brought against him by Markus Breitschmid, a professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture. The ruling relates to an Instagram Story posted by Olgiati in 2022 pertaining to Breitschmid’s private residence in Riner, Virginia.

The initial case, regarding Olgiati’s compensation, remains ongoing. Dan Jonas Roche

CLB Architects has completed the latest phase of improvements for Jackson Hole Airport, the point of entry for tourists traveling to Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park, Yellowstone, and nearby mountains. This upgrade includes a new restaurant, expanded holding area, two additional gates, a gift shop, and an updated baggage claim area fitted with a snack bar and retail space. DJR

Interior architect Lauren Rottet has plans to build a new ground-up office in Houston.

Sited on a residential street that overlooks Buffalo Bayou, the structure is intended to be a workspace for the company and a showroom for the architect’s Rottet Collection.

The building is slated to replace the Owsley House, a modernist home completed in 1960 by architect Howard Barnstone. JM

+ POOL slated to open first location in New York City this summer, more pools in Buffalo, Rochester, and Newburgh to follow

Juha Ilmari Leiviskä (1936–2024), Finnish architect of poetic, lightfilled buildings, dies at 87

Plans announced for New York City’s Second Avenue Subway Extension and Interborough Express

Eugene Aubry, (1935– 2023), an architect of late modernism in Texas and beyond, dies at 88

Juha Ilmari Leiviskä’s work evades facile historical and critical categories. Born in Helsinki and educated at Helsinki University of Technology, he established a unique family of forms and a personal style across his career of 60 years. William J. R. Curtis

New York governor Kathy Hochul laid out major transportation plans in her 2024 State of the State address. The big takeaways: Three new subway stations under S econd Avenue could be built in Harlem, filling in a major transit desert, and Brooklyn and Queens will have new orbital service. DJR

Eugene Edwards Aubry died on December 9, 2023. He was 88. A musician, storyteller, and fluent sketcher, Aubry was also a prolific architect whose many modernist works are endangered. Stephen Fox

Kurt Forster (1935–2024), scholar and former Getty Research Institute and CCA director, dies at 89

Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation opens The Bev, a new multi-use headquarters in Manhattan

UCLA has acquired the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles

Swiss architecture professor Kurt Walter Forster died of cancer on January 6 in New York.

He was 89. He is remembered for directing the doctoral studies program at Yale School of Architecture; his role as director of the Getty Research Institute in Santa Monica, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal, and Venice Architecture Biennale; and also for his time as a mentor to myriad renowned scholars at ETH Zurich. DJR

The Bev is a new headquarters for the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) that opened its doors in Manhattan. The headquarters is named after Beverly Willis—a pioneering feminist, architect, and mentor who died in 2023. The 2,000-square-foot space is sited in an SOM-designed tower at 4 Manhattan West overlooking the High Line and Hudson River Park. The interiors were designed pro bono by Angelica T. Baccon, principal at SHoP. DJR

The rumors are confirmed: The former Westside Pavilion shopping mall has been acquired

by UCLA . The school, named the nation’s top public university, has plans to use the 700,000-square-foot property along Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles for the UCLA Research Park. The 12-screen cinema, a bygone feature of the shopping mall, will be used by the university as lecture and performing space.

KK

Modernist structures by Paul Rudolph and Ulrich Franzen are New York City’s newest landmarks

African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund announces 31 historic Black churches to receive funding

Short list announced for the Fallen Journalists Memorial competition

Open Studio Architecture is renovating the East Wing and Plaza at Denver Museum of Nature & Science

After several modernist buildings by Paul Rudolph have fallen to the wrecking ball or been substantially altered, 2023 ended with one of the last buildings he designed gaining protection as a public landmark. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) voted unanimously to designate Rudolph’s Modulightor Building an individual city landmark. Ed Gunts

A church in Selma, Alabama, hit by a tornado and another in Atlanta where the NAACP’s first convention took place are among the 31 historic Black churches across the United States to receive funding from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Since it was launched in 2021, the Action Fund’s Preserving Black Churches initiative has given $9.8 million to over 80 churches and congregations in the United States. KK

In Washington, D.C., the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation (FJMF) announced that Höweler + Yoon Architecture, John Ronan Architects, MOS alongside Hood Design Studio, and NADAAA were short-listed to design the country’s first monument dedicated to press freedom and journalists who died in the field. The selection committee included critic Paul Goldberger, Milton Curry of Cornell University, landscape architect Mia Lehrer, and architecture critic Blair Kamin. DJR

With a $20 million contribution from the Sturm Family Foundation, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science is readying to carry out a renovation of its East Wing and Plaza. Local firm Open Studio Architecture has reimagined the wing’s historic theater, lobby, and eastern-facing plaza. DJR

The waterways running east and west of Manhattan are notoriously grimy. + POOL was founded 14 years ago by Dong-Ping Wong, Oana Stănescu, Archie Lee Coates IV, and Jeffrey Franklin with a simple vision: Bring free and safe river swimming to New York City. + POOL received $12 million from Governor Kathy Hochul and $4 million from the Adams administration. The pilot program will deliver plus-shaped pools to New York City as well as Buffalo, Newburgh, Rochester, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. DJR

COURTESY + POOL

COURTESY ROT TET STUDIO

January/February 2024

Neri Oxman, wife of Bill Ackman, accused of plagiarism days after Claudine Gay resigns

Charles Thornton (1940– 2024), founding principal of Thornton Tomasetti, dies at 83

Amid the fallout at Harvard University over Claudine Gay ’s recent resignat ion, Neri Oxman—spouse of Bill Ackman, who accused Claudine Gay of plagiarism—has also been accused of plagiarism in her dissertation. The allegations were made public by Business Insider. Reporters claim that in Oxman’s 2010 dissertation, she plagiarized text from 1998 by two Israeli scholars, Steve Winer and H. Daniel Wagner, among other scholars. Oxman responded via her Twitter/X account. DJR

Charles Thornton—renowned structural engineer, educator, mentor, and founding principal of Thornton Tomasetti—died on December 12, 2023, in Maryland after a brief illness. “Charlie was a visionary, foreseeing the needs of structural engineering, our clients, the building industry and the public it serves,” said Richard Tomasetti, founding principal of Thornton Tomasetti. DJR

Olson Kundig debuts Aro Homes—a net-zero, single-family prototype in the Bay Area

A photographic exhibition on Dan Kiley sets out to document a portion of the late landscape architect’s exhaustive portfolio

Olson Kundig has partnered with Aro Homes, a San Francisco start-up, to design a prototype for net-zero single-family residences that can be built faster and more environmentally soundly than conventional houses. The pair debuted their first built prototype in Mountain View, California, which sold for $4.2 million.

DJR

The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley takes a look back at 27 landscape projects from Kiley, who in his extensive career worked on more than 1,000 projects, from large, public-facing museum and institutional jobs to private residences. The exhibition, to be mounted at ABC Stone, nearly doubles the quantity of materials on display compared with past iterations. Kristine Klein

Tom Pritzker of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and other benefactors named in Epstein-Maxwell court documents

In a lengthy legal document made public on the evening of January 3 about sex-trafficking allegations against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, several prominent architecture benefactors were named. Among them is Tom Pritzker, billionaire and executive chair of Hyatt Hotels Corporation. Architects may recognize Pritzker as the individual who hands over medals to each year’s Pritzker Prize winners. DJR

A 1,907-foot supertall designed by AO in Oklahoma City may become the country’s tallest building Developer Scot Matteson first revealed plans to build a whopping 1,750-foot supertall in Oklahoma City. This would have been second only to the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan. Now, the plans are changing, rising to 1,907 feet: It’s poised to be the country’s tallest building. DJR

Eight office buildings in downtown Boston could become residential apartments under pilot program In Boston, three real estate development groups—Boston Pinnacle Properties, KS Partners, and Equity Residential—have filed applications to convert a total 104,000 square feet of office space into 170 apartments. These older, Class B and Class C “less desirable” office buildings plummeted in value during COVID, as millions of Bostonians opted to work from home. DJR COURTESY AO

William Pope.L (1955– 2023), a prolific artist known for his public interventions in New York, dies at 68 Legendary artist Pope.L, born William Pope.L, died in Chicago on December 23 at the age of 68. His passing was confirmed by ARTnews.

Known for his elaborate performance pieces and public interventions, Pope.L was born in 1955 in Newark, where his family had moved from Alabama. Separate heartfelt announcements were made on social media by the Julia Stoschek Foundation and artists Theaster Gates, Kevin Beasley, John Corbett, and Dieter Roelstraete. DJR

A 1974 mural by Richard Haas at 112 Prince Street is restored to its original glory After 50 years, Haas now considers his mural at 112 Prince Street a career milestone. The monumental piece was one of the earliest, most public expressions of postmodernism in New York, completed at a time when figurative painting was taboo and geometric abstraction was king. It also led to the “creation of over 100 interior and exterior murals” in cities around the world, he said. Critic Kira Obolensky, writing in a 1987 issue of Architecture Minnesota, credited Haas’s Soho mural with bringing architectural painting back into the 20th century. The lost artform abandoned by modernism was later championed by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. DJR

Marlon Blackwell Architects selected to design Columbus Indiana Municipal Airport control tower Following a competitive competition, Marlon Blackwell Architects has been selected to design a new air traffic control tower at Columbus Indiana Municipal Airport. The Fayetteville, Arkansas–based office beat out submissions from SO – IL, Höweler + Yoon, studio:indigenous, and Snow Kreilich for the job. The Marlon Blackwell–designed tower will be a short drive from Columbus’s many modern masterpieces by luminaries like Kevin Roche, I. M. Pei, Eero Saarinen, Deborah Berke, and Venturi. DJR

Pratt School of Architecture’s Reading Room, which holds the William “Bill” Menking Book Collection, opens On December 11, Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture unveiled a new reading room, which holds the William “Bill” Menking Book Collection, the library of AN’s cofounder and longtime editor-in-chief who died in 2020 due to cancer. The collection numbers over 2,000 titles and spans a range of subjects, from architecture to history, urbanism, city planning, design, art, and culture. JM BARRET T DOHERT Y

Read more news at archpaper.com.

8 Open

JUSTIN CHUNG

The Architect’s Newspaper

GEORGE BARBERIS AND EVAN SUNG

DANIEL BROWN PHOTO

BROOKE HOLME

Baroo 905 East 2nd Street, #109 Los Angeles, CA 90012 Design: Only Way Is Up

ōkta 618 NE 3rd Street McMinnville, OR 97128 Design: Hacker Architects

Bad Idea 1021 Russell Street Nashville, TN 37206 Design: EOA Architects

Talea Beer Co. West Village 102 Christopher Street New York, NY 10014 Design: Alda Ly Architecture

Chef and cofounder of Korean eatery Baroo Kwang Uh bucks expectations that his cuisine must be traditional. For his reopened restaurant, Uh and his cofounder, Mina Park, entrusted to Los Angeles–based firm Only Way Is Up (OWIU) with turning the industrial space into a warm interior, sensitive to tradition yet not pandering to Asian tropes. The architects employed walnut wood to evoke a hanok, or traditional Korean residential architecture, while a combination of Venetian and Shikkui plaster counteract the coldness of preexisting concrete walls. An aperture with a live edge provides a window into the kitchen and keeps things light and open. The designers also created custom ceramics for the space, including the decorative moon platter often seen in traditional Korean homes, made through the firm’s sister ceramics branch.

When you enter ōkta, a restaurant in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, a subdued sense of luxury is immediately palpable when you enter the dining room. Hand-troweled plaster walls, fringed rugs, and a ceiling covered in intricate details create a restaurant rich in organic textures inspired by nature. Hacker Architects approached the design of the 9,000-squarefoot space by bridging high-end hospitality with Oregon’s natural environment. Case in point: The main floor is grounded by an uneven basalt boulder, carried into the valley by a flood over one million years ago. While creams and light neutrals are featured on the ground floor dining space, the lower level houses a 24-seat cellar bar and wine library that opts for cozy, dark tones like brown leather and burnt sugar– glazed terra-cotta tiles.

East Nashville’s wine bar and restaurant Bad Idea is a modern insert within a historic shell.

Formerly a church, the structure was damaged by a tornado in 2020, prompting local firm EOA Architects to revive it. Sommelier and restaurateur Alex Burch tasked the women-owned practice Design Object to adapt the interior to better reflect Bad Idea’s funky wine menu.

Remnants from the building’s past life stand in contrast to playful, contemporary additions.

The most striking addition hangs behind the fluted wood bar counter, a motif millwork by art and design studio New Hat. The resulting composition features eyes and droplets—the same detailed pattern that hangs delicately above the bar. The space, one of Design Object’s first projects, ties together an eccentric yet approachable style.

Since launching in 2017, Asian- and woman-owned firm Alda Ly Architecture has garnered a reputation for gender-inclusive and empowering design. It’s not rocket science, then, that New York’s first women-owned brewery, Talea Beer Co., approached the office to design its first Manhattan taproom. The West Village outpost effuses classic saloon design through its use of exposed brick, brass accents, and decorative molding, but Talea is treated with a colorful, sun-drenched twist. The open dining room gives way to a hybrid dining and work area, restrooms lined with portraits of gender activists, and an intimate seating area, Put together, the design eschews the traditionally masculine saloon elements. Instead, it puts a feminine spin on taprooms, sensitive to Talea’s values and the LGBTQ+ history of the location. Kelly Pau

9 News

January/February 2024

A Campus Under One Roof

Moravec Hall by IwamotoScott Architecture is a new building for Ivy Tech in the star-studded city of Columbus, Indiana.

Since 2000, San Francisco–based IwamotoScott Architecture has established itself as a thoughtful and artistically inclined office that doesn’t shy away from history and theory. Yet even after more than two decades in practice, the office’s cofounders, Craig Scott and Lisa Iwamoto, describe their new project, Moravec Hall at Ivy Tech, as a milestone. “For us, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Scott said, namely because of the campus location: Columbus, Indiana.

The small Indiana city has an iconic architectural lineage, due in large part to the benevolence of The Cummins Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Cummins, a local manufacturing giant. The Foundation has commissioned more than 50 big-name architects since 1957 to design socially sensitive buildings in Columbus, from Venturi and Rauch to I. M. Pei, Deborah Berke, Leers Weinzapfel, and Harry Weese. So when the foundation announced its intention to fund a new building on Ivy Tech’s satellite campus in Columbus, a bevy of heavyweight contemporary studios answered the call, but ultimately one came out on top.

“When the Cummins Foundation called us to gauge our interest in designing a campus building in Columbus, my initial response was, ‘Who wouldn’t be interested?’”

Lisa Iwamoto told AN. “This is Columbus, Indiana, we’re talking about!”

Ivy Tech is a community college with 45 locations spread across Indiana. In 2019, five competitive firms threw their names in a hat to design an 80,000-square-foot replacement building at Ivy Tech’s Columbus site. Snow Kreilich Architects, nARCHITECTS, Marlon Blackwell Architects, and SO – IL were each short-listed for the job, too. IwamotoScott was announced as the winner of the $32 million project in February 2020. CSO Architects and Pepper Construction were the architect of record and general contractor, respectively.

The architects describe their design as a “campus under one roof” that didn’t go a single penny over budget. IwamotoScott’s parti is a relatively simple rectangular volume that houses a bouillabaisse of college departments. Space for health sciences, a nursing and dental laboratory, surgery technology, business education, communications and graphic arts, general and early childhood education, and even aviation falls under a single roof. Most of the building is only open to students and faculty, while some parts, namely the dental lab, had to be publicly accessible, necessitating a unique circulation solution.

Moravec Hall shares a site with several institutions grouped around a single quad. Its neighbors include the Advanced Manufacturing Center designed by Cesar Pelli and the Columbus Learning Center by Kevin Kennon of Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects.

The previous Ivy Tech building made of CMUs paled in comparison to its Pelli- and Kennon-designed neighbors. Moreover, it had only scant natural light and a lackluster connection to the quad. Its classrooms had measly clerestories, and the double-loaded corridor had no sunlight at all. “The first thing stakeholders said to us was that the new building needed to have lots and lots of sunlight,” Iwamoto said. “It also needed to better connect to a quad area where other campus buildings are located.”

During schematic design, the architects faced another challenge: Construction couldn’t disrupt the semester, so the new

BRUCE DAMONTE

Above: A continuous envelope allows all of Ivy Tech’s programs to unite under one roof.

Far left: Internal circulation spaces are multitiered and include clever interventions for social gathering.

Left: Attention to facade resolution results in stepped brick details around the school’s apertures.

BRUCE DAMONTE

building had to be built somewhere else on-site while students and faculty remained at the existing building. IwamotoScott responded by fitting the new edifice in a leftover space adjacent to the existing Ivy Tech building. The replacement building went up in the negative void while classes continued uninterrupted. The old building was promptly demolished; students and faculty started using the new building last year.

With this intervention, IwamotoScott successfully squared off the existing quad faced

by Kennon and Pelli. The architects, however, described their contribution as a simple box with “one little crank.” The crank, the architects said, creates an impression for the entry, a natural place of egress for users to move to and from the Columbus Learning Center.

Between the egresses is what IwamotoScott

CR AIG SCOT T

calls a “social spine,” an internal street that links the building’s front to the quad. The social spine floods the interiors with natural light, and its sculptural ceiling adds visual flavor. “We’re really inspired by Portuguese architects like Álvaro Siza,” Iwamoto said.

“Namely how much attention they give to voids and how they sculpt light.”

The California architects noted that brick was the material of choice, selected for its cost-effectiveness early on by the general contractor. Thus, the building is faced in white brick, which contrasts nicely with a base clad in black panels. Brick corbelling around the windows also suggests texture, shadow, and playfulness. Working within a limited “economy of means,” Scott said, the ensemble takes inspiration from Venturi Scott Brown—namely how the Philadelphia

architects espoused the value of utilitarian volumes fit for a variety of programs. This way, things can evolve over time. Iwamoto acknowledges the Venturi & Scott Brown influence, but clarified that it’s not just a decorated shed: “It’s something more synthesized with multiple ideas,” Iwamoto said.

Iwamoto and Scott noted that they were lucky to have Dr. Steven Combs, chancellor of Ivy Tech Community College Columbus, as a client on the project. “Dr. Combs is a real architecture buff,” Iwamoto said. The pair was equally inspired by Columbus’s architectural lineage and the community at large. “I remember walking into a nearby Walgreens and talking to a store clerk there about Saarinen,” Iwamoto says. “Columbus has such deep appreciation and care for architecture. It’s special.” DJR

10 In Construction

The Architect’s Newspaper

A New Blue Zone

Dattner and SCAPE deliver a health-conscious design for Alafia in East New York, with phase one now underway. continued from cover though the phrase

likely came from Arabic.) Dattner Architects completed the master plan with landscape architect SCAPE; their RFP response— created for clients L+M Development Partners, Apex Building Group, RiseBoro Community Partnership, and Services for the UnderServed—was awarded the project in 2018. The proposal, informed by the concept of the 15-minute neighborhood, has the ambition of becoming a “blue zone”—a new label defining places where residents seem to live long, healthy lives thanks to diet and exercise.

Forty-eight apartments will be reserved for people with mental health challenges, and 88 supportive homes will be offered for individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities, according to the state’s announcement of the project. Services for the UnderServed will support these 136 new homes. All units in the development will be for residents who make 80 percent of the city’s average median income or less, which still may be too expensive for many East New Yorkers, according to The New York Times.

Dattner’s master plan stages two rows of taller buildings along the east and west edges of the site, with the eastern blocks stepping up in height when moving away from Jamaica Bay. Shorter buildings enclose open areas and face out to an expanse of recreational green spaces. “The massing

is designed so that each building is visible from the center of the site to help wayfinding and minimize shadows cast on each other,” Daniel Heuberger, principal at Dattner, told AN. “The buildings share a number of common characteristics: a communal identity built around a shared, defensible, and safe outdoor space; a lively, activated ground plane with residential, commercial, and community facility activities on all sides of the structure; a sense of place created by a mix of scales and unique massing to each building; and a healthy, comfortable environment based on sustainable, Passive House principles.”

The master plan creates a nested set of relationships for residents, from personal residences to a shared courtyard to the overall neighborhood. Two vehicular streets cross the site, but otherwise resident access will largely be via pedestrian promenades. A mix of unit types will be offered.

Heuberger said Dattner helped draft the general public plan—the legal document controlling the development, which translates the descriptive language of the master plan to the rules-based zoning text. The process “makes one appreciate the link between architectural form, planning intent, and the regulatory and legal structures underpinning it all,” he recalled. “The project is not just about design, but also the long-term operational and programming support that is necessary to sustain such a large and complex community.”

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A significant part of the team’s proposal is its four acres of SCAPE-led landscape components, which include tenant gardens, a playground, a sports court, a dog park, a fitness loop, a lawn, and bioswales. An urban farm, a biodigester, and a waste facility will take up another acre. Given the site’s proximity to Jamaica Bay, it will be elevated to protect against rising sea levels, and open spaces will be designed to absorb water and control erosion.

Alafia’s first phase, now under construction, is scheduled to be completed in June 2025 at a cost of about $204 million. This scope includes Building C, designed by Dattner, with 575 units, a clinic operated by One Brooklyn Health, offices for Services for the Underserved, parking, and neighborhood retail spaces; Building I/J, the maintenance hub, with on-site trash handling and composting, which will eventually serve the full complex. Building C will be all-electric, utilize geothermal pumps, include rooftop solar, and rely on a wastewater heat-recovery system.

It will likely take six phases to fully build out Alafia’s master plan at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion. Not all the architecture will be

Top: An aerial rendering shows clusters of buildings, massed around an open park, that step up in height.

Above: Construction is underway on the first phase of Alafia, which will include a 575-unit apartment building designed by Dattner.

completed by Dattner; Marvel is designing the buildings for the second phase, and subsequent commissions may be handled by other architects, who would work within Dattner’s master plan. A manufacturing building and a public school are anticipated in later phases.

Dattner’s housing portfolio includes a mix of typologies and scales, from mixed-income and mixed-use to affordable, supportive, and senior housing. Heuberger said Dattner’s role at Alafia is “reflective of the office’s interest in the most essential and relatable of architectural impulses: providing shelter. New York City has a particularly rich housing history. We are proud to play our part in it.” JM

11 Preview

January/February 2024

Facades+ Is on the Road Again AN’s in-person conference series will land in 13 cities in 2024.

In 2024 The Architect’s Newspaper will bring our Facades+ conference series to 13 cities across North America. This year marks the 12th year of the conference and we are excited for another year of amazing programs, which will continue to highlight the latest and greatest in high-performance envelope design.

This year, the conference series will include a new attendee networking session, as well as industry roundtable discussions featuring leading contractors, fabricators, and manufacturers. Our Facades+ events are unique thanks to the wide variety of AEC professionals we bring together under one roof, offering interdisciplinary networking opportunities that bridge industries. Professionals interested in elevating their practice and extending their reach nationally make up our core audience.

F a c a d e s + k i c ke d o f f t h e yea r i n S a n Francisco on January 25. The program was co-chaired by SOM and featured conversations on embodied carbon, the game-changing evolution of vacuum-insulated glazing, as well as case studies on high-performing projects from Verse Design, KPF, and SmithGroup.

On February 23, Facades+ returns to Dallas with a program co-chaired by Yen Ong, a partner at 5G Collaborative. The event will feature case studies of award-winning projects in the metroplex, such as David Hotson’s Saint Sarkis Armenian Church, Cunningham Architects’s Shady Brook Office Building, Morphosis’s Edith and Peter O’Donnell Athenaeum on

the University of Texas at Dallas campus, as well as 5G Collaborative’s Virgin Hotel.

The Washington, D.C., conference will take place on March 20. Hickok Cole will co-chair a program that will feature presentations from SmithGroup, Leo A. Daly Architects, Morris Adjmi Architects, and more.

Facades+ New York City returns with a twoday conference on April 4 and 5. The first day will consist of symposium assembled with the help of co-chair Henning Larsen. It will feature case studies like The Spiral by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the adaptive reuse of Williamsburg’s iconic Domino Sugar Factory, led by PAU, and conversations around embodied carbon, new materials, and climate change. On the second day, held at New York Law School, attendees will participate in hands-on technical workshops in a classroom setting.

We’re a l s o exc i te d to a n n o u n c e t h a t Facades+ will come to two new cities this year: We will be in Nashville for the first time with the help of HASTINGS on April 19, followed shortly after by our debut in Vancouver on May 21—the first of two Canadian conferences.

Over the summer, Facades+ returns to Boston, and in the fall, look out for programming in Chicago, Austin, Philadelphia, Toronto, Los Angeles, and Seattle. There’s sure to be a Facades+ event near you, so take the opportunity to learn more and network with fellow AEC professionals. Trevor Schillaci

L AURIAN GHINITOIU

BIG’s The Spiral is the newest addition to New York’s Hudson Yards neighborhood, characterized by a unique bracelet of greenery climbing the tower.

ROBERT TSAI

At Facades+ Dallas, Cunningham Architects will present the Shady Brook Office Building, which is shaded by means of an Accoya wood screen.

ROBERT TSAI

The interiors of the Shady Brook Office Building showcase the porous nature of the Accoya wood screens in circulatory spaces.

12 Q&A

The Architect’s Newspaper

One Family, Two Architects

Nina Cooke John and Sekou Cooke are architects who lead independent practices and academics with decades of teaching experience.

Nina is the founding principal of Studio Cooke John Architecture and Design, and Sekou leads sekou cooke STUDIO and is the director of the Master of Urban Design program at UNC Charlotte. They are also siblings: Nina is the eldest.

In this interview, AN’s executive editor, Jack Murphy, spoke with them to learn about their pathways in architecture. Their parents, Leroy and Cynthia, joined the conversation to share about their family’s life together.

COURTESY NINA COOKE JOHN AND SEKOU COOKE

AN: Nina and Sekou, what was your family life

like growing up in Jamaica?

Sekou Cooke (SC): We were inquisitive and

argumentative; we were always discussing ideas and concepts. Both sides of our family are big, and they’re each loud in different ways. My father is one of seven, and my mother is one of nine. It’s rarely just the four of us; usually there are more people around, so it is always lively.

Nina Cooke John (NCJ): Our nuclear family is

a small part of our influences. As Sekou mentioned, we spent a lot of time with our cousins, uncles, and aunts growing up. Both sides had profound influences on us—my mother’s side of the family includes artists, and my mother’s father was a contractor and used to invent things, keeping his designs in a sketchbook.

Also, one of my mother’s sisters was a dancer.

SC: I was going to bring up my mother’s

father. Cynthia was talking about how he used to design things and build things for people’s houses and draw them; that’s something I learned recently. I have long thought about architecture as something that requires equal parts of your left brain and right brain.

I feel like my father’s influence is more the left brain and my mother’s is more the right brain. That may have been the secret sauce.

AN: How did you both become interested in

architecture as young people?

NCJ: Architecture wasn’t on my radar for

most of my childhood. But I remember, while in high school, someone describing a house they had visited that was an architect’s house and how amazing it was. That piqued my interest in architecture. I started taking evening classes at Jamaica School of Art, and then my uncles that lived in New York City said, “Oh, City College has a good program,” so I went there before transferring to Cornell. The program was very conceptual, and I absolutely loved it, which is the opposite reaction experienced by many people who go into architecture school expecting to start designing buildings right away.

SC: I was also one of those kids that would

take my toys apart and break everything to see

how it works. By the time I was five, my grandmother had told me about architects. “So there are these men (as she called them) that draw houses and buildings,” she said. So, architecture became my default answer to the question of what I wanted to do when I grew up.

AN: Leroy and Cynthia, what could you add

about Sekou and Nina? What was your household like, and how did it create the foundations for success? Leroy, you were a politician in Jamaica, so I’d be interested to learn more about your work.

Leroy Cooke (LC): They were polar opposites:

Nina was laughing all the time, while Sekou was crying. I don’t think the politics affected either of them that much. Nina was more involved, but by the time Sekou was old enough to be aware of what was going on, I wasn’t directly involved in politics.

Sekou was a strange kid, but he was very good at school. He liked to watch TV all the time, which was strange for me because there was no television in Jamaica when I was growing up. He was interested in art, which I remember well because it was different from me. I am the opposite of a gifted artist; I couldn’t even draw something to represent it in a recognizable way, like in geography, where you have to draw a map. The only place I could draw was Barbados! I can definitely tell you that they didn’t get any of their artistic gifts from me.

Cynthia Cooke (CC): Nina was a perfect child.

She was mature beyond her years. As it relates to the politics, she was out and about with us campaigning. And even before she was five, she was telling children in the area about South Africa and apartheid. She was quite conscious and listened to the radio to learn what is happening around her. When she heard that architecture could mix art and science, then she chose it to study.

With Sekou, on the other hand, since he was born, he was watching Sesame Street and talking about architecture. He was always looking at buildings and being interested in the shape of roofs and so on. Every summer I had to buy him one of those 64 packs of crayons. He was interested in everything.

Personally, I used to draw, paint, crochet, knit, embroider…all sorts of crafts. I

was never interested in being a specialist; I just could do everything. I was sort of carried away into these things. If I had a choice, I would be doing art. But because I was good at mathematics, they felt that I should be doing mathematics and so on. What I enjoy doing is more creative, like making clothes and writing. But because I could do other things, I was pushed that way. So maybe they got the interest in architecture from me, or maybe it came from somewhere else.

AN: Once you finished your respective under-

graduate degrees, what did you want to do next?

NCJ: I think I knew that I wanted to continue

to be engaged in the academic exploration of architecture, which is why I went back to graduate school after two years of practice.

I already had a five-year professional undergraduate degree, so I didn’t need to go to graduate school to become licensed, but I knew that being able to work through theoretical ideas in the academic space was exciting and important to me.

SC: Continuing with the theme of Nina and

I being very different, when I left school I thought I never wanted to go back to school.

I wanted to learn the business of designing and building buildings, and I wanted to get as much professional experience as possible.

I decided early on that I didn’t want to go to a big firm or work for a superstar. All my friends were going to SOM or KPF or trying to get a job at OMA, and I only applied to firms that had four people or fewer. I ended up spending six years at Michael Davis Architects in Manhattan. They had five people at their largest, and while the work wasn’t flashy, it was well thought out. I learned how to run a practice. I didn’t return to academia for ten years.

AN: Did you two compare work experiences?

NCJ: When I was working at Polshek

Partnership, Sekou worked nearby on Hudson Street, so we would meet in the middle for lunch. He was in the same building as 1100 Architects at the time. We would talk about projects in parallel, because we were always kind of at different places doing different things.

SC: At the time, she was at a larger firm doing

bigger projects, and I was doing these little apartment renovations, so it seemed like that’s how things were going to go. We also knew a lot of the same people, so it was an interesting time.

AN: Now, it seems like the practices you lead

have overlapping concerns relating to public space and cultural memory. How did you decide to work between academia and individual companies?

NCJ: In 2001, I moved from the scale of cul-

tural institutions to residential work while teaching and being a young parent. I had small kids at the time, so that mix worked for me. Then, after seven or eight years, I had a business partner; we both had small children, so much of our work happened late at night when the kids were asleep. I was always thinking about getting back into urban engagement. At the time, the best way to seek out those issues was through competitions. My business partner and I invited Sekou to join us for a couple of the entries, including one that I still show all the time, The Power in the Dark.

SC: I’m surprised that our paths aligned so

much, because I’ve always thought that we’re quite divergent. But I think that’s due to us being “real architects” who are interested in the entire expanse of what architectural practice can be. It can take on different scales and address different people and communities.

After my office experience, I wanted to work for myself almost immediately and started doing a couple of independent commissions. I started collaborating with some friends from Cornell like Olalekan Jeyifous and Anaelechi Owunwanne. Also, Efrain Perez and I collaborated on a restaurant called Fanny in Brooklyn.

Transitioning to teaching was a surprise at first, but maybe my mother would say that I’ve been doing it my whole life. After four years in California and separating from my wife, I ended up teaching at Syracuse and then going to graduate school at Harvard.

My experience at Harvard is what ignited my current career trajectory. It changed everything. It really made me refocus on larger issues in architecture and understand the

13 importance of research, both in the academy and the larger public. Plus, it allowed me to make connections with influential people. Of course, that was during the time Kanye West visited the school; I coauthored the letter inviting him, and I ended up writing about him. That was actually the spark that led to my work on Hip-Hop Architecture.

AN: Can you say more about the shared inter-

ests of your respective practices?

NCJ: My undergraduate thesis at Cornell was

sited in the Bronx and Brooklyn and investigated how Jamaican immigrants reclaim leftover spaces and how we could program them for community engagement. I continue to have an interest in the public realm and issues of immigration. Also working on smallscale interventions. That all went on hold for about 20 years. When I give lectures now, I show my thesis project all the time because it is directly linked to a lot of the public installations that I’m doing currently.

While I was in school, I worked best when making physical models, while Sekou was always creating expressive drawings. That is his way of thinking through ideas. In a way, our practices relate to the media we used to explore critical questions: I am now, finally, moving back into working at the scale of the installation, and, Sekou, you’re often working through drawing and images. Is that right?

SC: That’s accurate. I often talk about Nina’s

work; I’m also a curator, so I like collecting things and seeing how people arrive at the same idea. When I did my first exhibition on Hip-Hop Architecture, I recommended Nina for the advisory board, and I was also thinking about her thesis project. And now, I’m talking about her Tubman Memorial and her project in Alexandria because I want to have a larger conversation about all of the contemporary practitioners who are hitting this same topic. She’s a big part of that conversation, and I’m always looking at her work with admiration.

Both of us are also in this amazing text group with other people we met at Cornell. It started in 2019 but intensified in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd. This group chat has sustained me for a long time. It has been a space for us to reflect on each other’s work,

January/February 2024

celebrate each other, share things, or just talk shit about stuff. It has been a really good and powerful tool for over three years, and those have been some of the most interesting times in our careers.

Nina Cooke John’s Newark, New Jersey installation, Shadow of a Face, honors Harriett Tubman.

NCJ: What’s great about that group chat is

that while we were all undergraduates at Cornell around the same time, we all have different ways of practicing architecture. A few of us have what might be considered traditional architecture firms, but someone else is primarily doing art, though with an architectural influence. Another friend is an arts educator and artist. The group chat is valuable because we arrive at different conclusions, but we share a common ground.

We can all talk the talk, and we know the language, but we each have different takes on it.

“This is still architecture” is what we say to people who go to architecture school and think they’re a failure if they’re not practicing architecture afterward. Not everyone who goes to law school and graduates ends up practicing law. Students should know that the skills they learned in school are going to be valuable for any number of pathways that they might choose.

SC: That dovetails with what I’m advocating

COURTESY NINA COOKE JOHN

for these days. This idea is actually at the heart of my second book, Black Architect, which I’m currently writing. It’s about how people— and especially Black people—have a broader sense of what architecture is, what it can be, and what it can be used for. As a profession, architecture is so restrictive; it’s almost like it’s afraid of losing itself. But architectural practice can look like almost anything.

The idea is especially powerful for people who study architecture and don’t see themselves reflected in it because our profession started out as a pastime for wealthy white males. It’s hard to see yourself in there, so it pushes a lot of people out, but that doesn’t mean those people don’t belong or can’t add to the conversation.

they both seem to be happy with what they’re doing. While I didn’t pass on any artistic skills, I feel myself to be intimately interested in architecture, in all senses of the word. I see myself as something of a social architect, in terms of designing and improving a society. I am more interested in public architecture and city planning and improving the conditions in which people live. Jamaica was a British sugar colony, and the British didn’t pay much attention to how cities looked, in comparison to the Spanish and the French. So, I want the country to pay more attention to public architecture.

AN: Leroy and Cynthia, how do you see your

CC: I was always amazed by my children’s

children as adults? What do you think about their successes?

LC: I’m glad that they’re getting public re-

cognition, and I’m even more pleased that

uniqueness. I compare them to others, including the thousands of students I’ve known through my work [as a teacher of mathematics and principal of a coeducational high school of 1,400 students]. Whenever I hear something about my children, I want to wake the town and tell the people. I don’t think they want me to do that, but that’s how I feel.

Sometimes when I see their successes, it’s sort of like an out-of-body experience, as I see myself in what they do. For instance, I read an article that Nina wrote, and it sounded exactly like if I had written it, even though Leroy is the one known for his literary skills.

SC: Related to family creativity, I want to

mention my father’s book, Land of My Birth: A Historical Sketch of the First Forty Years of the People’s National Party of Jamaica. It started as a historical sketch of a political party, and it turned into a book.

CC: Leroy was asked to write something for

the 80th anniversary of the party. I couldn’t understand why he was so involved and obsessed with this writing, but he finally showed it to me. I thought it sounded like a book, and he eventually decided to publish it.

But of course every time we went back to the computer, there was a new version.

SC: His book came out before my book, HipERIK BARDIN

An installation shot of Sekou Cooke’s exhibition Hip-Hop Architecture at the Center for Architecture New York.

Hop Architecture. That timing was a surprise, but it was good because then he was available to do my index. For his own book, he did everything except printing—pagination, index, editing, all of it.

We should also acknowledge the fact that during this conversation, our parents are sitting in a house in Jamaica that Nina designed.

NCJ: With a little bit of help from Sekou!

AN: Can we talk about this house? What was

it like to have your parents as clients?

NCJ: It happened a long time ago; I think the

house was finished in 2001, and my parents moved in in 2002. They were good clients. For me, it’s all about how to create a space that works best for the people who will live there. I knew there would be family events with many people over, but it also needed to work when it was just the two of them: Leroy needs a small study that was distanced from the TV room, and things like that. There are several things that I might have done differently, but in terms of the layout, I’m happy with it.

CC: We wanted high ceilings and lots of light.

I didn’t ask for anything else.

LC: We were willing to be the guinea pigs.

Nina wasn’t able to be present to guide the construction, so I think that was a slight minus.

SC: I was still in undergrad when Nina started,

but by the time construction began, I was out of school, so I helped lay out the kitchen and designed some doors and windows.

Thinking back, my parents were good clients because they were able to be expressive and clear about what’s important and flexible about what isn’t, which allows the designer to have agency, which is what we need from all of our clients.

LC: I had faith in Nina. I trusted her in terms

of what she would design. It was the first house to be built in the area, and other people were awestruck by it.

CC: Everybody wants to come and look at the

inside. Twenty years later, maybe the stairs need to be rebuilt. Nina wasn’t here, so I had to design them myself.

14 Studio Visit

The Architect’s Newspaper

4

MAGDA BIERNAT

Life of the Mind Architecture Research Office continues to evolve its inquiry-based process.

It turns out that Architecture Research Office (ARO) is an apt name for a firm dedicated to curiosity. In 1993, cofounders Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell came together to create a place where they could continually learn through work. This year, the duo, along with principal Kim Yao, has marked the nearly 40-person firm’s 30th anniversary with a relocation to a new Brooklyn office.

“When we first started the firm, an empirical methodology initially was directed toward form and materials,” Yarinsky told AN. The firm’s ten-year partnership with acoustic textile brand FilzFelt, on display in the new office, is part and parcel of this. The collaboration began when the two first worked on Knoll’s New York flagship showroom and has since blossomed into an ongoing exploration of architectural materials.

Over the years, that inquiry has evolved beyond textiles into the realm of relationships between people, organizations, companies, and institutions—and the ways architecture can

facilitate this dynamic. ARO’s research rightly begins at home, where the practice’s collaborative process affords it a flat, nonhierarchical operation. One actionable example of this is the firm’s requirement that two principals lead every project to ensure multiple points of view.

“We shifted to having weekly office meetings every Monday morning and social initiatives within the office, making sure that everyone feels that they have agency,” shared Cassell. Some of these initiatives include the Social Equity Group, which holds the firm’s diversity and antiracist practices to account by ensuring representation and social responsibility within projects; a Zero-Waste Team to minimize office waste; and even the team project Pumpkitecture, an annual New York architecture competition for pumpkin carving.

“The community of the office is a project itself,” continued Cassell. Through it, research becomes praxis, the running theme uniting the firm’s many scales and typologies.

15

January/February 2024

1

2

COURTESY ARO

MAGDA BIERNAT

1 ARO Office 2023 Occupying a loftlike floor of an industrial building in downtown Brooklyn, the firm’s office embodies ARO’s process. Office-wide design sessions informed the 6,500-square-foot workplace, resulting in an open, inviting floorplan that breaks off into informal and formal places to gather. Generous daylight and colorful materials soften the concrete. Not only is the office a reflection of ARO’s collaborative methodology, it’s also a testament to how the firm investigates space as it relates to relationships. “We made very specific strategic decisions about

2 100 Flatbush 2016– supporting the way we want to be interacting,” said Yao. “They’re really simple choices, but each one thoughtfully engages with how we want to support our process.” Integral to this is physical model-making, evidenced by the office’s model shop, which, of course, falls alongside the research-forward material and book libraries.

3

Part of Alloy Block, a mixed-used, five-building development in downtown Brooklyn by Alloy Development, the 100 Flatbush project comprises two ultra-low-energy schools: a public primary school, P. S. 486, and Khalil Gibran International Academy, the city’s sole Arabic language public high school. Designed to meet Local Law 97’s energy efficiency requirements, the two are the city’s first Passive House–certified public schools. Social context drives the design. “We decided the high school entrance is off Flatbush.

It reads as a civic building on Flatbush Avenue

so that kids are proud of where they go to school,” shared Cassell. “They can feel a sense of belonging and ownership.” A brick facade and rhythmic windows bolster this sense of dignity.

The primary school entrance is located on the other side, where the street faces Cobble Hill.

Lower massing situates the school within the brownstone vernacular and offers a quieter, safer entrance for little ones. Navigating the civic and residential scales, as well as a below-grade gymnasium, the 146,000-square-foot project expertly balances rigorous requirements.

4

ELIZABETH FELICELL A

3 Rothko Chapel 2016— First completed in 1971, Houston’s Rothko Chapel remains an artistic and architectural icon, designed collaboratively by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko alongside Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry. ARO completed phase I, the restoration of the chapel, in 2020, and construction of phase II begins this spring. It entails creating a campus for a new administration building, program center, and outdoor space, realized in collaboration with Nelson Byrd Woltz. For ARO, it was important that buildings visually and physically engage

COURTESY ARO

4 Olana Frederic Church Center for Art & Landscape 2017– the neighborhood. To that end, brick and glass facades unite with the chapel, while scale and massing echo the early-20th-century vernacular that surrounds it. “So much of our work involves engaging existing historic buildings or older structures and renewing them through adaptive renovations. This one encompasses the existing building but then also the neighborhood around it,” said Yarinsky. It’s another project informed by ARO’s meticulous deep dive into how buildings affect locals, visitors, and history.

Landscape artist Frederic Church built Olana, his 250-acre Persian-style home, studio, and garden in 19th-century Hudson, New York.

Though the site has been open to the public since the state purchased the property in 1966, the new visitor center, part of Nelson Byrd Woltz’s design plan, realizes a more immersive visitor experience. For the 4,500-square-foot, all-electric center, ARO approached the design by merging indoors and outdoors through numerous skylights and a wall of windows that opens onto a terrace. Sustainability was also

important to honor Church’s stewardship of the land. As such, ARO designed the mass timber center to reduce its carbon footprint with glue-laminated wood columns and cross-laminated timber roof panels—a first for a public building in New York. Currently under construction, the center integrates ticketing, restrooms, a cafe and restaurant, and a multipurpose room.

All design interventions ensure that the center situates itself conceptually and aesthetically into the landscape. KP

16 Dispatch

The Architect’s Newspaper

DEMOGO Takes on the Gare A young firm will soon have an enfilade of civic projects after successful institutional critique of an Italian competition process.

IWAN BA AN

In 2018, Treviso, Italy–based architecture studio DEMOGO won second prize in the competition for an office and lab building in Bolzano, a northeastern Italian city.

The design concept was based on the subtraction of mass from a monolithic urban block: an imaginary erosion that reveals the building’s interiors by turning its opaque steel skin into transparent glass surfaces.

This excavation process generates a stepped sequence of floors, each with its own roof garden. The result was a beautiful and convincing structure with a strong urban form.

A form so strong that it inspired another DEMOGO project from the same year: the new Regional Headquarters of Bologna’s Financial Guard (the Italian police force tasked with enforcing rules like taxation and customs), which was completed this past summer.

The project is the outcome of a gara—an Italian competition procedure for assigning public works in a quicker way than competitions. Gare, in fact, reduce the design submission to a scheme, letting the client concentrate on the financial feasibility of the project.

Cost efficiency and conceptual clarity, in this

sense, are the essence of gare, which is why DEMOGO’s winning scheme is defined by great rationality.

The core of the project is a stepped stack of four levels of office space (and as many roof gardens). Underneath the offices is a warehouse where the Financial Guard’s archives are kept. Closed to the public, the warehouse occupies the whole ground floor of the building, with the sole exception of a small entrance hall. A classical architectural composition is therefore slightly disturbed by the fact that the base contains an introverted service space rather than a magniloquent public foyer.

Despite being the programmatic core of the project, the offices are not the main event.

They are simply designed according to current standards, regulations, and technologies. It is around them—in the connecting spaces, in the material fabric, and in the urban form of the building—that the architectural strength of DEMOGO’s project emerges.

The building rests on a triangular plot not far from Bologna’s Central Station. Each of the site’s three edges frames very different urban conditions: a dense residential block to the east, a social center occupying a former freight

yard to the south, and a system of railway infrastructures to the north. The terraced shape of the building reacts to the complexity of the site and changes depending on where you stand.

Its lowest height matches that of the neighboring building but grows taller toward the northern edge of the site, adjacent to the railway zone. This consideration of the surrounding urban conditions means the building subtly inserts itself into its plot while still becoming a visible urban landmark.

The rusty material of the railway reverberates with that of the building’s envelope.

Supported by an exposed concrete skeleton, the facade is made up of modular, rhythmically composed 100-by-380-centimeter red steel panels. These balance the overall composition while hiding the technical infrastructure that runs on its external walls.

The pattern is interrupted at each floor by a stringcourse, which produces a controlled play of vertical and horizontal lines and of thinner and thicker shadows. On the top floor, the facade is perforated to publicly declare the presence of the technical appliances behind it. Similarly, the facade opens farther to create a porch—and to reveal a hanging garden—on the first floor. The steel frames of the porch are thicker than they structurally need to be, so as to cast longer shadows. This compositional choice alters the perception of the building within and from the street.

By contrast, the gray plaster finish of the warehouse makes it look more like a basement, as if the building had been pulled out of the ground. But this departure comes as a surprise only to visitors and employees of the headquarters, considering that a perimeter wall hides it from public view.

But the entrance, positioned directly under the hanging garden, generates anticipation for the most interesting feature of the project: a diagonal atrium generated by a scenographic staircase that extends all the way to the roof of the building.

Besides connecting all the office levels and offering those who walk it a dynamic view of the surrounding urban landscape, this long sequence of red resin steps becomes the stage where Financial Guard employees can perform an unintended march every time they go to their offices—evoking the military character of the building through the ways they move through it. This kind of

theatrical treatment of architecture is one of DEMOGO’s calling cards.

It is uncommon to find such spatial quality in recent Italian civic architecture, much less that built for the police. This is partly due to a scarcity of public investment in this building sector and partly to the way in which gare are conceived. Given that they already contain indications about the way in which the program should be organized, they generally limit an architect’s freedom to explore creative spatial solutions.

DEMOGO’s proposal for the headquarters of Bologna’s Financial Guard addressed this issue head-on. It openly criticized the original indications of the gara, suggesting a different and unrequested design approach. First tested on this project, DEMOGO’s strategy has proven successful, winning the firm five subsequent gare for the design of police buildings since 2019, as well as several more public competitions. This is good news. Not only for DEMOGO, which finds itself in the rare situation of being a small and emerging architectural practice working exclusively for public administrations, but also for Italian architecture in general. The soon-to-come enfilade of civic projects by DEMOGO might in fact reopen a once fertile field for architectural production, demonstrating that good design should not be confined to private clients.

Davide Tommaso Ferrando is an architecture critic, curator, and researcher interested in the intersections of architecture, cities, and media. He is currently a research fellow at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano.

Left: A bold central stair ascends through the open atrium.

Below: The stepped volume increases gradually in height and connects to neighboring buildings via rust-red skybridges.

IWAN BA AN

17 Dispatch

January/February 2024

Sponge City Spaceships

Archi-Tectonics, !Melk, and Thornton Tomasetti deliver an intricate campus of stadiums, retail, and landscapes in Hangzhou, China.

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Set atop an elevated greenscape, two new stadiums, built for the Asian Games, are now open to the public. Parks and waterways cover what was once a divisive corridor of the city crisscrossed by agricultural canals.

With almost 12,000 athletes from 45 Asian countries and regions participating in its latest iteration in Hangzhou, China, the Asian Games is the world’s largest sporting event outside of the Olympics. Like the Olympics, the event’s host cities have long struggled to activate their venues and sites after the festivities. Nobody wanted a repeat of Beijing 2008, where Herzog & de Meuron’s celebrated “Bird Nest” now sits empty much of the year, or much less a rerun of Athens, where venues from the 2004 Games have largely been abandoned.

The most recent Asian Games, branded as Hangzhou 2022, took place last fall. (It was delayed a year due to COVID-19.) Hangzhou,

a city of over ten million people southwest of Shanghai, hosted 481 events in 56 competition venues, including an 80,000-seat, lotus-shaped main stadium by NBBJ. One of the most effective clusters was devised by a New York–based team of architects, Archi-Tectonics; landscape architects !Melk; and engineers Thornton Tomasetti. On the northern edge of the city, the 116-acre, seven-venue Gongshu Canal Sports Park fuses flexible venues and inhabitable landscapes to deliver a site that will thrive in the city well beyond the games. “We said from the beginning that this park should be about the future of the neighborhood,” Winka Dubbeldam, founder of

Archi-Tectonics and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told AN. The three firms developed their scheme for the project competition before working with local offices to complete most of the landscaping and engineering. The key venues—stadiums for field hockey and table tennis—sit at either end of the mile-long, rectangular site, which was previously crisscrossed by agricultural canals and bisected by a six-lane roadway. The canals were rerouted into a new river that spills into a new lake, freeing up land for buildings and green space, but the roadway remained intact.

To cross this divide, the team proposed the Village Valley Mall, a recessed canyon that

18 Dispatch

The Architect’s Newspaper

SFAP

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Top: The landscape master plan offers a variety of multitiered pedestrian pathways.

Above right: Sunken below park-level, shops sit beneath green roofs.

Above left: The stadiums become active venues for programming but also striking architectural backdrops for parkgoers.

meanders for a half mile between the stadiums and beneath the street. It is dotted with circular, green-roofed pavilions that incorporate shops, restaurants, and cafes. All of this is supplemented with plant-filled outdoor gathering areas. This has become the project’s social heart, and the site’s divisions have been further linked via snaking pedestrian bridges—two over the roadway and six over the river—that inject a sense of kinetic excitement.

The Valley Mall, noted !Melk founder and principal Jerry van Eyck, was inspired by Rotterdam’s Beurstraverse, a sunken, 1990s shopping complex that helped connect that city under a major road. “After growing up in Rotterdam and

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working there for many years, this came as a sort of natural move,” van Eyck said. Dirt from the excavation helped create hills and other landscape features across the site, keeping the overall project “zero earth,” meaning no soil left the site.

The site’s athletic venues anchor opposite ends of the promenade. The centerpiece is the 5,000-seat table tennis arena, which also functions as an entertainment venue. Its oblong form, Dubbeldam said, is the result of two intersecting ellipses, creating a “wobbly” design that carves out surprising interior spaces.

One diagrid facade of flat glass units looks out toward the park, while the opposite is

covered in overlapping brass shingles evocative of fish scales, suggesting a mysterious object like Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie Berlin, Dubbeldam’s favorite building. At the center of the arena, a long-span, steel-trussed “suspen-dome” structure creates an uninterrupted central space faced in bamboo that can be transformed from arena to amphitheater seating. The “suspen-dome” tapers beyond this core to cover the flanking support spaces, including lobbies, ramps, stairs, and a VIP viewing area. Beyond table tennis, the facility was used for breakdancing, marking the first time the sport has appeared at the Asian Games. It’s also designed to host cultural events and performances.

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January/February 2024

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COURTESY ARCHI-TECTONICS

Above left and right: Two facade conditions—one glazed, one faceted—offer textural variety and a visual connection to the park.

Far left: Internal circulation spaces are filled with natural light and create a buffer between facade and inner stadium.

Left: An exploded diagram of the stadium’s “suspen-dome” roof system.

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At the opposite end of the site, the ovalshaped, 5,000-seat field hockey stadium is set about 16 feet into the ground, so it appears to be emerging out of the landscape. A soaring mesh roof covers the seating area and shades the field beyond. This is supported by a single arched steel beam, and concrete abutments keep it in tension. The gesture gives “drama and emotion,” observed Scott Lomax, senior principal at Thornton Tomasetti. “It’s a symbol of the importance of this project.” The cast-inplace concrete seating area is accessed via a glass-wrapped lobby. Its openness, combined with that of the unwalled playing field, helps the venue connect more intimately to the site.

Sustainability is built into most of the plan. The wetland landscape, crisscrossed by boardwalks, porous pathways, playgrounds, and elevated areas, is filled with local vegetation—as part of a required “sponge city” approach, it is designed to absorb runoff and prevent flooding. The river and lake, which serve as sites for kayaking and other recreation, help collect water. Islands in the river are scenic elements that also clean and oxygenate the water by speeding up currents. From above, one can see that 85 percent of the site is covered in planted surfaces or water.

The buildings are green, too. The table tennis stadium achieved Green Building Evaluation Label 3 Star, the highest level of sustainability in

COURTESY ARCHI-TECTONICS

China, equivalent to LEED Platinum. Its diagrid structure and planar glass helped remove 1,130 tons of steel from the effort, according to the team. The park’s several green roofs total about 690,000 square feet and can release around 83,000 kilograms of oxygen and absorb nearly 115,000 kilograms of CO2 annually.

The neighborhood around the project, which was already humming, now sports many highrises, and real estate values have soared, Dubbeldam observed. Locals, who got to know the project before the games commenced, regularly use the park and the venues, she added.

The size of the complex and the designer’s prioritization of visual and physical connectivity

help it feel like part of the city. There is no concern that this will become a left-behind area.

“If you give people something precious, they will treat it as precious,” said Dubbeldam. “They treat it like a permanent inhabitant of their city.”

Sam Lubell is an editor at large at Metropolis and has written more than ten books about architecture for Phaidon, Rizzoli, Metropolis Books, and the Monacelli Press.

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21 Feature

January/February 2024

WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY THINK? For some, the social dimension of architectural work has taken on increased importance lately. For others, this has long been a central concern. Architects design for people, surely, but which ones? This feature section dives into the topic of organization, as Timothy Schuler covers the growing interest in employee-owned companies across the country, and Ray Hu checks on how a change in mission and location is revitalizing New York’s Van Alen Institute. But it also analyzes the larger, ubiquitous problem of housing: Allyn West visits two workforce housing projects in Nashville, Tennessee designed

by HASTINGS; Inga Saffron reviews Leong Leong’s Ray Philly, an arts-led mixed-use complex; and Ellen Peirson appreciates an almshouse by Witherford Watson Mann in London.

Plus, Emily Conklin, AN’s managing editor, covers David Baker Architects’s Bandsaw Building in Birmingham, Alabama, where the company shares space with a general contractor and three local businesses. It’s yet another example of how a small project done right can offer outsize benefits to its neighbors.

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The Architect’s Newspaper

NAHO KUBOTA

SPLIT AND SET Leong Leong delivers an elevated, arts-oriented apartment building for Ray Philly.

Ray Philly is a newcomer in the South Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, a formerly blue-collar industrial area with many historic factories, warehouses, and other masonry buildings.

● It wasn’t long after Dasha Zhukova opened Moscow’s celebrated Garage Center for Contemporary Art in 2008 that she began to chafe at the limitations of presenting culture within a high-art temple. Looking to move beyond museum walls, Zhukova started organizing other kinds of art experiences. She launched a film festival, founded an art magazine, and joined the board of The Shed in New York. But her ultimate goal, she told Art News in 2021, was to embed art in “the day-to-day environment.”

That quest eventually led to real estate development. At the height of the pandemic in 2021, Zhukova formed the housing company Ray, with the aim of building apartments that would make art experiences a natural part of daily life.

There would be quality art in her apartment buildings’ public spaces, art exhibits and openings, master classes for residents, studios where residents could indulge their creative impulses, and maybe even a few actual artists. But mainly the complex would house a community of sensitive souls united by their affinity for art.

The prototype for Zhukova’s concept opened this spring in a former industrial corridor in Philadelphia’s fast-changing South Kensington neighborhood and will be followed in 2025 by Ray Harlem, at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street. “Ray is more than a building,” Zhukova’s promotional materials proclaim. “It’s a place.” It’s also an exercise in canny branding, albeit a very earnest one.

That branding is evident even before you walk in the door of Philadelphia’s new Leong Leong–designed apartment building. A row of six roll-up, glass-fronted garage doors line the ground floor on North American Street. They’re meant as studio space for artists and arts-adjacent makers. Ray commissioned Philadelphia artist Michelle Lopez to produce

an “intervention” at the top of the building’s brick parapet: a text fragment that reads When Under One Sky. The piece could almost be a ghost sign, a survivor from South Kensington’s hardworking past.

It’s become practically de rigueur for high-end residential developments to include an “art program” in their public spaces. What elevates Ray Philly above the luxury crowd is Zhukova’s knowledge of contemporary art. The sunny lobby is dominated by a site-specific sculpture by Rashid Johnson, whose sought-after work deals head-on with the contradictions of the Black experience—he once painted the words “I Talk White” on a mirror. It’s true that his Ray Philly piece isn’t quite so provocative: The gridded structure could easily be mistaken for a shelving unit if it weren’t for several intriguing sculptures perched among the potted plants. But nor is it the usual, clichéd black-and-white photo of an urban scene. The large wall hanging over the central staircase, by Philadelphia artist Marian Bailey, with production facilitated

by Commonwealth Gallery, picks up on the nature theme and depicts a pretty Black woman peering through tropical foliage.

These complementary elements suggest there is a larger aesthetic at work. Rather than outfit the lobby with the obligatory living room trio—two armchairs and a sofa— Ray’s designers installed a forest-green conversation pit that encourages residents to sit close and interact and, ideally, form friendships. The pine-colored coffee tables and benches are generously strewn with art books printed on heavy-stock paper, including a door-stopper of a monograph devoted to Johnson’s work. While Ray Philly offers the usual selection of apartment amenities—coworking, event kitchen, rooftop deck—there’s also a basement workshop that residents can reserve for messy art projects. As architect

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Dominic Leong explained, “We got involved in Ray around a conversation: What is community today? What are the needs of living?”

Initially, it looked as if Ray Harlem would be Zhukova’s real estate debut. She had partnered with the National Black Theater, which owned the Fifth Avenue site, to build two new theater spaces in the base of a new 21-story tower designed

by Frida Escobedo with Handel Architects. But because of permitting complications in New York, the 110-unit Ray Philly opened first.

Building Ray Philly turned out to be more straightforward because Zhukova purchased the site from a developer who had already obtained all the necessary city approvals. But the prepackaged deal came with a big downside: The architects, brothers Dominic and Chris Leong, were locked in on the massing, a five-over-one bar building that stretches 310 feet from end to end. The Leong brothers told AN they were determined to elevate the building type, which has become the bane of cities, into real architecture.

They’ve done just that. Their treatment of the facade and ground floor is easily the most artful thing about Ray Philly and especially welcome given what else is being built nearby. Only a decade ago, North American Street was lined with muscular, brick factories and sturdy working-class row houses. But the surrounding area, often called Fishtown, has

January/February 2024

been rendered unrecognizable by new residential construction. Many of those newcomers are five-over-one buildings faced in metal panels. Their flat, lifeless surfaces are typically arranged in alternating color patterns, ostensibly to “break up the massing,” which ends up calling more attention to their clumsiness.

Rather than succumb to that approach, Leong Leong clad its building in Philly’s vernacular red brick. That choice alone would have made Ray’s facade above average, but the office used the brick in a novel way to create a highly textured surface that resembles tile. Leong Leong literally turned the bricks inside out: Each one is split lengthwise, then set with its broken, three-pronged core facing the street. Once the designers opted for brick, they decided to lean in, using matching red grout and red concrete to deepen the effect.

Such a long, red building might have overwhelmed some other locations, but one of the few industrial survivors on North American Street is the 340-foot-long, all-brick Crane Building, designed by Philadelphia architect-engineer Walter Ballinger in 1905. The old factory, which sat derelict for years, was rescued in 2006 by developer David Gleeson, who transformed it into a hive of studios for artists and architects.

Since then, the stretch between Master and Oxford streets has emerged as an accidental culture hub that includes Nextfab,

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a coworking space for makers, and the Clay Studio, a ceramics workspace and museum designed by the award-winning Philadelphia firm Digsau. Ray Philly fits right in.

The street-facing artists’ studios are also a welcome innovation. As online shopping has devastated brick-and-mortar retail in cities, it’s become increasingly difficult for residential developers to find tenants for traditional shops. The studios offer an alternative way to activate the street. While not all the studio tenants will actually be wielding paintbrushes or chisels, most have some connection to the arts. One space will be occupied by a gallery, another by a commercial photographer-slash–branding consultant. Ray has also hired a full-time programming coordinator to work with the studio tenants and help them organize public art events.

Still, there is something ironic about building a high-end apartment building for art lovers in a neighborhood that, only a few short years ago, served as a haven for artists seeking cheap studio space. It’s unlikely that many Philadelphia artists can afford a $1,800 one-bedroom apartment at Ray Philly. It seems they’ll have to make do with a building that encourages its residents to appreciate and, hopefully, buy their work. ◼ Inga Saffron is the Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

NAHO KUBOTA

Clockwise from above left: Interiors offer plenty of communal spaces for both socialization and creativity, furnished with plants and a continuous rust-red color palette; areas like a rooftop patio offer up-close interaction with the facade's unique split-brick texture; communal kitchens and other maker spaces are available for communal use.

Roof Deck Plan

Typical Floor Plan

Ground Floor Plan

COURTESY LEONG LEONG

NAHO KUBOTA

24 Feature

NEW BOROUGH, NEW VAN ALEN The Van Alen Institute’s move to Brooklyn is just one part of the organization’s “mission shift” toward justice.

● It had been a busy week for Andrew Brown and Shiloah Coley.

By Saturday afternoon, the Van Alen Institute programs and communications staffers were happy to host a respectful crowd for the launch of the GLOwanus art project. The atmosphere was far more subdued than it had been during the previous event at the Van Alen that week, when a contingent of 30 to 40 aggrieved residents threatened to commandeer an unusually raucous Brooklyn Community Board 6 meeting with their vocal—and frankly prejudiced—opposition to a proposed asylee shelter.

Rabble-rousers notwithstanding, “hosting those [community board] meetings is a cornerstone of how we’re thinking about ourselves as an institution,” executive director Deborah Marton told me over coffee a few days later. It’s just one aspect of the organization’s wholesale “mission shift,” which she has spearheaded since her appointment in 2019.

The ideological pivot and relocation to Brooklyn followed the institute’s sale of its longtime home at 30 West 22nd Street, where Van Alen had occupied a portion of the office space and the streetlevel storefront but leased out the rest. “The board decided that we should really focus on the mission, as opposed to focusing on being

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a landlord,” Marton said. The $30 million sale handily funded the ground lease of a former garage at 303 Bond Street in Gowanus, Brooklyn, but more importantly, it gave the organization ample runway for a strategic reorientation on the cusp of the institution’s 130th anniversary.

With a new home in rapidly changing Gowanus, where a controversial upzoning has followed a major Superfund cleanup effort, Marton admits she was mindful of the optics of the move: “We had no agenda other than being open and learning from the community,” she said. “And what we found was that all anyone needed was just a place to convene and some resources to support what they wanted to do—nobody needed us to tell them what to do.”

Mission Shift While the Van Alen spent many of those first 130 years as a member’s-only club focused on professional architects, what has changed since Marton took the reins in 2020 is a renewed focus on community partnerships, casting architects in a supporting role. Marton said that “instead of teaching folks about Beaux Arts architecture or what have you, we say, ‘Let’s bring that community into the service of design justice—and just justice proper.’”

Prior to the mission shift, projects usually came over the transom from city and municipal agencies that turned to Van Alen for “community engagement”—which, according to director of programs Andrew Brown, usually meant they were “just getting the community to rubber-stamp an idea.” An instance where this approach backfired was in 2017, when the Van Alen Institute organized the Gateways of Chinatown design competition to create a public landmark on an odd, triangular parcel on Canal Street for the Department of Transportation. “Despite efforts to explicitly avoid neighborhood blowback, I think the way the competition was structured—bringing in artists that didn’t come from the community and just dropping those ideas on the neighborhood—triggered a lot of frustration and anger,” said Brown. “It’s one thing to feel like what you’re doing is wrong, but how do you figure out what the next step is?”

The financial stability of the Chelsea sale afforded a major rethinking of not only the mission but how to reimagine an organization dating back to 1894. “How do we partner with communities in a more organic way, to figure out their vision for their neighborhood?” Brown asked. “What’s their definition of success? And then how do we structure a program to make that vision come true?”

Neighborhoods Now One answer comes in the form of the initiative Neighborhoods Now, a collaboration with the Urban Design Forum.

Launched in May 2020 as a response to the pandemic, the program connected community-based organizations (CBOs) in hard-hit neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Kingsbridge, and Jackson Heights with designers from the likes of Jaklitsch/Gardner, COOKFOX, and SO – IL, who provided pro bono design services for outdoor dining structures, pop-up markets, and other initiatives. A key takeaway?

Documentation of projects is paramount: “From every partner, we consistently heard that the most valuable outcome of anything we did was the assets of the video, storytelling, and data collection,” Marton said. “They use that for their own fundraising efforts.”

Neighborhoods Now also turned out to be an opportunity for the Van Alen to redeem itself after the Gateways of Chinatown debacle. “At the time, I was just a nerdy urbanist neighbor who felt like that design process was not in tune with what the community needed,” said Yin Kong, who is now the executive director of Think!Chinatown, one of the partner organizations for Neighborhoods Now. Years later, she was understandably “wary” about working with Van Alen when they reconnected through the Chinatown Night Market project. Yet, like Brown, she credited Marton for bringing “a completely different approach and a better understanding of how to work within communities.”

K YLE LEE

An installation supported by Van Alen in New York City’s Chinatown drew crowds for the Chinatown Night Market in 2022.

From 60 to 100 Of course, the mission shift is intended to be an iterative learning process for everyone involved. Programs associate Shiloah Coley understood why one CBO’s initial response to her outreach was “We don’t work with architects,” because architects have historically been like a tool for gentrification.

Coley eventually formed a partnership with the CBO, though, furthering an ongoing project that was well-conceived but needed funding. Brown told me that “the impact is meant to be capital: [Van Alen] doesn’t take an organization from 0 to 60 but from 60 to 100.” Kong concurred: “Van Alen hit on something really valuable with Neighborhoods Now: letting the community organizations take the lead in the design programs or projects while empowering them with technical assistance from designers and, of course, bringing some funding to make it happen. It’s a really great model for groups that know what they want.”

Even as its mission comes into focus, the Van Alen Institute means many things to many people. For some, it’s a place; for others, it’s a grand experiment in building trust; for others still, it’s a new model of community-based design education or technical assistance. For Gowanus residents, it’s the host of a vibrant annual block party, or perhaps it’s just another nerdy urbanist neighbor. For all of the above, though, it’s a multimodal network—and still very much a work in progress. ◼ Ray Hu is a Brooklyn-based design writer and researcher.

Left: The Van Alen Institute’s new space in Gowanus, Brooklyn revamps a former garage and retains its industrial feel.

Below: Dancers perform at a block party the Institute hosted late last year.

COURTESY VAN ALEN INSTITUTE

CAMERON BL AYLOCK

25 Feature

January/February 2024

● Carleigh Pope earned her architecture degree just two years ago, but already she’s an owner of her firm. In October 2023, BNIM, an early pioneer in sustainable design with offices in Kansas City, Des Moines, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., joined the ranks of architecture offices that are 100 percent employee-owned—a growing list that includes Zaha Hadid Architects, SHoP Architects, and Gensler.

Pope, who has also been an active member of Kansas City’s NOMA chapter, said the announcement came as a pleasant surprise that underscored BNIM’s values of collaboration and transparency and also contrasted with the experiences of some of her peers. “When we made our announcement and I reposted [it] on social media, someone who works in a different firm responded, ‘Oh, our firm just got sold to private equity,’” Pope told AN. Growth in employee ownership within the architecture industry is a response to multiple intersecting trends, from demographic shifts to increasing demands for equity and transparency within design offices. But as Pope points out, the shift is also a response to overtures from outside investors. For example, in 2021, a Canadian investment company purchased a majority stake in London-based Foster+Partners.

In the U.S., private equity companies like Bernhard Capital Partners have begun purchasing stakes in large and midsize AEC firms for use as vehicles for further acquisition.

At BNIM, as with many large architecture practices, the transition to employee ownership is partly a succession strategy. Steve McDowell, a principal at BNIM and the last of the four eponymous partners, said that although none of the principals are immediately transitioning into retirement, an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) constituted a way to perpetuate the work and culture of the firm without the need for an outside investor.

“We had competitors that wanted to purchase us. We had private equity firms that were interested in buying firms like ours and marrying them with other firms,” McDowell recalled. “The most interesting was the firm that bought [Norman] Foster’s office, but I didn't see how the culture and the spirit of BNIM would survive all of that.”

COURTESY AYERS SAINT GROSS

Ayers Saint Gross is a women-led firm that prioritizes an interdisciplinary practice in addition to being an ESOP since 2015.

In an ESOP, employees receive shares in the company as part of their compensation—usually ranging from 6 percent to 10 percent of their salary—which must be bought back at fair market value when the employee leaves. Architects who have experience with ESOPs note a number of advantages to the legal structure. Perhaps most importantly, it can ease the financial strain of transferring ownership when an owner decides to retire or leave.

Luanne Greene, the president of Baltimore-based Ayers Saint Gross, said the firm went through this process a little more than ten years ago. “We bought one of the previous significant shareholders out. It was hard, it was expensive, and it was emotional,” she remembered. “We realized, ‘Shit, we gotta do this over and over again.’”

Shortly after, the firm’s leadership voted to transition to an ESOP, which Greene said has helped the firm weather periods of economic uncertainty because ESOPs are generally exempt from any income tax liability. “The idea is you take that money and you push it back into the firm. And that really does work for us. If we have a down year, we have more of a resource to pull from. It just creates a steadiness that you didn’t have before.”

ESOPs are also a way to allow workers to share in a company’s profits. Senator Bernie Sanders is among those who have highlighted the model’s potential role in distributing wealth. Sanders recently championed the Worker Ownership, Readiness, and Knowledge Act, which passed as part of an omnibus bill in December 2022. The law directs the Department of Labor to create an employee ownership initiative that will fund employee ownership outreach programs at the state level. “Workers deserve an ownership stake in the companies they work for, a say in the decisions that impact their lives, and a fair share of the profits that their work makes possible,” Sanders said upon introducing the bill.

COURTESY SWA

SWA is a leading landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm. Over 50 years ago, it became one of the first 100 percent employee-owned design firms in the U.S.

Today, more than ten million workers in the U.S.—about 1 in 13—actively participate in an ESOP program. Several of the country’s largest ESOPs are architecture firms: Gensler, HDR, and HNTB all make the top 25. SWA, the global landscape architecture firm, is one of the oldest, operating under the ESOP model since 1973.

At a time when architectural labor conditions have moved closer to the center of the national conversation within the profession, firms are betting that employee ownership programs, which ostensibly align worker interests with the interests of the firm, will help with recruitment and retention. Gerdo Aquino, SWA’s co-CEO, said the firm’s employee ownership program is a differentiator for new hires, particularly among the latest crop of designers. “This younger generation, they have a different set of priorities, and they have questions about finances that are different from, say, people 10, 15 years ago,” Aquino explained. “[The ESOP] does seem to weigh in when it comes to decision time.”

Although the phrase “employee-owned” conjures visions of a democratic collective, firms with ESOPs still generally maintain leadership hierarchies and are typically managed by a small number of individuals who sit on a board or executive committee. Employee ownership, in other words, doesn’t automatically create channels for bringing attention to concerns about workload, compensation, or mental health. As Greene put it, an ESOP is “basically a nondiversified, highly regulated retirement plan.”

In the case of SHoP Architects, an ESOP may have been used to erode support for a worker’s union. As Isabel Ling reported for Curbed in 2022, a consultant hired by SHoP to advise on the firm’s ESOP told union leaders that individuals who were part of the collective bargaining unit would not be able to take part in the stock program. The union drive at SHoP ultimately failed. Jess Myers, a member of the Architecture Lobby, told Ling: “I have a feeling we are going to be seeing a lot more firms attempt to use this ESOP strategy to avoid unionization. What workers need to understand is that having equity is not the same as having managerial power.”

For this reason, some architects, most notably Peggy Deamer, professor emeritus at Yale University and cofounder of The Architecture Lobby, have been vocal about the need to clarify the difference between ESOPs and other, more democratic ownership models, such as cooperatives. “A distinction has to be made between an ESOP-structured firm and a firm whose organizational structure affords actual worker

ownership,” Deamer told Archinect last year. “In my view, that is a worker-owned cooperative. One worker, one share, one vote.”

Today, worker-owned cooperatives are vanishingly rare in the design disciplines. In Practice Practice, author Ashton Hamm found that there are only 12 architecture firms that “identify as cooperatives” in the United States.

There are, however, prominent examples in history: The Architects Collaborative was founded by eight equal partners in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1945 and embodied a belief in the value of collectivism. Four of the founding partners—a pair of married couples with children—went so far as to live together for a time in order to share the duties of child care and housework. For her book, Hamm interviewed South Mountain Company, the longest-standing architectural cooperative in the country, which was founded in 1975.

More recently, other firms have begun to explore new alternatives. The Barcelona-based architectural cooperative Lacol began in 2009, and Hamm founded the Oakland, California–based cooperative practice uxo architects in 2016.

And just last year, the landscape architecture and ecological design firm Biohabitats transferred 100 percent of the firm’s ownership to a perpetual purpose trust, a model that both prevents the company from being sold and funnels all company profits toward fulfilling the company’s stated purpose.

Uniquely, one seat on the board that governs Biohabitats’s trust is reserved for an individual whose job is to represent the priorities of “nature.”

Whatever form it takes, it is likely that architecture as a profession will continue to explore alternative models, particularly as owners of large, legacy firms approach retirement. BNIM’s McDowell said he is hopeful that the trend toward employee ownership makes a material difference in young people’s lives and helps kill off the culture of “superhero architects and all that crap.” In the younger generations of architects, he said, he has seen that “there’s a thoughtfulness about the world at large and about the responsibilities that we all have to one another. My hope for this is that it contributes to the financial health and well-being of all the employee owners throughout their career, not just at the end of their career.” ◼ Timothy A. Schuler is a magazine writer whose work focuses on the intersection of the built and natural environments.

BNIM employees are some of the newest architectural workers enjoying a shared ownership model after the transition was announced in October 2023.

As labor concerns play a more central role in architectural discourse, employee-owned design firms offer a half-century of precedent.

ESOP FABLES

COURTESY BNIM

26 Feature

● The Bandsaw Building is a single-story brick structure on a small lot in Birmingham, Alabama. An on-ramp leading to an elevated highway runs behind the property, part of a network of freeways that extend over the city’s postindustrial extents like a spiderweb. Here, at the edge of downtown, David Baker Architects (DBA) has worked adaptive reuse magic: There is no parking save for a handful of bike racks; the designers actually decreased the conditioned square footage of the existing space; the walls are largely unfinished, showing their layers of paint; and a mishmash of salvaged materials is deployed both structurally and, even, decoratively.

These design decisions—made jointly by Amanda Loper, principal at DBA and a proud Alabamian, and her development partner, Kyle Tyree of Locke General Contractors— have resulted in a small but mighty act of urbanism.

“Developing in Birmingham feels like you can play at the poker table,” Loper told AN. This small-scale work was a welcome change from her large projects in San Francisco, where she was previously based. “Developing projects there makes you feel like you’re a rookie in Macau,” she laughed.

But still, she could not have done it alone: The entire project relies on collectivity and collaboration, even more so than the average design project with its charettes and shared labor. Loper said that “partnering with Kyle was the first and most important step of the entire process, as we not only both contributed funding and design knowhow, but we were deeply invested in the space, as it was to become our home base, our offices.”

The plan was for DBA’s office to take the rear of the building, Locke General Contractors to maintain a coworking space in the middle, and retail and community spaces to open along the street. To do this, the Bandsaw needed a huge overhaul, structurally and aesthetically. The most rewarding (and difficult) part was designing for varying degrees of programmatic change, privacy, and publicity— all for (and with) first-time small-business owners.

“Having offices for an architect and a contractor in the building made acquiring the loan easier,” said Loper, “but the wild card was the small-scale retail. However, in Birmingham, small projects like these are able to gain traction and really have legs.”

The Bandsaw showcases the enormous potential for urban intervention and experimentation in regional cities on parcels often overlooked by developers that focus on riskaverse valuations. While traditionally a “desirable” tenant requires a track record like that of a Chase Bank or Starbucks, the two partners hoped for tenants in search of a collective space with shared responsibility, resources, and values.

The demand they experienced surprised them. “There was so much interest from small, local groups wanting to try brick and mortar,” Loper recalled. “And almost everyone recognized the value of a collective space for this kind of emergent energy.”

The search resulted in three tenants: June Coffee, Zephyr Barber, and Last Call Baking. All have standard leases but share resources like common outdoor spaces and a central courtyard. The location—one block from 2nd Avenue, a main pedestrian thoroughfare—means that the activity of the coffee shop, the barber, and the retailers merges with the bustle of the 2nd Avenue corridor.

The Architect’s Newspaper

With emotion in her voice, Loper described how the line for Last Call Baking goes down the block every morning: “The pastry chef asked for design assistance for a new case that can hold the daily demand.” And the bike racks really do function in place of previous parking minimums. “They’re always full, and people spill out beyond the cafe space into what we originally conceived of as our studio’s private courtyard,” she added. “I love it.”

While postindustrial cities across the country boast many successful case studies of industrial spaces flipping to community and cultural uses, Loper makes it clear that this project even surpassed her expectations. “It feels like a partnership between me, Kyle, and the tenants. It happened naturally that we offered pro bono design services in the form of brainstorming layouts for the space and choosing materials,” she said. Later, Loper and Tyree helped plan and design new additions to help each business grow and accommodate the demand after opening.

“It’s a small-scale project, but we didn’t go a hair over budget,” Loper stated. She credits that to her shared collaboration not only with Tyree but with construction and fabrication professionals she made lasting networks with over the course of the project. A local brickmaker told the duo about an exciting new product he had in supply down the road, and a steel manufacturer recommended economical sizes and quantities. A concrete subcontractor looked at the budget, then looked at the square footage, and said, “You only have enough cash for 30 percent of this space.”

They moved forward by finishing only the 30 percent they could afford.

These sorts of stories, constraints, and ideals don’t detract from the design; they fuel its uniqueness. The layered look of the space is shared across the project and adds a sensibility, rooted in authenticity, time, and material, that couldn’t have been achieved any other way. Emily Conklin ◼

BRUCE DAMONTE

BRUCE DAMONTE

BRUCE DAMONTE

Throughout the Bandsaw Building, David Baker Architects’s attention to creative and expressive adaptive reuse can be seen and felt. A layered look stays true to the building’s original industrial use as a wood-processing facility, and shows the passing of time in juxtaposition to new, modern fittings and furnishings. Contemporary tenants include a barber, a bakery, and a cafe in addition to David Baker Architects and Locke General Contractors.

David Baker Architects realizes a shared office in Birmingham that prioritizes togetherness.

SMALL BUT MIGHTY

BRUCE DAMONTE

27 Feature

WHO DOES WORKFORCE HOUSING WORK FOR?

January/February 2024

HASTINGS's Martin Flats (left) and Rutledge Flats (below) in Nashville share a similar exterior expression through corrugated metal, color-blocked accents, and syncopated glazing.

NICK MCGINN

Both workforce housing projects prioritize small units and in turn offer generous communal spaces and included utilities like wi-fi.

Two apartment buildings by HASTINGS in Nashville offer one answer to the country’s affordability crisis. ● When she’s home, a pastry chef living in workforce housing in Nashville has been giving cooking lessons in the shared kitchen on her floor, inviting her neighbors to join as she makes macarons.

In the text that follows I will suggest there are several ways to feel about this.

Such communal activity—spontaneous, not programmed—might very well be an ideal outcome for developers Eagle Rock Ventures and The Mathews Company and Nashville-based architecture and planning firm HASTINGS, who have now realized two wood-frame, workforce housing complexes close to downtown. Both the eight-story, 174-unit Rutledge Flats in so-called So(uth)Bro(adway) and the threestory, 150-unit Martin Flats, on the other side of the “tourniquet” of Interstate 40 in Wedgewood-Houston, attempt to meet a need for affordable housing while still making a profit in a city with a per capita income of $45,000 and an average monthly rent of almost $1,400.

Natalie Gualy, Eagle Rock’s director of development, told me the company completed eight similar workforce complexes in Seattle—where public transit is frequent and off-street parking not required—before expanding in 2022 to Nashville and Asheville, North Carolina. The latter two are both places with good bones that have been splintered by segregation and urban renewal. “We look for cities with great neighborhoods and diverse economic drivers,” said Gualy, who earned master’s degrees in both architecture and real estate. “When you have those [drivers], you will have people willing to compromise a larger space for a more affordable unit.”

The unit is where the business model and the architecture begin. Eagle Rock has found a “sweet spot of square footage,” said HASTINGS principal David Powell, that pencils out.

There are no utilities to pay. The wi-fi flows as freely as the tap water. These units are around 190 square feet, complete with a bed, kitchenette, toilet, shower, and window. Eight “live-work” units in each building include built-in desks.

Hemmed in by railroad tracks and surrounded by breweries, art galleries, and new market-rate apartment buildings, Martin Flats folds around a surprisingly serene interior courtyard—a three-story void landscaped in river birches and swishy grasses that serves as a patio for 150 people and

doubles as a rain garden. Both buildings avoided wasting space for off-street parking: Martin, in a former industrial neighborhood where a major hosiery once employed a quarter of Nashville’s population, provides only a third of what’s required and Rutledge none, making it the first multifamily building downtown to take advantage of the no-more-minimum-requirements ordinance city council passed in 2022.

What might feel constrained to you could be convenient, even cozy, for some. But the units feel small. The shared, social-whether-you-like-it-or-not spaces embedded in both complexes are more generous spatially and materially. The compromise Gualy identified lies in the ways the architecture by necessity compels people to spend less time inside their units and more out of them: at work, at the park, and at the bar with colleagues or neighbors. Designed as they are to withstand incessant, inevitable turnover, the units imply impermanence, much like a dorm room. The pastry chef gives lessons—in part, at least—because she doesn’t have her own kitchen right now.

Developments like Martin and Rutledge “solve a need because they’re going to be cheaper than many other options for people,” Karen Kubey, a writer, editor, and professor at the University of Toronto, told me. “And it’s easier to get a lease.” Nashville is no more exempt from this need than any other U.S. city. From 2010 to 2020, it gained nearly 90,000 people. While productivity increased nationally that decade, wages stagnated and overall rents rose 36 percent.

In Nashville, they rose 50 percent. The National Low Income Housing Coalition concluded there’s nowhere anymore in the U.S. you can afford a market-rate two-bedroom working 40 hours a week at the federal minimum wage. You’d need to clock at least 104 hours, leaving just 64 to sleep and polish your bootstraps.

In all of this, “workforce” housing ought to be consistently in scare quotes, as it describes homes for people whose jobs pay them 80 to 120 percent of the average monthly income. Historically, this was targeted to people with jobs in the public sector. But in this economy? Today it’s people with occupations as diverse as pastry chefs, nurses, and bus drivers. When I worked at the corporate-owned newspaper in Houston, where there have been more than 220,000 evictions since 2020, my salary meant I was also in the “workforce.” It

NICK MCGINN

is bad everywhere, though it is much worse elsewhere. The multiplicative housing and labor crises have created a situation where, in the Bay Area, school districts tried building housing for teachers, some of who pay more than 50 percent of their salaries on housing and still face commutes longer than an hour. In New York City, where the average rent in Manhattan surpassed $5,500 last summer, $50 million is being spent to renovate once-condemned “single-room occupancy” hotels just to create 500 new units. In Nashville, an affordable housing task force estimated the city would be 52,000 units short by 2030.

“Our country has enough resources to house everyone decently, but we see over and over that simply making an architectural move and making smaller units does not mean affordability, because housing in the U.S. is market driven,” said Kubey. “It only becomes affordable through regulation.”

She means through policy changes, like establishing the right to housing. Grassroots coalitions like People’s Action are trying to achieve this through the Homes Guarantee campaign. Likewise, a 2022 report from the Community Service Society lays out 20 smaller strategies New York City could pursue to support more social housing, including passing local taxes, increasing community ownership, strengthening code enforcement and securing tenants’ rights to representation, organizing, even supporting lease renewals.

Because as Kubey said, “You don’t live in policy. You live in architecture.”

Atop HASTINGS’s Rutledge Flats, a 1,754-square-foot amenity roof deck opens out to a crowd of construction cranes and newly completed high-rises wallpapering the Nashville skyline. That’s where Powell kept directing my attention: elsewhere. That’s what this type of housing provides: valuable, desirable proximity in an extremely expensive world for the barista working on her first album or the empty nester who just off-loaded her burdens at an estate sale. The divorced dad. The college graduate. It’s not ideal. But the future, Powell seemed to imply, doesn’t have to end here. ◼

Allyn West is a writer and editor in Houston and rural Kentucky.

They are on X and Instagram @allynwest.

28 Feature

● It’s a bright and clear morning. The sun is beating down on the Appleby Blue almshouses in Bermondsey. Two older men, tops off—as is customary when the sun unseasonably appears in London—are soaking it up on the roof gardens of the new building’s southern edge. The almshouse was recently completed by Witherford Watson Mann for the 500-year-old charity United St Saviour’s. “You can’t really be disappointed living here,” one said, having just been rehoused from a site down the road that awaits redevelopment. The rooftop gardens are already lush and blooming, brimming with produce grown for the community kitchen.

Downstairs, the kitchen spills out into a double-height dining space lined with solid oak and grids of glazing. Inset sliding doors sweep out onto a garden courtyard, which is filled with sunlight, thanks to the building’s stepped profile to the south. The calming acoustics of a linear water feature trickle through mature ginkgo trees. This is social housing, but you would not know it at first glance.

The London Borough of Southwark is a microcosm of the U.K.’s housing crisis. Southwark is the U.K.’s largest local authority landlord, managing 55,000 homes, which house 40 percent of the borough’s residents. While its northern edge abuts the River Thames and touristic icons like Tower Bridge, Tate Modern, and Shakespeare’s Globe, Southwark is a battleground for housing. There are more than 20,000 people on its council house waiting list, with many others living in overcrowded temporary accommodation—and the situation only becomes more dysfunctional in the private sector.

It’s a bleak picture, but one of the things that exacerbates the complex set of housing problems is a lack of secure and affordable housing for older people, many of whom received decent family council houses in the postwar building boom.

These lucky few are therefore unlikely to move out and free up the desperately needed larger homes in the area.

“What we didn’t want was to create another retreat from society in a typical sheltered housing block,” explained Martyn Craddock, chief executive of United St Saviour’s.

The charity operates the almshouses and has tall ambitions in the face of decades of neglect and harmful policies in the social housing sector. “We think this is an example of what social housing in the inner cities should be…and the social benefits are huge.”

Almshouses date back to a much more compassionate time of housing provision in London and have existed since the tenth century as a way to provide affordable accommodation to vulnerable groups. They are widely regarded as the oldest form of social housing in the U.K. and were most often started by religious orders or individual wealthy benefactors. However, the surviving picturesque rows of cottages of the oldest almshouses obscure the basic and often impoverished accommodation they once provided. Social norms and moral enforcements meant that residents were made to follow strict rules and worship, and these behaviors are reflected in, as well as dictated by, the architecture of the almshouses themselves. The designs are inward-looking, often arranged around central courtyards, with the houses turning their backs to the street. There was shame associated with those being sent to live there: An almshouse address indicated that you could not be provided for by your family. Also, more recent studies have suggested that almshouses could be responsible for the widespread ageism in the U.K. since the 18th century, as they removed, and therefore isolated, older people from both the family home and greater society.

Today, though, the need for affordable housing is taking on a new urgency, and Appleby Blue attempts to subvert this troubled history. The brick building with two-story oak bay windows framing the entrance is home to 57 units with a nonstandard breakdown of type: 53 are one-bedrooms, two are two-bedrooms, and two are studios that specifically host yearlong residencies for academics conducting on-site research into the effects of food growing, cooking, and eating together on the residents’ well-being.

The flats are designed to the London mayor’s minimum space standards and mostly do not exceed them. But as Stephen Witherford, director at Witherford Watson Mann, explained: “This isn’t really about provision; it’s always been about trying to create a really good quality of life.” The space standards dictate that every new unit should have some private amenity space, which is most often provided in the form of a balcony. In discussion with residents at another of the providers’ almshouse sites, Witherford explained that they remarked: “What’s the point of sitting on our own on a balcony? We sit [by ourselves] all the time.”

It was important to United St Saviour’s to combat loneliness through the design and provide spaces for informal socializing. These conversations prompted ideas to prioritize collective amenity spaces over private ones. Witherford Watson Mann negotiated with Southwark Council that in place of private balconies, wide walkways would line the inner courtyard, catching the sun and creating a quiet place to sit with other residents. Forming winter gardens, the

APPLEBY BLUE

The Architect’s Newspaper

An almshouse by Witherford Watson Mann in London offers stylish senior living.

A centuries-old charity is updating the traditional English almshouse—a supportive housing typology with deep roots in U.K. history and culture—for 21st-century housing solutions.

PHILIP VILE

entrance routes to all flats double as a social space, with large sliding windows, planters, and benches. “The real effort and energy in the building is in all of the in-between spaces. This is about a joyful life,” Witherford said.

All prospective tenants were interviewed before moving in to ensure they would like the social nature of the development and be involved in the community. The development is now full, with more than half of the new residents being nominated by the local council from its waiting list. But the other half was selected by United St Saviour’s across a broad spectrum of age, need, and ethnicity to, as Craddock describes, “fabricate what we think is a natural community of older people in this part of London.” Under the almshouse legal structure, residents are appointees instead of tenants, and rather than rent, they pay a maintenance fee.

At Appleby Blue, the maintenance fee is £200 a week (in Southwark you can expect to pay double this for a one-bedroom apartment), and this cost is fully offset for many by the council’s housing benefit, which can be up to £300 a week.

In the community kitchen, I sat down for lunch with one resident named Gloria. “I’m in love with it,” she told me. In

stark contrast to her previous council flat, plagued with the trials of maintenance and basic upkeep, she insisted, “I’m not going nowhere now.” I can understand why. The development does feel luxurious—it’s easy to consider this a luxury development when the norm of social housing provision in the U.K. has become the absolute bare minimum. For this type of housing to be dignified and joyful was once beyond our collective imagination. In reality, the flats are not bewilderingly high-spec, and they needn’t be, because the joy is provided for in the communal space. The oak-framed frontage to the main road has a second-floor landing that has been dubbed “the royal box,” where residents spill down in the evenings with food and wine to watch London play out on Southwark Park Road. On a recent Saturday night, one resident described an evening in the royal box waving at some local teenagers over the road, drinking their own wine, both groups peering into each other’s lives. He’s reminded: “Us and the teens, we’re not so different.” ◼ Ellen Peirson is an architectural designer, writer, and editor based in London.

29 Feature

January/February 2024

PHILIP VILE

PHILIP VILE

PHILIP VILE

PHILIP VILE

Top: A generous interior courtyard brings light and greenery into all spaces.

Above: Residents asked for more common spaces to share and socialize.

Ground Floor Plan

Second Floor Plan

Top: Gardens all around the complex supply fresh food for the kitchens.

Above: Circulatory paths are glazed and offer seating and places to pause or chat.

Third Floor Plan

COURTESY WITHERFORD WATSON MANN

DISCOVER DESIGN

AT THE A&D BUILDING

MandiCasa Canopy At Mill District

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—Alberto Snaidero, CEO, MandiCasa

MandiCasa brings you over 27 years of experience serving top luxury multifamily developments all over North America. MandiCasa’s dedicated multi-housing team work closely with developers, architects, and designers to meet the unique demands of each project.

Canopy at Mill District, a luxury residential community in Sonoma County, California, chose MandiCasa’s elegant YOTA cabinetry for the kitchens, bathrooms, and laundry rooms of its 43 units, including condos and penthouses. Designed by world-renowned architecture firm Olson Kundig, modern interiors and expansive outdoor spaces flow seamlessly together atop a grove of preserved redwood trees. The project is a perfect fit for YOTA, a cabinetry design that marries essential lines, functional efficiency, and sustainability.

Like all MandiCasa cabinets, YOTA uses CARB2certified ecological panels in compliance with the strictest formaldehyde emissions restrictions. mandicasa.com

COURTESY MANDICASA

Miele ONE57 A new generation of extremely slender skyscrapers is altering the New York skyline. At 1000 feet, One57 is the seventh tallest building in the Big Apple. Although it’s right in the heart of the city, the location near Central Park provides a leafy outlook—and a landmark for the walkers in the park.

Interior design by the Danish designer Thomas JuulHansen is inspired by French modern style. but natural surfaces are predominant. Each design was created exclusively for One57, especially the kitchens.

Miele believes in clean lines, timeless elegance, and intuitive handling. Whether specifying a conventional rotary dial, discreet sensor controls, or high-resolution touch display, operating a Miele is both easy and fun. For our customers, our German engineering means peace of mind. Choosing Miele is the decision of a lifetime. mieleusa.com

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Miele appliances outfit beautiful kitchens by Thomas Juul-Hansen in Manhattan’s iconic One57 residential building, overlooking sweeping views of the city’s skyline.

COURTESY MIELE

Nolte Küchen by 7 Haus Williamsburg Project We are living in an age of possibilities. We create our world and our daily life based entirely on our personal wishes and needs, driven by the freedom of deciding what we like and don’t like. So even when choosing a kitchen, we don’t want just a selection of standard products, but we search harder to find something that is perfectly tailored to our needs and to which we can add a personal touch. In short: a kitchen with maximum individuality.

7 Haus applied this principle to the townhouse project in Williamsburg. The cabinetry was seamlessly integrated, extending its design influence from vanities to kitchens, closets, laundry room and more.

Thanks to Nolte cabinetry’s extensive range of styles, colors, finishes, and materials, we ensured that the client not only found precisely what they were looking for but also allowed us to create a cohesive design across every space, ensuring a harmonious flow and aesthetic unity throughout.

7haus.com

COURTESY 7 HAUS

The Williamsburg Project features a seamless and refined palette of material and color thanks for Nolte Küchen’s cabinetry line.

SieMatic Miami’s North Bay Village SieMatic was selected to furnish all 54 kitchens in the luxury tower at 7918 West Drive in Miami’s North Bay Village. The new 21-story tower designed by world-renowned architect Juan Azulay is a project by developer Pacific & Orient Properties and marks the first groundbreaking in North Bay Village in 10 years.

Currently under construction, the tower’s one-of-akind corner-unit residences, including four penthouses, blend the simplicity of Japanese living with today’s most advanced technology. Starting at $2.2 million, each apartment is expressly designed to experience its own unique spectacle of shadow and light as residents enjoy breathtaking panoramic views of Miami’s Biscayne Bay.

Elegant and essential, SieMatic’s fittings for 7918 West Drive in Miami are inspired by Japanese design and culture. The result are zen environments uplifting personal rituals.

siematic.com

COURTESY SIEMATIC

The Architects & Designers Building offers the best in kitchen, bath and fine furnishings.

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January/February 2024

At Home A home consists of many detailed elements, from the hardware that elevates daily rituals to the overall architecture that establishes the places where we can live more intentionally.

34 Case Study: Omar Gandhi Architects 35 Case Study: Sarah Jacoby Architect 36 Doors & Windows 38 Case Study: JSa & MTA+V 39 Case Study: Brooks + Scarpa

40 Hardware 42 Kitchen & Bath 43 Floors & Walls 45 Resources LOUISA AND F YODOR

34 Case Study

January/February 2024

Rock On

Omar Gandhi Architects fortifies a coastal retreat amid craggy shores and extreme weather.

Architect: Omar Gandhi Architects Landscape design: Omar Gandhi Architects Structural engineer: Blackwell Structural Engineers Civil engineer: Stantec and Harbourside Geotechnical Consultants General contractor: MRB Contracting Windows: Heroal Doors: Heroal Roofing: Soprema Waterproofing: Huber Engineered Woods Insulation: Rockwool Appliances: Jennair Fireplace: Stuv Lighting: Mooi, Muuto, Flos, Aaline Fixtures: Hansgrohe, Delta Furniture: American Leather, Gus Modern, Umage, Huppe Landscape furniture: Loll Designs The rocky shoreline of Hubbards, Nova Scotia, is at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean and the merciless winds it blows. It’s here, perched atop this uneven terrain, that the boxy modern retreat Rockbound met its first quagmire: how to capitalize on the site without falling victim to it.

Top: The rocky coastline of Nova Scotia serves as a dramatic backdrop for Rockbound.

No stranger to the area nor maritime vernacular, Toronto- and Halifax-based Omar Gandhi Architects navigated the landscape through careful materials and form selection. “One thing that we always try to maintain in our practice,” said the firm’s eponymous founder and principal, “is using ordinary, rugged materials that, through intense craftsmanship, become beautiful.” For the exterior, the architects opted for weather-resilient cork and steel, as they are easy to maintain and even improve aesthetically over time rather than appearing battered and worn down. Eastern white cedar, which makes up the bulk of the volume of the box, connects the residence to its surroundings. The material is readily available and commonly found in the area’s vernacular fishing shacks.

The 4,100-square-foot building presents itself as a cluster of simple forms nestled on top of each other, much like the rocks that lie below it. On the ocean-facing side, recessed windows carve into the facade, and upper and lower porches help protect against the punishing winds while preventing leaks and providing additional insulation.

During construction, a seam in the bedrock was discovered running right along the middle

of the building, almost overhauling the plans.

But rather than redesign the home, which the clients were already attached to, the architects redesigned the foundation to accommodate the tightened site. A series of micropiles, which are essentially stainless-steel augers, were installed along the rocks to bolster structural support. Additional strength comes from a steel frame within the home’s wooden cladding that also provides resistance against the locale’s extreme winds.

While the exterior focuses on protection from the elements, the interior is all about framing it.

“We tried to produce an interior in the tones of the wood, the whites, and the natural stones,” said Gandhi, but that also “recedes a little into the background.” The minimal yet warm design doesn’t strive to compete with the views but to better accent them. The color palette of offwhites and creams contrasts with the gray landscape outside, creating a place of retreat.

Rockbound’s layout continues this contrast.

Whereas the landscape is all wide, sweeping views, the interior prioritizes privacy. More traditional divisions between spaces organize the three bedrooms; three and a half baths; and living, kitchen, gym, and dining areas. Fireplaces

and half-walls carve out zones that hug guests, creating a sense of intimacy and coziness.

“We typically approach a lot of our projects with a denial of certain things and then a reveal,” added the firm’s associate Jordan Rice.

For Rockbound, this meant establishing the landscape with closely cropped trees to better withhold the oceanic views. This choreography continues within, where the breakthaking views are only revealed after turning a corner—a surprise that only heightens the panorama.

Rockbound may be a cleaner, more conventionally modern home than those typically found in the firm’s portfolio, but the minimalist structure impressively withstands and plays into its terrain. It’s a reminder of the beauty of seemingly simple forms: Here, clarity conceals the complexity required to achieve it. KP

EMA PETER PHOTOGR APHY

EMA PETER PHOTOGR APHY

EMA PETER PHOTOGR APHY

EMA PETER PHOTOGR APHY

Above: The kitchen design is seamless thanks to inset cabinets and material consistency.

Top: Exterior textures are inspired by the rugged site and massed in geometric forms.

Above: Sweeping views at the back of the home offer an intimate connection to the sea.

35 Case Study

January/February 2024

Free Rein

Sarah Jacoby Architect renovates a townhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, for “an imaginary client.”

Design architect: Sarah Jacoby Architect Structural engineer: Celin Muñoz-Consulting Electrical engineer: RAAD General contractor: Gowanus Custom Builders Facade system: Sto Windows: Marvin Windows, SkyFloor Doors: TruStile Roof: Delux Millwork Waterproofing: Sto Fire protection: 3M Door hardware: DnD Grilles: American Vent and AAG Tile: Cle, Mutina Lane, Futura Lighting: Apparatus, RBW, Allied Maker, Cedar and Moss, Lenson, USAi, InCommon, Astep Fixtures and appliances: Vola, Duravit, Miele, Moen, Watermark, Bluworks Countertop: BAS Stone Backsplash: Heath Tile Millwork: De-Lux Stairs: Architectural Atlantic Stairs So often developer-led residential projects result in a predictable white box, but what could happen if the developer was also a bespoke client? A townhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn,

renovated by New York–based Sarah Jacoby Architect (SJA) offered a unique opportunity that strayed from the typical townhouse renovation and challenged a new developer to reimagine the client relationship. The developer, who lives nearby, purchased the townhome, intending to both transform the 2,962-square-foot space on a corner lot and to sell it. Unlike past renovations SJA had worked on, this project was a blank slate, giving Jacoby, as she described, “free rein” to design a house for “an imaginary client.”

“It was more up to us, which made things both harder and easier. You think it’ll be easier, but then you’re like, wait, we’re usually responding to people who have some constraints or some interest,” Jacoby told AN. The three-story townhouse had already been renovated a number of times before Jacoby arrived on-site. Its staircase had been relocated, and the brick facade had seen better days. From the beginning, the need for natural light was apparent. The architects responded to this in a number of ways: first by relocating the stair to the front, strategically placing windows to accommodate both light and privacy, and installing skylights on the roof and the third floor to draw light through the hallways.

Switching the location of the stair played with the layout of the townhouse, creating an open-plan living and kitchen space on the first level and orienting the bedrooms and bathrooms on the two upper floors along a more intimate hallway. Jacoby reflected that in other projects she’s worked on the stair is often the one architectural feature left intact: So, to have freedom to design the structure “feels like a treat.” Simple in its construction and materiality, the new wood staircase features a soft grain and a curving handrail.

The stair was the jumping point for bringing warmth into the interiors. Windows and cabinets were subsequently wrapped in wood framing, and a large island base was made of lumber. This attention to the small details (not always apparent in developer-led projects) is visible throughout: in the bold red color used on the powder room walls, on the curved door handles, and in the quirky closet hidden within the living room wall.

The fun of the project is its speculative nature and the opportunity to make changes without constraints or the judgments of clients.

Does the blue front door match with the hue of the red faucet or the simplicity of the wooden elements? Does it matter?

LOUISA AND F YODOR

LOUISA AND F YODOR

LOUISA AND F YODOR

LOUISA AND F YODOR

Left: The townhouse form is retained but updated with a new splash of color.

LOUISA AND F YODOR

“People always think there needs to be a vision for the house,” Jacoby offered. “Which if you have a vision, great, but I think if people say, ‘Is this tile gonna go with this color?’ and if everything on its own is beautiful and maybe natural, it’ll go.”

That’s not to say design decisions were made willy-nilly. The blue of the front door was, like most features in the house, a considered choice. Its cheery tone is introduced on the exterior: The color was pulled from the standard set of offerings from Marvin Windows and it pairs well with the brick dominating the front and rear elevations of the building.

Beyond repairs to the brickwork and its existing lintels, the face of the building, much like the interiors, has seen a complete renovation.

Its eastern facade was originally slated to be similarly faced with brick but ultimately had to be stuccoed over using the same blue as the woodwork on the front and the rooftop extension housing the staircase.

“Part of the process is identifying what people like or don’t like, and what doesn’t make us feel too sad to change,” Jacoby said. KK

Clockwise from top left: Color play continues in apertures while leaving walls a calm neutral tone. Colorful accents and statement lights abound in the kitchen and baths, too.

36 Products

January/February 2024

Doors & Windows

The latest apertures to add elegant transitions to any project. Rita Catinella Orrell

690/695 Sliding Door System | CRL crlaurence.com

Arched Pivot Doors | Maiden Door maidensteel.com

Kolbe Smart Glass | Kolbe Windows & Doors kolbewindows.com

Advanced engineering means the new the 690/695 Sliding Door System requires minimal force to move expansive glass panes for both commercial and residential applications.

The Maiden Steel Arched Pivot Door unites the traditional arched form with a modern pivot hinge integration. The preassembled unit is designed for easy installation and features fully welded steel construction, dual-pane low-e glass, and full-height door pulls.

Kolbe partnered with Gauzy to integrate LCG Smart Glass Technologies into select window and door products. When electricity is applied, the glass changes from opaque to transparent, allowing for adjustable shading.

AX550 Moving Glass Walls | Milgard Windows and Doors milgard.com

Modular Outswing System | Goldbrecht goldbrecht.com

Milgard AX550 Moving Glass Walls come in sliding, pocket, and bifold configurations in four colors and sizes as large as 10 feet tall and 20 feet wide.

Goldbrecht’s new thermally broken Modular Outswing System relies on structural glazing and cutting-edge technology to provide the same slim profiles as the company’s Invisible Wall Sliding and Pivoting System.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS

Coastal Storm Door | Panoramic Doors panoramicdoors.com

Radius | Rimadesio rimadesio.it

This advanced slide-pivot-stack door system is available up to 10 feet high and can withstand harsh conditions, including 165 mph wind.

Radius is the new bidirectional pivot door system designed by Giuseppe Bavuso. This full-height solution can be installed on the wall without a jamb or with a concealed jamb, or integrated into the brand’s Modular wall paneling system.

For over 25 years, Halliday + Baillie has made iconic, modern architectural hardware for the most demanding residential and commercial projects. From our unparalleled range of flush pulls and pocket door locksets, to our modern stair rail brackets, to our slender solid brass door pulls—our offering is a long list of well-made classics in a dozen durable finishes that feel as good as they look.

Longevity has become the hallmark of our success, a direct response to the harsh climate on our island’s coast. Our products are made entirely in New Zealand while we adhere to the country’s strict environmental standards.

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38 Case Study

January/February 2024

Living in the Round

JSa and MTA+V turn the multifamily housing model inside out with Pedre, an undulating tower in Mexico City’s El Pedregal neighborhood.

Architect: JSa and MTA+V Landscape architecture: Devas General contractor: Factor Eficiencia Windows and facade system: Venster Facade system: Venster Roofing, partitions and ceilings: Portos Global Fittings, doors, closets and kitchens: Dimad Lighting: Esrawe Studio, Foton Outdoor furniture: Esrawe Studio Flooring: Fine Floors Rippling against a rigorously rectilinear Mexico City skyline, the Pedre residential tower stands apart. Designed by local firms JSa and MTA+V, the 14-story edifice is an amoeba-like, threelobed structure with a circular atrium at its core.

The overall effect is one of surprise and delight.

Each of the 112 apartment units boasts its own outdoor space. The entire building is capped by a roof garden of fruit trees, and it’s navigable via a meandering path flanked by intimate seating areas. The product of a constrained, triangular site and the intention to capture as

much daylight inside as possible, the sinuous form is also the result of JSa’s ongoing investigation of alternative housing models—those that can generate greater connection, both between residents and with the surrounding environment.

“I’ve always been interested in how housing is shaped by the facade,” said Javier Sánchez, principal of JSa, who led the design alongside JSa partner Benedikt Fahlbusch and Miguel de la Torre of MTA+V. “With Pedre, we wanted to create an extension of the facade that would bend back and forth, allowing light to penetrate deeper into the plan,” Sánchez continued, referencing the building’s undulating edges, which he likens to a string sweeping to and fro across the compact site. “In housing, life is made possible by light.”

In order to achieve this desired form, expressed via a reinforced-concrete structure of 16-inch-thick concrete slabs and concrete columns; floor-to-ceiling windows with strategically placed vertical aluminum “fins” for privacy screening; and a profusion of openair spaces, the design team needed efficient

structural engineering and construction methods.

A BubbleDeck slab system and Aircrete concrete walls rely on prefabricated concrete panels that are cast off-site and then trucked and craned into place. The “waffle” slab system embeds beams and all mechanical conduits into the slab, allowing for a clean appearance in interior spaces.

The feasibility of Pedre’s unusual form is also due to its location in El Pedregal, an area approximately 10 miles south of Mexico City’s center that was first developed by Luis Barragán in the mid-20th century. The name loosely translates to “land covered by rocks.” Barragán was inspired to create modern houses amid the volcanic rock that characterizes El Pedregal, and it is this rock that also laid the groundwork for the new modernity of Pedre. “This part of the city sits on solid volcanic bedrock,” said Sánchez. “The rock is what liberated us construction-wise from a boxlike shape and allowed all the contours of the building to be facades.”

The BubbleDeck system also made possible Pedre’s full-height central atrium, where a radial open staircase encircles a ground-level seating

area with six monolithic black marble benches.

Emblematic of the building’s ethos of connectivity, this atrium invites residents out of their individual units and provides a place for casual encounters. “A sense of community happens here,” reflects Fahlbusch. “Here, your hallway becomes something sculptural and unexpected.”

The 20-foot ceilings of the open-air lobby reference the garden-like entry typical of Barragán’s work, seen as almost “vernacular” to the neighborhood. The high ceilings and a sculptural steel gate allow daylight to sparkle across the terrazzo floor throughout the day. For Miguel de la Torre, who has worked on several residential projects with JSa over the years, this aspect of the unexpected is what gives Pedre staying power. “Every time I go to this building, it surprises me,” he said.

“When you design something and it’s still surprising you after it’s finished, that’s how you know it is special.”

Lauren Gallow is a Seattle-based writer and editor covering art, architecture, and design.

R AFAEL GAMO

R AFAEL GAMO

Above: Each curved facade plays with alternating glazed faces and balcony voids.

Top right: The lobed plan creates cozy terraces.

Right: Statement stairs ascend in the interior atrium.

Far right: Concrete forms are softened by an abundance of greenery throughout.

R AFAEL GAMO

R AFAEL GAMO

39 Case Study

January/February 2024

A Dynamic Courtyard

With Brunson Terrace, Brooks + Scarpa carves out an energy-efficient, mixed-use affordable housing project in Santa Monica, California.

Architect: Brooks + Scarpa Landscape architect: Tina Chee with Brooks + Scarpa Structural/civil engineer: Labib Funk Engineering MEP engineer: Idiaz Design General contractor: United Building Masonry: Angeles Block Company Windows: Arcadia, Alpine, U.S. Aluminum Skylights: Bristolite, Solatube International Doors: TM Cobb, Timely, Steelcraft, McKeon Door Company, Nationwide Industries, Anemostat Door Products, Total Door Systems.

Hardware: Schlage, Trimco, LCN, Ives, Rixon, Monarch, Pemko, Johnson, Elmes Roofing: CertainTeed Tile: Walker Zanger Fixtures: American Standard, Kohler, Bobrick, Grohe, Chicago Faucets, Toto, Delta Across the 4,751-square-mile region of Los Angeles County, the seaside city of Santa Monica has become the unrivaled testing ground for innovations in energy-conscious civic design in the service of community. It might just have at least one example for every building type imaginable. Frederick Fisher & Partners’s open-plan office addition to Santa Monica City Hall, for instance, was the first municipal structure to receive Living Building Challenge Certification. Field Operations’s adjacent Tongva Park, funded through California’s now-defunct tax increment financing (TIF) laws, is replete with drought-tolerant plants grown in

local nurseries and watered by the runoff of a nearby recycling facility.

Brunson Terrace, a 48-unit affordable housing project recently completed across the street from Santa Monica College, continues this trend by boasting every energy-saving accolade one can reasonably expect. Designed by the Hawthorne, California–based firm Brooks + Scarpa, the LEED Platinum–status building achieves a Predicted Energy Use Intensity (pEUI) score of 6.6 thanks to a net-zero output—a true rarity for the building type.

Yet the architects drew just as much from the past for inspiration as from projections of future energy use. “The building’s massing— essentially a carved-out cube with strategic openings and a courtyard—belongs to a longer local history of courtyard apartments throughout Southern California ranging from Irving Gill’s 1918 Horatio Court to the classic post–World War II Spanish Colonial Revival Ambrose Gardens,” Angela Brooks, cofounder of Brooks + Scarpa, told AN. The ground floor is a quasi-public space animated by natural light, cross ventilation, and a colorful children’s play structure shielded from the roaring cars of Pico Boulevard by a street-facing community space and 6,700 square feet of ground-level retail.

The various sources of funding and subsidies for Brunson Terrace—including low-income housing tax credits from the State of California, funding from the City of Santa Monica (construction-to-permanent loan), and a loan from the Bank of America—were secured by the Community Corporation of Santa Monica, a local nonprofit founded in 1982 that now manages

nearly 2,000 affordable housing units in the beachside city. Each of these financial sources, however, came with different requirements and concerns. Brooks + Scarpa therefore didn’t have many options regarding the layouts and finishes of the units. “The interiors of affordable housing units are the coding equivalent of sardines in a can,” said Lawrence Scarpa, cofounder of Brooks + Scarpa, “leaving us to squeeze in natural light, cross ventilation, and views where we could.”

The stair, however, was the subject of a harder-fought battle waged by the firm in pursuit of an open-air design that snakes across the courtyard and western elevation. “In the fire department’s ideal world, the stairs would be contained within an enclosed shaft to isolate potential fires from the rest of the building,” Scarpa explains.

“But we see the stairs as a part of the lived experience of the affordable housing building type rather than an element of risk management or an afterthought.” The result of this regulatory battle is a dynamic interplay of circulation bridges, stairs, and balconies that maintain a visible connection to the ground-floor courtyard, allowing caretakers to watch over children in the play structure as they wash clothing in the stair-adjacent laundry room.

“As residents circulate vertically, they find smaller side spaces that allow for a variety of more passive activity,” said Brooks. “When you can view a green space or a street or social space, you feel closer to it, so the design allows multiple visual connections to these types of spaces, but also the ability to be physically separate from them, if one desires.” Scarpa added that “people will walk three stories without

thinking about it” when the stairs are visible upon entering the courtyard, leading to the development of a small community.

The building’s LEED Platinum status, dynamic massing, and open stair design are additionally impressive considering that the construction cost was just under a staggering $800,000 per unit, which is still far below the $1 million price tag often seen in California, a product of the state’s skyrocketing property values and exorbitant contracting regulations associated with the building type. Yet the increasing cost of building affordable housing in Santa Monica brings an unavoidable question to light: How affordable is “affordable housing” when it’s developed in one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in America?

Though the residents of Brunson Terrace rent for far below the local market rate (which, in Santa Monica, averages over $3,900 per month), the neighborhood amenities, resources, and transportation infrastructure predominantly cater to a clientele far above their means. Until enough affordable units and related resources pop up across the city to meaningfully offset local wealth disparity, Brunson Terrace will have to largely rely on its own internal community for what is missing just beyond its perimeter and Santa Monica will be a loose constellation of civic-minded projects in search of a direction forward.

Shane Reiner-Roth is a lecturer at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.

COURTESY BROOKS + SCARPA

COURTESY BROOKS + SCARPA

Top: The facade opens at the center, offering a peek at the courtyard beyond.

Above: Sectional variation enlivens all facades.

Right: The interior courtyard offers external circulatory paths as well as park and play areas for residents.

COURTESY BROOKS + SCARPA

40 Products

January/February 2024

Hardware

The details that matter when it comes to the design experience. RCO

Gramercy Handle Set | Baldwin Hardware baldwinhardware.com

Zai Collection | Ento ento.it

Inspired by the intricate geometric patterns in the fence surrounding Gramercy Park, these handle sets incorporate knurled textures and dark metals. The collection includes tubular handle sets, mortise entrance trims, and door pulls. Baldwin also carries cabinet hardware.

Designed by Neri & Hu, the Zai Collection features a flat metal profile with a gentle radius bend that fits the curvature of the hand. This simple form is applied to a lever door handle, door pull, and window handle, all fabricated in various metallic finishes.

Phases Collection | Rocky Mountain Hardware rockymountainhardware.com Created in collaboration with Suede Studio, this handcrafted solid-bronze hardware for kitchens and baths includes cabinet pulls and knobs, door pulls and grips, towel bars, hooks, and a toilet paper holder with shelf.

ISM-MC7000 | Inox inoxproducts.com This smart mortise lock offers a secure access management solution for multi-tenant, hospitality, and mixed-use properties. This ANSI/BHMA Grade 1 mortise lock combines commercial quality with elegant trims in 12 lever options and seven standard finishes.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS

Anthology Collection | Keeler Brass Company keelerbrasscompany.com

Marcelle Collection | Modern Matter modern-matter.com

Keaton Tub & Shower Diverter Plate | Newport Brass newportbrass.com

Anthology is crafted of American-made solid brass and is offered with a palette of different colored leathers. Each piece comes in both standard and custom sizes.

Using exposed screws and a hand-forged finish, New York– based Float Studio and Modern Matter created the Marcelle Collection as an homage to bespoke vintage hardware.

Shown here in antique copper, the Keaton balanced pressure tub and shower diverter plate is available in more than 20 decorative finishes. Featuring a solid brass construction, it comes with a faceplate with a diverter pull-knob and an ADAcompliant lever handle.

AVA I L A B L E AT F I N E A R C H I T E C T U R A L H A R DWA R E S H O W R O O M S N AT I O N W I D E T H O M F I L I C I A F O R AC C U R AT E . C O M

|

P RO UD LY MA D E IN U SA

42 Products

January/February 2024

Kitchen & Bath

The products and appliances that shape our daily rituals. RCO

Qatego | Duravit USA duravit.com

Pot Filler | California Faucets californiafaucets.com

Qatego is Duravit’s first collection designed in collaboration with Studio F. A. Porsche. The range of bathroom ceramics and furnishings was inspired by stones gently polished by water.

Designed to coordinate with a complete line of matching kitchen accessories, each solid brass Pot Filler features the same Italian-inspired design and craftsmanship as California Faucet’s original Kitchen Collection.

Tub21 | Lacava lacava.com

Habito Bath Collection | Gessi gessi.com

Bathroom Sinks | Mila International mila-international.com

This freestanding soaking bathtub features fluted detailing made of white solid surface, available in gloss and matte finish. An overflow and a decorative solid-surface drain matches the tub.

The Habito bathroom fixture collection applies metal textures in fabric-inspired patterns including mesh, diamonds, horizontal lines, and dots. Applications range from showerheads to body jets, and include accessories such as towel bars, hooks, and soap holders.

Mila’s modern stainless steel bathroom sinks feature the brand’s patented slotted drain channel that spans the length of the sink.

This slotted design not only provides a clean and minimalist look, it also allows water to drain smoothly and efficiently.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS

June Rangehood | La Bastille labastille.com

ONE Collection | Kallista kallista.com

This reimagined take on the classic box-shaped range hood is handcrafted by a team of artisans in Savannah, Georgia. The modern metal range hood has a bullnose detail, giving the square shape movement and flow.

Each of Kallista’s ONE solid brass faucets features handles with hand-hammered details crafted by the artisans at P. E. Guerin, New York City’s storied makers of custom hardware.

IMAGINE ODIN IS COMING FOR DINNER.

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44 Products

January/February 2024

Floors & Walls

As essential elements of any space, these options can set the right tone. RCO

She Flooring | Ege Carpets egecarpets.com

Italian Landscape | Ceramica Fiorense fioranese.it

Bjelin Rigid Core Range | Revolution Mills revolutionmills.com

Crafted from 100-percent pure new wool by Danish designers Laura Bilde and Linnea Blæhr, this Cradle-to-Cradle Certified carpet is spun from extra-long fibers that match the durability of wool/nylon blends.

This porcelain stoneware collection is a collaboration between Fioranese and the 23Bassi Architecture Firm, inspired by the landscape symbols in Florence, L’Aquila, and Siena.

Reducing material from the backside of the Bjelin’s stone plastic–composite flooring panels makes these up to 20 percent lighter, easier to handle, and more sound-absorbent than alternative options.

XLight Flooring | Porcelanosa porcelanosa.com

Cracked Pepper | Behr behr.com

XLight is Porcelanosa’s large-format porcelain available in extraslim sizes. Ideal for walls and floors, XLight re-creates the look of cement, marble, stone, wood, and metal in polished, silk, textured, and natural finishes.

Behr’s 2024 Color of the Year is Cracked Pepper, a dark gray/soft black hue that can help create a bold statement as an entire wall or an accent in kitchens, living spaces, and bedrooms.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE RESPECTIVE MANUFACTURERS

Hush Blocks | 3form Elements 3-form.com

Flow | Inkiostro Bianco inkiostrobianco.com

Hide and Seek | Crossville crossville.com

Made of 50 percent postconsumer recycled PET, these Sola Felt block are NRC-tested, fire-rated, and come in six different shapes and a variety of depths. Each is available in five different colorways: Monochromatic, Gray, Blue, Green, and Colorful.

Created in collaboration with the LATOxLATO design studio, the Flow line of wallcoverings bridges art, architecture, and design.

The wallpaper’s refined cool and warm tones create chiaroscuro effects within the space.

This collection includes large-scale wall tiles in five harmonious colors. While the flat tiles glow with subtle pearlescent shimmer, the three-dimensional ceramic tiles evoke triangular geometry.

45 Resources

January/February 2024

This listing combines companies specified in case studies, product highlights from our Contributing Products Editor, Rita Catinella Orrell, and additional recommendations, all in one place.

Doors & Windows Arcadia arcadiacustom.com CRL crlaurence.com Glass Flooring Systems glassflooringsystems.com Goldbrect goldbrecht.com Hawa hawa.com Heroal heroal.de/en Kawneer kawneer.com Kolbe Windows & Doors kolbewindows.com Maiden Door maidensteel.com Marvin Windows marvin.com McKEON Door Company mckeondoor.com Milgard Windows and Doors milgard.com NanaWall nanawall.com Panoramic Doors panoramicdoors.com

PPG ppgresidentialglass.com

Behr behr.com

PK-30 System pk30system.com

Ceramica Fiorense fioranese.it

Quaker Windows quakerwindows.com

Clé cletile.com

RAM ramwindows.com

Cosentino cosentino.com

Reynears reynears.com

Crossville crossville.com

Rimadesio rimadesio.it

Daltile Daltile.com

Steelcraft steelcraft.com

Ege Carpets egecarpets.com

Total Door Systems totaldoor.com

Fine Floors finefloorscorp.com

TruStile trustile.com

Hanover hanoverpavers.com

Venster vensterwindows.com

Inkiostro Bianco inkiostrobianco.com

Western Window Systems westernwindowsystems.com

La Nova Tile lanovatile.com

YKK ykkap.com

Legno Bastone legnobastone.com

Floors & Walls

Porcelanosa porcelanosa.com

3form Elements 3-form.com

Revolution Mills revolutionmills.com

Armstrong armstrongflooring.com

Walker Zanger walkerzanger.com

COURTESY RIMADESIO

Hardware Accurate Lock accuratelockandhardware.com Allegion us.allegion.com Assa Abloy assaabloy.com Baldwin Hardware baldwinhardware.com Belwith Keeler belwith-keeler.com Bridgeport bridgeportworldwide.com Buster + Punch busterandpunch.com DnD dndhandles.it/en/ Elmes elmesworld.com Emtek emtek.com Ento ento.it Inox inoxproducts.com Johnson johnsonhardware.com Keeler Brass Company keelerbrasscompany.com Modern Matter modern-matter.com

COURTESY 3FORM

Rocky Mountain Hardware rockymountainhardware.com

Duravit duravit.com

Schlage schlage.com

Gessi gessi.com

Stanley stanleydoorproducts.com

Hansgrohe hansgrohe.com

Sugatsune sugatsune.com

Heath Ceramics heathceramics.com

Trimco trimcohardware.com

Infinity Drain infinitydrain.com

Von Duprin vonduprin.com

JennAir jennair.com

Yale yalehome.com

Kallista kallista.com

Kitchen & Bath

Kohler kohler.com

A&D Building adbuilding.com

La Bastille labastille.com

American Standard americanstandard-us.com

Lacava lacava.com

BAS Stone basstonenyc.com

Mila International mila-international.com

Bobrick bobrick.com

THOR Kitchen thorkitchen.com

California Faucets californiafaucets.com

Toto totousa.com

Chicago Faucets chicagofaucets.com

Watermark watermark-designs.com

Delta Faucet deltafaucet.com

COURTESY DUR AVIT

46 Marketplace

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Sahar Coston-Hardy esto.com

Battery Playscape, New York NY BKSK Architects

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47 Essay

January/February 2024

For Sale Renovated homes in Levittown evidence our algorithmic real estate reality.

Facades, cluttered. Materials, uncomplimentary. Bathroom tiles glisten at the base of a facade, and glass railings on Juliet balconies cast distorted reflections of plastic triangular profiles. In Levittown, New York, the desire for symmetry is often present but rarely achieved. Here, the iconic image of the American dream house is simultaneously broken and multiplied, and now it’s selling for over a million bucks.

The infamous postwar suburb that standardized midcentury ills like sprawl, white flight, and exclusionary zoning broke ground in 1947 and initially catered to middle-class families looking for a fresh start. A starter home—mass-produced, balloon-frame, and endlessly replicated—originally sold for around $8,000 (about $110,500 today). But the new million-dollar renovations of those original houses are fully loaded and ready to compete with their far younger (and bigger) imitators. While clearly trying to match the character that surrounds them, their scrambled compositions and exaggerated qualities—brightened, weightless—appear to belong more to the ephemerality of social media feeds than the durability of buildings that might last for generations.

Many likely anticipated this kind of development in 21st-century Levittown and countless neighborhoods like it. In the 1950s, aesthetics were controlled here by the community’s self-imposed social codes. Yet with today’s ubiquitous digital content aggregation, the once-cohesive Americana setting now yields to a new totality: an algorithmically driven cycle of production that’s spawning a new domestic reality, all with just a few taps.

A Broken Picture Announcing “the end of the world” in 2013, Timothy Morton argued that “hyperobjects,” like the internet and climate change, have broken our picture of a stable reality that’s determined by us. As explained in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World, these complex objects are pervasive, operate at scales and frequencies beyond our total comprehension, and don’t allow us to resolve them within our existing frameworks.

In this context, one’s reality, or “world picture,” is seen as shaped by aesthetics. When elements from outside the frame enter the scene, the nature of reality, subject to the influence of its parts, comes into question. As familiar elements are replaced or reoriented, boundaries and meanings become altered or subverted, even subtly, as if an old phrase were now spoken with a different intonation.

The world of Levittown began as an actual picture: a watercolor sketch of a modest house enclosed within a clearly defined frame. Lush foliage surrounding a perfect lawn under a clear spring sky caressed each and every residential miniature. This world picture offered an ideal blend of traditional values and modern convenience, and as a bare-bones model, it contained immense DIY potential, representing for residents the epitome of American individualism.

In a cycle of symbolic exchange, the act of remodeling the home would improve one’s individual condition while also contributing to the larger picture of the community and, by extension, the nation. The Levittown American’s quest for independence and freedom, like that of the early settlers, meant that the house was the stage upon which one’s allegiance to the nation was performed.

Capturing this belief, the protagonist in W. D.

Wetherell’s fictional story The Man Who Loved Levittown passionately recalls: “I’ll never forget those years. The fifties. The early sixties. We were all going the same direction....

Thanks to Big Bill Levitt we all had a chance.

You talk about dreams. Hell, we had ours....

We were the pioneers.”

Prior to widespread internet use, Levittown maintained a largely coherent architectural identity despite ongoing renovations throughout its 70-year history. Early on, homeowners began experimenting with dormers, bay windows, vinyl siding of various colors, brick and stone elements, fencing, and backyard swimming pools. It wasn’t long before a substantial proportion of the original 17,447 freestanding houses—all initially featuring plain asbestos facades and unfinished attics—had been modified to resemble unique homes.

From the perspective of residents, it must have seemed that each of their architectural creations distinctly reflected its owner’s very own values and aspirations, but the community’s social codes were a dominant force.

As documented in Barbara Kelly’s Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown, residents sought mutual acceptance by undertaking renovations within the realm of what was readily observable, deemed appropriate, or considered successful.

Levittown’s 20th-century coherence was a predictable outcome of its mass production, combined with the well-known exclusionary practices of its real estate developer, Levitt and Sons. In the 21st century, with the internet’s instantaneity at our fingertips, Levittown has evolved at odds with its former insularity.

As materialized objects of digital content populate the scene, suburbia is spilling beyond the world-protecting confines of lawns, foliage, and sky.

Levittown Now The visual remnants of Levittown’s former social regime now give way to newer, slicker elements that appear stunted by an inability to communicate. Despite social media’s goal of streamlining communication, one result of this convenience is an alien language of architectural products-as-symbols devoid of a previous generation’s grand narratives. The new Levittown home is flattened with white paint, black window frames, and minimally geometric fencing, porches, and doorframes.

It’s unable to offer any idea other than that of a desirable ROI when the asset has been exhausted. The newly renovated houses still resemble variations on their original model only now, they sit on maxed-out footprints like voiceless inflatable monsters, trapped within invisible cages of zoning jurisdiction.

The Levittown of today espouses a dark optimism. No longer is the community centered by misguided nationalism. The threat of the Cold War is gone, replaced by other existential anxieties that call for stronger lifestyle remedies. Yet a neat package of luxury seems wholly unattainable in this mass-produced context, where elements are not only of an unconvincing quality but also assembled without intent. No particular composition suggests a level of certainty or stability.

Looking from the street, the new doors, windows, and roof profiles form surprising misalignments on facades that resemble generated versions of McMansions from real estate TikTok. Who’s Driving?

Today’s consumer-as-architect plays an increasingly regimented role in the design process: interacting with the social media interface, inputting basic information,

activating desired imagery with a split-second pause. Architecturally speaking, the result is without resolution at the scale of the whole.

Proportions are odd, both outside and inside, where even more amenitization takes place.

Floorplans are either complicated or entirely open, signaling that clarity is less obtainable than the devices and perks that populate a home’s much-scrolled listing on Zillow.

In the 1948 comedic film Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a young couple relocates from their small apartment in Manhattan to the Connecticut countryside.

While planning their new home, Mr. and Mrs. Blandings push their architect to the side and scribble all over his well-thoughtout plan: “A built-in bar here and a walk-in closet there,” they command. “How about a bathroom for every bedroom—all five, yes.

Now add a sewing room, a playroom in the basement, and a terrace just outside the study with a little awning.” To the audience of 1948, the result is a monster. The couple can’t see the whole picture, but the architect, presumably, can.

In the age of the algorithmic image, aesthetics in Levittown are no longer driven by any community of individuals—as limited and segregated as they were—partaking in mutual dialogue. Instead, algorithms rapidly feed new imagery into the builder’s working palette.

This totality operates through pure economics.

It caters perfectly to its market, unbothered by factors of human comprehension with which to discriminate. Mr. and Mrs. Blandings’ condition—an inability to conceptualize a coherent whole—has become universal.

Steven Sculco is a designer based in New York.

CREDIT TK PAUL TRISTIS

48 Pictorial

The Architect’s Newspaper

Herman Jessor’s Co-op City at 50 continued from cover alongside Robert Moses.

Each of the towers is eponymously dedicated to a prolific person: One hulking skyscraper is named after Eugene V. Debs.

To date, myriad legendary New Yorkers have passed through Jessor’s flats: U.S. Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor called Co-op City home as a teenager. The legendary labor organizers W. E. B. Dubois, Emma Goldman, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, and Paul Robeson frequented Amalgamated Cooperative Houses in the Bronx, a milieu otherwise known as “the commie coops.” Penn South in Chelsea is the childhood home of the late Marxist David Graeber, who longingly described the place as his “only permanent address.” Marc Chagall lived at Sholem Aleichem Cooperative Houses after fleeing the Nazi invasion of Paris. If only the walls could talk.

In the Bronx, Co-op City’s architecture is vertical, as seen in Zara Pfeifer's photo

essay here: The towers of housing rise high above the Bronx River and are visible from around the city. But its ownership system is horizontal. The model was designed by Abraham Kazan of the United Housing Foundation (UHF). Kazan’s cooperative ideal, according to Tony Schuman in his 1997 essay “Labor and Housing in New York City,” was inspired by the Rochdale weavers, a “profit-sharing movement” in England founded in 1844, from which Jessor’s Rochdale Village in Queens takes its name.

Under Kazan’s leadership, the complex offered co-op grocery stores, milk deliveries, pharmacies, optician services, furniture distribution co-ops, insurance programs, and even energy.

Co-op City can be understood as a city within a city. The complex has its own government, its own zip code, and its own newspaper, The Co-op City Times, which has a

print run of 27,000 copies weekly. Riverbay Corporation is the name of the governing body that manages Co-op City, as well as the 15-member board of directors that presides over 44,509 shareholders. This body is made up of residents elected to office; it’s responsible for setting policy in the community and interfacing with New York City and New York State officials. An industrial power plant, also photographed by Pfeifer above, provides electricity, heat, hot water, and air-conditioning to every unit.

Subletting at Co-op City is prohibited.

Shareholders in these units don’t pay market rate like a lot of us who cough up large portions of our monthly paycheck to private landlords. By comparison, Jessor’s apartments are bought at “low per room prices but do not realize a profit on resale,” wrote Schuman. “The units were made affordable by real estate tax abatements, low-interest mortgages, and Jessor’s cost-conscious design,” Schuman elaborated. In short, Jessor’s units are decommodified, allowing for

49

January/February 2024

Zara Pfeifer is a Vienna- and Berlin-based photographer who often trains her lens on architectural icons of the everyday.

Her work has explored high-rise housing in her native Vienna, Berlin, and other cities. The photographs published here are the result of an artist residency in New York in 2023. These selections focus on Jessor’s architecture, but Pfeifer also documented the lives and apartments of co-op residents.

working-class New York families to live close to their jobs and schools. In the most expensive city on earth, these flats can be a lifeline.

Fifty years after Co-op City topped out, it continues to entice debate. In Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York, Annemarie Sammartino leans upon her childhood in the complex to tell its remarkable story.

Sammartino pooh-poohs yesteryear’s critics like Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Ulrich Franzen, and Ada Louise Huxtable for focusing too much on the estate’s aesthetics while overlooking

its socially radical mission.

In response to the naysayers, Jessor shook off criticism of Co-op City after it was built as petit bourgeois pedantry: “We are willing to pay for something practical, but we are unwilling to pay for art.” In a 1970 article in Progressive Architecture, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi came to Co-op City’s rescue. Scott Brown and Venturi applauded Jessor for having the courage “to accept the ordinary on its own terms and do it well.” Also a focus in Pfeifer's photography, this iconoclastic

opinion makes sense, given Scott Brown’s own training at the Architectural Association (AA) in London after World War II. Scott Brown was well versed in the teachings of Team X’s Peter and Alison Smithson, which espoused the social virtues of large-scale, Brutalist planning for the masses.

Is Co-op City perfect? Certainly not. Every utopia has its cracks. Co-op City is notoriously hard to get to—it’s a 20-minute walk from the nearest subway stop (but a new Metro-North Railroad station is slated for construction nearby in the next few years). When the rent strike at Co-op City concluded in 1976, it almost bankrupted the New York State Housing Finance Agency, and the UHF folded shortly after. There was also a new president in Washington, D.C., Gerald Ford, who preferred smaller government and set into motion austerity programs that divested from government-backed housing. So much of Co-op

City’s construction cost was handed over to shareholders, prompting many of the original families to get up and leave. Crime and racial tensions plagued Co-op City for much of the 1980s until deals were made in 1986, 1991, and 1993 that procured much-needed support for the estate from New York State’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal under then-governor Mario Cuomo.

Today, Herman Jessor’s buildings aren’t the prettiest or most extravagant, but thousands of working-class New Yorkers call them home. They recall the old adage about how “small is good but tall is necessary.” Amid a devastating housing crisis, this generation of urbanists can learn much from both Jessor and Co-op City. The north Bronx towers hovering over I-95 should remind us of the utopian optimism that radicals employed not so long ago, beckoning contemporary architects to do the same. DJR

50 Q&A

The Architect’s Newspaper

More Architects Should Design Public Housing AN speaks with Daniel Libeskind, whose studio is increasingly focused on socially engaged projects.

Since 1989, Daniel Libeskind has built a reputation for designing landmark cultural spaces around the world. His office, Studio Libeskind, has designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the World Trade Center Master Plan in Lower Manhattan, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, among others. Recently, he partnered with families of mass-shooting victims in Pittsburgh to design an outdoor memorial and addition to the Tree of Life Synagogue.

Today, Libeskind is working on projects most people don’t associate with architects of his caliber: social housing. Studio Libeskind’s Allan & Geraldine Rosenberg Residences opened in Freeport, Long Island, last September. Here, 45 artfully crafted units deliver much-needed housing for formerly homeless people and low-income seniors. Studio Libeskind’s Atrium at Sumner, another social housing project, is slated to open early this year in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Studio Libeskind relocated from Berlin to Manhattan in 2003, but the Rosenberg Residences mark the office’s first building in New York. AN’s associate editor, Dan Jonas Roche, interviewed Daniel Libeskind about these two social housing projects and why he’s so passionate about them.

AN: You grew up in a Bronx co-op. How did that shape your views about architecture?

lived there. So it’s kind of vernacular, and fits into domestic life nicely, but has spectacular spaces with unique views. The building changes the character of the street itself.

At the opening ceremony, a woman spoke who had been homeless her entire life. She talked about how she had lived on the subway and under bridges. At the opening, she said when she walked into her new house, she couldn’t believe it was for her. She had a bed, a kitchen, things that many take for granted. I think this kind of work is exemplary, and more architects should be doing it.

Can you talk about the design for Atrium at Sumner?

The site in Brooklyn faces Sumner Houses, which are boxshaped buildings that don’t really have a relationship with the street. Our goal was to create a beautiful environment in a tough neighborhood. So we designed an atrium that’s a social space, a clinic, space for lectures and performance, and so forth. Just like what I had growing up in the Bronx.

When we’d visit the site in Bedstuy, people would stop us on the street and ask if the building was a condo for rich people. We’d say: No, it’s for working-class and homeless people.

The community really appreciated the quality of the design.

There are so many obstacles that exist in the U.S. to building more public housing. What needs to happen to change that?

I live in Berlin, and even people there are protesting. They can’t afford rent either, so it’s a global crisis. Government and private groups should realize that everyone benefits when a city has housing for everyone. It needs to be easier for philanthropic organizations and developers to build public housing and make a living that way. Today, I have great admiration for NYCHA. They’ve raised their aspirations by investing in really great architecture and urban landscapes for people to have good lives.

I think, also, it’s important to remove the stigma surrounding social housing. When Rosenberg Residences opened on Long Island, someone said to me that they were surprised a well-known architect wanted to design social housing. But that’s exactly why I did it! I wanted to raise the bar and show architects that we need to do more of this. DJR

A rendered view of a central courtyard at Studio Libeskind’s new housing project in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, opening spring 2024.

Daniel Libeskind: I come from a family of Polish immigrants, and my parents were factory workers. When we moved to the U.S. we lived in the country’s first cooperative housing estate, Amalgamated Houses, built by the [International Ladies] Garment Workers Union in the Bronx.

There’s a film called The Garment Jungle that shows the blight that workers and unions used to face. Our [cooperative] by the garment workers union was beautiful. It was a wonderful place to come to as an immigrant teenager. We had a small apartment—it was four of us in a two-room walkup—but we had a community. We had a library, and we had shared space where Yiddish poets would lecture. It was here where my belief formed that social cooperative housing really creates communities.

I revisited my old house in the Bronx recently, actually, for a film shoot. It’s still so beautiful. The fact that this quality of life at Amalgamated Houses was affordable to working people like us expanded my own understanding of architecture beyond what buildings look like, but also into the matters of ethics and politics.

How did your upbringing inspire you to build supportive housing today?

So often, well-known architects become famous for grand buildings like museums, but we really need to change this.

We need more great architects designing public housing, and we need to remove the stigma behind public housing.

Cities are often judged by how fancy their museums are, but really they should be judged by how they house the working class.

Today, there’s simply not enough housing for working-class and low-income people. That, paired with my own childhood, is why we entered two competitions to design supportive housing in Long Island and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Atrium at Sumner in Brooklyn is backed by the New York City Housing Authority, and [Rosenberg Residences] in Long Island is by Selfhelp, an organization that was started during the Holocaust to help people move to New York. In those days, Selfhelp was mostly helping Jewish people find housing, and today they mostly serve people from Asia and Latin America. Their demographic has changed but their mission is still the same: Connect people to good housing. I think it’s a remarkable organization. So both projects in Brooklyn and Long Island are so close to my heart.

Can you talk about the architecture at Rosenberg Residences? It’s rare to see such thought and attention given to public housing in the U.S.

When we designed Rosenberg Residences, I had a simple goal. I wanted to design a place where I would want to live.

More broadly, I wanted to show architects that it’s possible to make good housing for the homeless and working people within very limited means.

Aesthetically, I wanted to make something that fit into the community that was also different from the housing around it. I wanted to make a building that spoke to the people who

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