TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;09

Doug Patt (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;11 - 00;00;35;04

David Kubik (DK)

From avenue to Avenue across all of these 11 buildings. That was generally programmatically, what was sought after by the client was good commercial space, whether it was retail or office. So then really the next question was, okay, let's look at these buildings, understand which ones were perhaps more intact, more attractive the way they were, which ones could receive some additions, and were there any buildings that just didn't have really kind of great architectural character and warranted demolition and starting over and so we had a little bit of all those.

 

00;00;35;07 - 00;02;59;25

DP

This is my guest, David Kubik, AIA. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we’ll highlight David's project called Gansevoort Row. BKSK Architects made its imprint on the Gansevoort Market Historic District in New York City with a collection of landmark approvals. The redevelopment of a full block of tattered, low rise commercial buildings near the High Line.

Through careful analysis, BKSK made a strong rationale for taller building heights and some new construction along portions of the block. The new development project has a roster of luxury retailers, commercial and office space. The row buildings include existing facades, along with a creative variety of contemporary versions. Interestingly, each new building of various sizes features a unique blend of colors and patterns of brick.

The street facades maintain a turn of the century aesthetic with traditional elements and details, while employing modern windows and expansive metal awnings.

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault.

Today we're talking to David Kubik, AIA. David Kubik holds a Bachelor of Science and Master of Architecture degree from the University of Maryland. He joined BKSK in 2003 and was named partner in 2018.

He works on the design of both institutional and development projects and is experienced at coordinating large consultant teams with expansive layers of complexity. He is currently the partner in charge of two new high end multi residential buildings for BKSK, the Keller and 111 Charles Street, both in the West Village and the recently completed 601 Washington Street. He also led the design of two commercial development projects in the Gansevoort Market Historic District, one of which we will discuss today, the Gansevoort Row redevelopment.

David has received an award for Excellence in Design and fellowships at both the graduate and Baccalaureate levels, as well as a thesis citation. David taught Design Studio as an adjunct lecturer in the Architectural Technology program at the City University of New York. So welcome, David. Nice to have you with us today. So, tell us a little bit about BKSK in New York City.

So where are you guys located? What's the size of the firm and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;00;04 - 00;03;30;13

DK

Well, thanks for having me. A little bit more about BKSK Architects. The firm was founded in 1985. We've always, right from the beginning, been a firm focused on ambitious design, really over a broad range of typologies, whether commercial or residential institutional. And as we're going to talk about today, we have many, many projects that have obtained approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. That's a particularly special part of our practice. The firm is located here in New York City. We're on West 38th Street. It's currently led by six partners and we're about 50 people.

 

00;03;30;15 - 00;03;32;12

DP

So how long have you guys been in New York City?

 

00;03;32;19 - 00;03;43;26

DK

We've been here practicing since 1985, and we were down on 25th Street for a number of years. We recently moved up to West 38th Street in 2020, which was an exciting time to move an office.

 

00;03;44;02 - 00;03;46;22

DP

How was that? Was that fraught with challenges?

 

00;03;46;23 - 00;04;12;05

DK

It was fraught with challenges. We literally moved the weekend of the shutdown. So, we moved out of our old office on the Friday and moved into our new office on that Saturday. And if everyone recalls, Sunday was the day that New York City really, effectively, shut down. So, we plugged in our new server, plugged in all of our new computers, and crossed their fingers that everyone could log in remotely on Monday morning. And miraculously, it all worked.

 

00;04;12;12 - 00;04;15;02

DP

That is unbelievable. So, you guys weren't fully remote.

 

00;04;15;04 - 00;04;21;01

DK

Fully remote as many did for a number of months. But yes, all of that came down to literally a day.

 

00;04;21;08 - 00;04;25;19

DP

As an aside, did that last for employees or is everybody back in the office now?

 

00;04;25;22 - 00;04;37;12

DK

We're all back in the office now. We kind of have some flexibility in terms of working remotely like many do. You know, you can have kind of a hybrid week somewhat, but like many companies, for a number of months, we were fully remote, which is tricky for an architecture firm.

 

00;04;37;19 - 00;04;42;22

DP

Absolutely. So, tell us a little bit about yourself. So how did you end up at BKSK?

 

00;04;42;24 - 00;06;07;23

DK

Sure. So, as you noted in the introduction, I was attending University of Maryland. I grew up in New Jersey, so always had kind of a fondness for the New York City area, was really excited by the architecture that was happening there. So, while I was still a student at the University of Maryland, I did have a summer internship with Clement and Holl Span architects, who are really also well-known mid-sized firm here in New York.

After graduating, I worked for about a year and a half at Michael Graves Architect. Most people don't know this, but they did at the time have a New York City branch office. They were not just in Princeton, New Jersey. So, I worked for them for a little bit. And then in 2003, I joined BKSK Architects. And at the time I was really looking for work where I could have a heavy involvement in the creation of the construction documents and during Construction administration.

I loved the work that BKSK had. There was a real high level of design ambition and you could tell there was a real study and appreciation for the craft of what they were making. And I loved the idea that I could be both involved in the design and documentation as well as have the opportunity to be on site while it was being built, which on some of the larger firms, sometimes that's not always in the cards.

So, it was a little bit of a shift for me to go to an office that was a little bit smaller, a little bit more locally focused. But there was something that I recognized I was really interested in and BKSK was able to provide that. So, it was a really rewarding shift and I really enjoyed that practice.

 

00;06;07;25 - 00;06;13;13

DP

So now you're a partner. Has that changed at all your role in the office? Or tell us a little bit about what you do now.

 

00;06;13;16 - 00;07;17;01

DK

Sure. So obviously some things change, and I'm happy to say that many things haven't. Sure, my role has changed. I'm involved in more projects; I'm overseeing those projects in the kind of sort of senior leadership role you'd expect when you hear the term partner. But – and our office is a little bit bigger now than it was when I joined in 2003 – but,  I would say that the ethos has not changed and we still, as architects, as kind of a tight knit group there in the office, were still very much focused on what I was describing earlier, which is high level of ambition in the design work that we do. And we really like to understand how things get built and the craft in which it takes to build them.

So, we enjoy working with contractors. That's not an adversarial relationship. We like to be on site, you know, and communicate directly with the subcontractors and the general contractors. And that's a process that we see can have a lot of opportunity for collaboration. And again, doesn't have to be this sort of adversarial standoff, which sometimes it can unfortunately sort of devolve into. But we try to make sure it doesn't go there and that everyone's working together in the sandbox to create something beautiful.

 

00;07;17;08 - 00;07;24;10

DP

Let's dig in here and talk about our building. Tell us a little bit about the Gansevoort Row project. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;07;24;16 - 00;09;12;02

DK

One of our existing clients, a client that we had already completed a number of projects with us, approached us about this project over our capital. I definitely can go on and on about that. Relationships. We're really happy with that relationship. They're a terrific client. They understand what it means to do a project of quality.

And so, we were honored when they came to us about this opportunity and this site. It's on the south side of Gansevoort Street, stretching from Avenue to Avenue, from Greenwich Street to Washington Street. It's really three pieces of property. But when you look across those parcels, it's really 11 individual historic structures that occupy these three properties. So, it was really quite a collection of buildings and structures that we had to grapple with and understand. They were all a little different. Some were more carefully preserved and intact than others, but the entire site had to be presented into the Landmarks Preservation Commission and whatever we designed, they had to approve.

So, what's interesting about that process, I think right out of the gate is that, if you're working on a site that is not subject to LPC approval, the very first thing you do is understand what the local zoning regulations allow you to build. How tall can I go? How big can I go and plan? What is the bulk that's permitted? How many square feet of floor area can I build? When you're in a landmarks district, you do not have rights to that floor area. You have to present a design that is compelling and as they deem, quote unquote, appropriate. It's often the case that you do not get to realize all of the square feet or all of the bulk that zoning might describe for that particular district. And that happened here, too. We didn't reach the full floor area allowed. We realized a lot of floor area for the developer, which is of course good for them. But we did have to present something that was appropriate for the neighborhood, appropriate for the scale on the street and the specific site context that we were dealing with.

 

00;09;12;05 - 00;09;16;01

DP

So, tell us a little bit about that. So LPC is Landmark Property.

 

00;09;16;06 - 00;09;18;19

DK

Landmarks Preservation Commission, so LPC for short.

 

00;09;18;19 - 00;09;22;20

DP

And you said they had to approve what you guys designed. How does that work?

 

00;09;22;25 - 00;09;50;24

DK

Because they were in a historic district. It's the Gansevoort market district. Anything that gets proposed has to first go in front of the LPC group and they have to review it and approve it before you can get your building permit, before you can get your approval at the local building department. So, it's not a, quote unquote, as of right district where you just follow the local code, follow the local zoning and you're off and running. We have this extra step of scrutiny. Whatever we present, they ultimately have to approve.

 

00;09;51;02 - 00;10;02;25

DP

I saw a great photograph; I think it was on the website from 1938. So, tell us a little bit about the history of the site. Is it interesting and why hasn't it been developed to this point? And what has happened along the way?

 

00;10;02;29 - 00;12;06;24

DK

It is very interesting. It has many chapters which we could spend hours talking about, but I'll summarize it a little bit in the sense that there was different types of buildings that were built here, whether it was a store and loft building or more of a warehouse building or purpose built garage buildings. In this district, you would see many different types of buildings. It wasn't sort of so perfectly monolithic like in some other historic districts. And in, generally speaking, many of these buildings were built to a certain height, often around five stories, six stories. And then when the city kind of really fell into tough economic times, a lot of these buildings were cut down to two stories because it was a strategy for building owners to pay less in taxes.

Unfortunately, a lot of these quite nice historic buildings would get cut down arbitrarily to two stories because that's just what made sense if you had a store and maybe one level of offices or storage above but, they didn't really need more than that. And this area of Manhattan on the far, far west Side, you know, became this sort of meatpacking district. And it just wasn't very desirable real estate in New York City for many, many decades. And then as economic growth has kind of pushed the city in recent years and decades, you know, finally this neighborhood has become a place where it's seen as advantageous to develop. High line, obviously, changed a lot of that. The new Whitney Museum, being literally on the opposite corner from this site, changed a lot of that. And our developer, Aurora Capital, are really responsible for a lot of the development in this neighborhood.

So, they've really boosted the appeal and the economic viability of this neighborhood. So, it was interesting to really understand the history of those buildings and it was sort of time for the next chapter of what could happen with these buildings. And so, your original reference, the 1938 photo, we looked at a lot of that carefully because it was obviously history and context that matters when you're dealing with these buildings. And in some cases there were narratives about bringing some of these buildings back up to their original five story height and in other cases not, which we can get into a little bit more specifically. But yeah, it was a bit of a mixed bag.

 

00;12;06;27 - 00;12;16;16

DP

So, I understand the scope of the project was to create successful retail, commercial and office space. Tell us a little bit about the scope and then the programmatic requirements.

 

00;12;16;18 - 00;15;29;27

DK

Sure. So, from avenue to avenue, across all of these 11 buildings, that was generally programmatically what was sought after by the client was good commercial space, whether it was retail or office. So then really the next question was, okay, let's look at these buildings, understand which ones were perhaps more intact, more attractive the way they were, which ones could receive some additions. And were there any buildings that just didn't have really kind of great architectural character and warranted demolition and starting over? And so, we had a little bit of all of those. So, you know, if you start generally looking at the block on the eastern end, there were more buildings that were pretty intact, had good architectural character. And we got from a sense in the community that they were cherished a bit more than some of the others.

So, you'll see on the eastern end the scale kind of stayed down at two stories. On the western end, there were two sort of blocks of buildings, one which comprised of five store and loft buildings, almost tenement style rowhouse looking type buildings, but more commercial oriented. Those buildings were all cut down from five stories to two. So, we proposed to put a three-story addition on that two story structure and raise that to a five story building.

And then lastly, on the western end of the property, and that piece of property being directly across from the Whitney, was just a one-story garage building kind of purpose-built garage building. It was not an original building in the district and really had no kind of architectural merit or character to speak of in the historic designation report for the neighborhood, it was described as non-contributing, which is also a term they use for buildings that might be in a historic district but were really never part of the original fabric and don't have any real value or they're not adding value to the district. So that was a corner property that was deemed acceptable to kind of demolish, remove that one story structure, and build something brand new. So, on that far western end, we proposed a new six story kind of warehouse loft looking building. And this goes back to the strategy of where is it viable to add bulk and square footage for the developer to kind of realize their investment? And where does it make sense to not do that?

And so, it was in a sort of perfect, even monolithic approach. Let's just add two or three stories across the whole block from avenue and avenue. We didn't do that. We said, you know what, on the western end, it makes more architectural sense to grow the properties and go higher. And on the eastern end, it makes more sense to keep them a little lower.

What was also interesting about this project was, you could imagine the owner could have very easily said, okay, we have three pieces of property here. Let's go to three different architects and just treat them like three individual projects and go to landmarks three individual times. But we didn't do that, and I think that was really smart on behalf of the owner, regardless of who they hired, to treat this as one job because you could treat it almost like an urban design exercise, a master planning exercise, you could look at the whole block and sort of horse trade square footage and decide where was it more appropriate and palatable to pump up the square footage and where was it not. And so, I think that we recognized it as a unique opportunity. We wanted to get our heads around, immediately about, where does the architecture support this intervention and where maybe does it not.

 

00;15;30;04 - 00;15;35;06

DP

So, at the end of the day, were there any project restrictions in terms of the heights of the buildings?

 

00;15;35;13 - 00;16;57;15

DK

Definitely. There was a lot of scrutiny about height, but it wasn't coming through either a code or zoning regulation. It was coming through an in-depth conversation with the Landmarks Preservation Committee and the Community board. So, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission approves your project, their permit has a title, and at the top it's Certificate of Appropriateness. Their measure of, you know, whether or not something should be approved really centers around that term appropriateness. So, it's very subjective.

So, they're looking at the context. How tall are the buildings around you? What are the styles of those buildings? What are the colors of those buildings? Do they have a lot of glass? Do they have a little bit of glass? You know, is all of the architectural language context bulk history. So, it's about storytelling is one way we like to think about it. What is the narrative that justifies your project? Like, what is the big idea of your project? And it has to be rooted in the history of the site, the context of site, and an appropriateness. So, there was a lot of analyzation of what were these buildings.

You mentioned the 1938 photo. That was one photo that was really important. There were many others. And so, you're really crafting a story. You're telling a story. So, what we proposed, we hope, extends the sort of natural evolution of this block like I was referring to earlier. This block has many chapters, and this is just the next chapter. Buildings go up, they come down, they go up again. And this will kind of be an evolution that the neighborhood will probably continue to see.

 

00;16;57;17 - 00;17;06;02

DP

Since the process with the planning commission was so subjective, how many people are on the planning commission? Was that really challenging? Because everybody's got to agree, right?

 

00;17;06;05 - 00;17;34;27

DK

Sure. I can't recall the exact number right now. I think it's around ten commissioners. And so, you know, you have to have a majority of the commissioners to obtain approval. You don't have to have unanimous approval. We went to the Landmarks Commission two times in order to obtain that approval. But we involved ourselves with a lot of kind of community engagement and – and meetings ahead of time because we wanted to make sure that what we were bringing was something that was viable and supportable in any way that we could.

 

00;17;34;29 - 00;17;44;17

DP

So, tell us about the building plans. I would imagine as you run across the facade, some are rectangular, summer more square, but they all fill the entire block?

 

00;17;44;20 - 00;18;47;10

DK

Well, it's actually a little bit different. So, the buildings that are on corners have different requirements than buildings that are mid-block. On both the eastern and western end – on the eastern end is an existing building. That building is built full on its lot because a corner building can be built full, it doesn't have a required rear yard. So, the eastern building was a purpose-built garage building, really kind of special, unique yellow brick house has a really bright image to it and we retain that building because it has some really nice character to it. Hermes is in there right now, as a high-end retailer. That's a special condition.

In the mid-block portion of the project, there is a rear yard, and the ground floor is built full. But once you're above the ground floor, starting at the second floor and up, these buildings do have rear yards. And then our new building that we proposed on the western corner that I was talking about earlier, same situation that it's very common.

The zoning allows it. Most buildings in New York City, when you're on the corner, won't necessarily have a rear yard or a side yard or anything like that. And this building doesn't either.

 

00;18;47;13 - 00;18;54;03

DP

So, tell us a little bit about the style choices, right. I mean, it looked to me like there were at least three buildings that remained.

 

00;18;54;09 - 00;19;46;22

DK

More than that. I would say on the eastern end there are two. And then in the mid-block portion, it's one building. But historically it's really three structures. Then there's this group of five, and then there's our new warehouse building on the western end. So that's why I was saying it's kind of like 11 structures stretching across three pieces of property when you really get into it, in terms of their history. They are different styles. They're all a little different.

The one on the eastern end was kind of a garage building. The ones mid-block are more kind of a store and loft, so they have kind of commercial storefronts at the ground floor and then kind of punched opening double hung window language above that. And then on the western end, our new building was not so much a store and loft had more of a kind of a warehouse look, so much heavier masonry language with much bigger areas of glass kind of departing from the individual punch window language.

 

00;19;46;24 - 00;19;58;24

DP

So stylistically, the newer buildings are slightly more contemporary than the existing buildings. Did you have different architects working on different buildings and coming up with themes?

 

00;19;59;00 - 00;22;06;12

DK

We definitely had a pretty substantial team in this project, and we are very collaborative in the office. So regardless of what level you might be practicing at our office, we're all at the table together. Everyone's contributing ideas, which we think is a great way to work and really fun. Obviously, as you kind of break down the teams, there were certain people dedicated to certain areas of the project. I also worked really closely with my partner Todd on this project. He had a deep involvement in this as well. So, it was really kind of the two of us on this.

What I think is fun, and as a general observation across the whole block, is that once we had a clear understanding of the kind of existing language of the architecture, whether it was garage or store in loft or warehouse, when we had our interventions, we did it in such a way that was quite respectful and kind of playing off the traditional languages of those buildings, but clearly contemporary at the same time.

So, the brick detailing is done in a traditional way, but with modern techniques and modern, you know, sort of expressions that are a little bit different. So, in the mid-block building, the one that has a three-story addition on a two-story base, there we used brick that was very similar in tone to the second floor that existed, but then also came up with a very special window language that involved some terracotta tiles on the transom that allowed for bigger glass windows but a smaller masonry opening. So, it felt appropriate for the scale of that facade. And then on the corner building, we really wanted to bring the sort of large heft and substantialness of the masonry detailing that you would see on a lot of the older warehouse buildings, even some of the buildings directly across the street from us. And so, we used a technique called a concealed lintel system to allow all of our brick returns, whether they were eight inches and in some cases 12-inch brick returns. You had these really beautiful brick returns both in plan and in sections. So, above the window, the window heads, you can really see 12 inches of brick wrapping and returning to the window, which you don't always see in newer buildings now, but we thought was really important for a building like this to be well detailed like that and show that depth of masonry, which is so characteristic for a lot of the historic buildings in that neighborhood.

 

00;22;06;19 - 00;22;17;28

DP

Now, I saw some patterning running vertically along one of the taller buildings. Tell me a little bit about that because that motif appears as a lintel above the windows. What is that?

 

00;22;18;02 - 00;23;52;26

DK

Yeah, so that mid-block building that was five store and loft buildings all kind of put together on its eastern facade because the building next to it was cut down like we talked about down to two stories. It's sort of exposed on that brick facade, the sort of scar of where the chimney would have been. So, there was a very sort of roughly demolished zone on the side of that facade where you could tell by looking at it, ‘you know what? I bet you there was a masonry chimney there and it all just sort of got roughly demolished.’ But it was kind of a signature moment on the side of that building that you would really see in the historic photos, and you would see in that 1938 photo.

So, we kind of wanted to bring back that chimney scar, but we did it with these terracotta tiles and behind those tiles behind that pattern is floor to ceiling glass. So, you're getting this masonry expression on the eastern facade that brings back that very particular circumstance that that building had. But you're doing it in a way that also allows some natural light to come in the building, because this is now a commercial office building. It's not a store in loft. Those upper floors are not used for storage anymore. People are occupying those floors. So, we were looking for ways to bring in a lot of natural light into this new work environment. But we wanted to do it in such a way that again, go back to that word that was appropriate for the sort of architectural expression of the building. So yeah, it was a unique moment. And the transoms, the lintel is basically doing the same thing.

Behind that is a really tall window, but from the street it looks like a smaller window, and it looks like a size window that is appropriate for that scale of building. So, it was sort of how you can have your cake and eat it too.

 

00;23;52;28 - 00;24;00;27

DP

Yeah, it's a really interesting detail. So how long did the design process take, city review, construction, start to finish?

 

00;24;00;29 - 00;24;29;27

DK

Good question. I don't know. I don’t have all of those dates at my fingertips, but I would say that while typically a project like this in our office would take about a year to document from schematic design to 100% construction documents, I think on this project it was substantially longer. Maybe a year and a half, a year and three quarters because of the extra time it took to first seek and get that LPC approval.

Once the approval is in hand, then we can really march forward and finish those construction documents. And then the construction itself, I believe, took about two years.

 

00;24;30;04 - 00;24;31;12

DP

How many sheets were in the set?

 

00;24;31;19 - 00;24;36;22

DK

It's definitely over 200. It's probably approaching 250 sheets or something like that. Yeah, it's a big undertaking.

 

00;24;36;27 - 00;24;38;17

DP

Did you guys model this in 3D?

 

00;24;38;25 - 00;25;00;27

DK

This entire city block is in Revit. It's all one Revit file that can be broken apart because we had to issue it as three sets of construction documents. Going back to the fact that this is three properties, it had to get filed at the Department of Buildings in three pieces to match up to those pieces of property, even though it was conceived as one big thing. So, yes, three sets of drawings.

 

00;25;00;29 - 00;25;04;21

DP

Now, a job this big, do have more than one PM? Project manager.

 

00;25;04;21 - 00;25;18;07

DK

Yes. Yeah, on this project we had two, Will Russell and Evan Singer, who did a phenomenal job really combing through every detail, understanding every nook and cranny. It was a real labor of love for them. I think they enjoyed it very much and they did a great job.

 

00;25;18;09 - 00;25;29;28

DP

So, this question comes up a lot. Did sustainability ever come up in choosing the materials for the project? And clearly brick was already out there. Did you guys just say, “okay, this is what we're going to do; we never even thought about another material”?

 

00;25;30;05 - 00;27;06;14

DK

Yeah. So, this project didn't seek any particular certification, but there were many sustainable elements that we tried to incorporate whenever we could in terms of material selection. I think that was also interesting is this is a conversation about adaptive reuse. One of the most sustainable things you can do when you look at a building project is reuse existing material. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, reuse what's there, don't bring new material on site.

Many of these facades, you know, we really carefully tried to keep as much as the brick structure, whether it's party walls, you know, load bearing walls, facade walls. We tried to keep as much of that intact as possible. There were cases where, even a little scary times, you go onto the roof and you look at these old brick parapets and, you know, they haven't been maintained or cared for in way too long. And the mortar is at this point dust. And you can literally just take your hand and take the bricks off, which it was time. We are also very grateful that this project happened when it did because, you know, I think it saved these buildings, too. They really needed this intervention. They needed this next chapter in their life.

So, we, in some cases, had to demolish brick walls and keep all the brick and catalog it, put it down on the floor, label it so that the masons could take it and then put it back up and reinstall it. So, we did a lot of that careful work in the restoration and then much of the new either additions or buildings that we designed use brick. And it was a direct sort of reaction to this historic neighborhood. There was just an abundance of it, frankly, used in many different ways, many different colors. And it was really sort of a core ingredient, if you will, to any of the architecture that you might propose here.

 

00;27;06;16 - 00;27;11;21

DP

So, I haven't seen any of the interior photos. But do we end up seeing brick on the interior of any of these buildings?

 

00;27;11;27 - 00;27;35;26

DK

On some of them, again, particularly in the places where they are existing. So, in the existing two-story portion of that store in loft building, every 25 feet was a load bearing brick wall. Many of those are still there and the retailers who took those spaces did not cover them up, which is great. We love seeing that. So, you can really see a lot of that character and some of the buildings on the eastern end. You have moments to see some of that brick, too.

 

00;27;36;03 - 00;27;43;22

DP

It looked to me like there were at least two different brick colors that were really unique to this job. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

 

00;27;43;27 - 00;28;51;12

DK

So, the two brick colors on the project that we're talking about right now is a kind of a standard red brick that went on our three-story addition over the two-story existing structure. And that was kind of a nice interplay between a nice, textured, more modern looking red brick, but clearly still relating to the historic red brick that was right below it. So, you can distinguish the difference, but it's subtle.

On the corner building, there is a more sort of neutral what you might think is a more modern brick color. It's a Glen-Gery glacier gray brick. It has a lot of kind of nice texture and variation to it, which we were really attracted by. And it is perhaps a little bit more neutral, a little bit more contemporary of a tone.

That said, there are many large six story warehouse buildings directly across the street from us on Washington Street on that block facing the river. And many of those buildings had some pretty neutral tones in their brick selection as well. Maybe perhaps a little bit creamier, a little bit warmer, but not that different from what we were proposing there. So, we thought it was kind of a nice sort of interplay between those tones and still felt quite appropriate in the color.

 

00;28;51;17 - 00;28;59;24

DP

And how did you guys ultimately find the right colors for the bricks? Did you guys simply have samples in the office, or did you go out and take a look at them?

 

00;29;00;02 - 00;29;49;10

DK

Yeah, both. So, we really want to gain all those samples in the office and kind of build a library that we can consider. We looked at mockups on site to make sure that we were really happy with it and just walking around the neighborhood looking at these tones and seeing really how they relate. So again, it's nice to feel like the selection is growing right out of the context, but with a little bit of a modern twist, we think is actually quite nice.

And that brick in particular, we really loved the variation in the shading. You get kind of different colors within it. There is a little bit of texture and stippling to the brick finish as well, and we kind of joke around that sometimes if you look at a material sample up close, you think it looks messy, but it's that messiness. When you put it at a building scale or an urban scale that really makes that brick look good and crafted. So having that texture we think is kind of important.

 

00;29;49;12 - 00;29;57;20

DP

That's a really good point. So, did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process? Anything come to light that was like, this is kind of cool?

 

00;29;57;28 - 00;30;55;01

DK

I think what's just fun about designing in brick is it's a particular knowledge set. It's kind of its own craft or game if you want to call it that. You really have to think about the module of brick and how it wants to be used. We know a typical module for brick is either eight inches or twelve inches, quite commonly, and when you start designing your building, you have to be thinking about that brick module from day one, how it courses out vertically, how it courses out horizontally.

There were moments we learned a little bit of the hard way where we thought we had it exactly right and we didn't have it exactly right. And we had to make changes on the fly. Work carefully with the subcontractor, but you can't ignore the module of brick. You have to kind of work with it, don't work against it, and your details should sort of celebrate the natural dimensions of that brick. And I think we learned a lot about that. We had done already a number of brick buildings in our history of the firm, but this one really had a little bit of everything in it, which was really quite fun.

 

00;30;55;03 - 00;31;08;02

DP

Isn’t it interesting that we deal with buildings, but we're really dealing with math, right? Everything has to kind of fit into those modules.

So, did you guys have any trouble finding a great mason to work with on the process?

 

00;31;08;09 - 00;31;56;12

DK

So, we rely very much on our contractors to find those subcontractors. So, we worked with a great general contractor here who did find their way to a mason who you could tell right from the beginning was enjoying their craft. They would constantly ask us questions because they just wanted to make sure that they were getting it right per the design intent. And we thought that was really great.

Again, going back to something I said earlier, it was a good collaborative, positive relationship between everyone because we just wanted to make these buildings, you know, as best we could. And so, I think that mason did an excellent job in this project, and it really shows if you walk the block. And whether you're looking at very careful noodling and restoration on the buildings to the east, or the obviously more expansive, impressive new construction on the west, all the detailing, all the construction is very tight. It looks great.

 

00;31;56;18 - 00;32;03;21

DP

It's good to hear. So, this is the last tough question I've got for you. You've been an architect for some time, I would imagine. 20, 25 years.

 

00;32;03;26 - 00;32;07;14

DK

23. Yeah, depending on when you want to start the clock. But yeah, somewhere in there.

 

00;32;07;14 - 00;32;14;24

DP

Right. Exactly. So, if you could give your younger self some career advice, based on who you are now, what would it be?

 

00;32;14;26 - 00;33;36;07

DK

I guess I would say, and it's something that's been important to me, and I guess it was a bit of a leap of faith, I kind of found my way to BKSK architects for a reason. I feel lucky that I ended up there, frankly. It reinforced an interest I had, which is really to understand what you're making.

I enjoy design very much. You know, we want to blue sky and think very ambitiously about what a project could be. You want to push the envelope. But I always like to couple that with the reality of how something gets built. And I think that constant tension, if you will, about being ambitious, trying something new, being innovative, I always want to couple that with understanding how you build because a lot of times the innovation will grow out of something quite conventional, or an observation about how things get built. ‘Well, this is how we normally do it.’ Well, what if you just did it the normal way, but turned it 90 degrees and now you have a new detail and you can express things differently. So, those two things don't have to fight each other, and they could actually reinforce each other. And I think that's something that I've tried to instill in people who have worked for me or when I've taught at City Tech. I think that is something that I've found to be a kind of rewarding aspect of the practice. I also think that goes back to where I went to school at University of Maryland. That was something that was kind of a core part of their ethos and their pedagogy about what they taught. And I think it's important and I recognize the sort of value of it as a practicing architect.

 

00;33;36;09 - 00;33;55;16

DP

Back when I was in Maryland, working in Baltimore, I was out on set with a contractor and he said, “Doug, do us a favor. Do yourself a favor. Always draw something that can be built.” So, learn construction, right? You may be an architect and you may want to be a designer, but you've got to learn how everything goes together first. That’s great advice.

 

00;33;55;18 - 00;34;20;00

DK

Yeah. And we try to practice this in our office now. Myself and my partners, we all kind of grew up together here at the firm. Once you get through one really big project of consequence, it makes you a better designer for the next project. It's like learning a language. It's like learning a grammar. Once you understand it and can speak the language and know how to form sentences and the structure of it all, it just makes you a better designer for the next one.

 

00;34;20;04 - 00;34;26;16

DP

Absolutely. David, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about BKSK architects?

 

00;34;26;23 - 00;34;35;25

DK

bksk.com Please go ahead and visit. We're also on all of the major social media platforms. Welcome anyone's input, or anyone wants to reach out.

 

00;34;36;01 - 00;34;38;19

DP

Awesome. Thank you very much. It’s been great to have you as a guest.

 

00;34;38;21 - 00;34;42;15

DK

Thanks for having me. This was really fun.

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;12

Doug Patt (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;14 - 00;00;33;10

Jay Valgora (JV)

So, it's very complex. It's two residential towers and it's mixed use. It has retail at the base with a series of astonishing amenities and public spaces that link them together, including a fantastic pool deck overlooking the ocean, overlooking the roller coaster, and a whole series of public spaces. Because, you know, there's a social life to a building, too.

 

00;00;33;17 - 00;02;02;09

DP

This is my guest, Jay Valgora. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode of The Design Vault, we highlight Jay's project 1515 Surf Avenue. It is a two tower, 26 and 16 story residential building complex in Coney Island, Brooklyn, designed by Studio V Architecture. This street corner project will span 470,000 square feet and yield 461 units 139 designated for affordable housing and 11,000 square feet of ground floor retail.

 

The building facade is variegated white to cream colored brick, with the main building podium facing Surf Avenue, featuring a soaring ground floor elevation with several diagonal columns, its sloped roofline is further defined by a stepped series of wooden platforms the design team calls the vertical boardwalk. The building features curved glass lined balconies and amenity deck heated pool and green roof.

 

Residents have panoramic views of Coney Island Amusement Park and the Atlantic Ocean. The total outdoor space will span over 20,000 square feet. The building includes a fitness center, lounges, co-working spaces, indoor basketball court, handball court and accessory off street parking. When completed in 2024, the property will be the largest geothermal heated and cooled building in New York City.

 

00;02;02;12 - 00;03;17;08

DP

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Jay Valgora is the founder and principal of the architectural design firm Studio V Architecture in New York City. Jay grew up in Buffalo. He tells the story that it was the steel mills where his father worked and the historic grain elevators of Buffalo that influenced him to become an architect.

 

Jay received his Bachelor of Architecture at Cornell University and his master's degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was also a fellow in the Fulbright program to the United Kingdom. At Harvard, Jay studied under Pritzker Prize winning Portuguese architect Alvaro Cesar. Mr. Valdora is on the forefront of urban design with nine projects on the New York City waterfront.

 

He works closely with entrepreneurs to create innovative designs and programs, collaborates with government agencies to address policy infrastructure, environmental issues and approvals, and is deeply engaged with communities through innovative public space design. Welcome, Jay. Nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Studio V architecture in New York City. Where are you guys located? What's the size of your firm and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;17;11 - 00;04;07;23

JV

So Studio V is right in the heart of Manhattan. You know, we're right in the middle of the island. I like to say that we live in a city of four islands and a peninsula, and we're right in the middle on 32nd Street and Park Avenue. Actually, by the time you broadcast this or soon thereafter, we've even purchased a small building, which we're currently redesigning right now, and we'll be moving to 111 East 29th Street, where we've created our own studio, which is currently under construction.

 

I guess the only other thing I can tell you is that Studio V is really all about the people. We have a really incredible range of people that work with us. We're about two dozen, and so we really see ourselves as a boutique architecture firm, but we handle tremendously large and complex projects because we have a really wonderful team and very diverse clients and very diverse projects. So we really pride ourselves on doing things that are a little bit different.

 

00;04;07;26 - 00;04;13;20

DP

So tell us a little bit about the firm. When did you get started and what's your role in the office now?

 

00;04;13;27 - 00;04;57;04

JV

So I began the firm and founded it in 2006. So I guess we've been around about nearly eight years and I'm the principal and the founder of the firm, but I have seven senior staff. They collaborate with me on all the projects. It's really an open atelier. I intentionally always call it a studio. It's not really an office, it's not really a firm.

 

It has the whole atmosphere and character of a studio. We have no offices, we have entirely open spaces. We have huge collaborative areas. So my role really is to work with and inspire the great designers and talented architects with whom I work and to provide leadership. But really they play an essential role. It's not Valgora architects, it's Studio V, and the studio really comes first.

 

00;04;57;08 - 00;05;10;16

DP

It's really interestingly described. I haven't heard somebody talk about their office like that. So tell me a little bit about how you get your people to pull mostly from New York City? And do people hear about your office and they want to work for you?

 

00;05;10;20 - 00;05;59;16

JV

We have a really diverse range of people, but there's sort of a running joke in Studio V that isn't really intentional, but somehow it proves to be true. I would say that many of the people at Studio V come from two places. It's really not intentional. It's not a policy. But many come from the heartland of America. I myself grew up in Buffalo and I consider that really secretly to be part of Ohio, not New York state.

 

It's completely part of a midwestern kind of ethos. And many of our talented architects come from around the American heartland in the Midwest, but the other half come from all over the world, throughout Europe, Asia, South America. And so I'm very proud of the fact that we really are part of New York City and kind of represent the diverse talents that come from New York City. And yet I think we're also grounded in certain optimistic ideals that come from my upbringing.

 

00;05;59;18 - 00;06;08;03

DP

Well, it's really great to hear. So let's dig in here and talk about your buildings. So tell us a little bit about 1515 Surf Avenue. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;06;08;05 - 00;06;58;14

JV

Well, first, we really can't do great projects without having a great client. And LCOR is our client on this. And they approached us with the building and it was really a breakthrough building for us. So Anthony Tortora, who is the partner at LCOR, knew me from another firm at which he had worked before, and he decided he wanted to give us a try.

 

But they did a competition and they put us against some really other serious architects, and we were really proud of the fact that we were able to prevail in that. I think it's all about the power of our ideas. It's about the design concepts that we bring, but also about solving our client's problems. And I think Studio V is really about those two things.

 

It's about maintaining ideals and an optimism about what a great design could be, and at the same time solving our client's real problems about bringing a project in on budget and doing something creative that they can actually build and that meets their needs.

 

00;06;58;17 - 00;07;01;28

DP

So how many people were involved in the competition to get the job?

 

00;07;02;04 - 00;07;45;09

JV

There were a handful of us. I put a couple of my best designers on it. It was a paid competition, albeit a small amount. Yes. And so we were up against these other serious firms. And really, I'm sure we spent three times the amount, but I was determined to do something special for it. And also I was inspired by Coney Island.

 

The principal, the partner, Anthony, actually grew up near there and he really was committed to the idea of remaking this neighborhood and that also fit studio visit. Those were really interested in transforming communities, rebuilding communities. And Coney Island has an incredible history and past and yet has suffered terribly under urban renewal and other elements. And so now we see this as one of the signature projects that's helping reestablish this really important and historic neighborhood.

 

00;07;45;17 - 00;07;51;07

DP

So that's a great place to start. So tell us a little bit about the history of the location where this building is.

 

00;07;51;14 - 00;08;49;12

JV

So this is right at the corner of Surf Avenue there, these great street names in Coney Island. You know, it's between Surf and Mermaid Avenue, and it's between 15th and 16th Streets. As a matter of fact, it's right across the street from a roller coaster and sits right on the beach with stunning views of the iconic Coney Island Beach and boardwalk.

 

So to me, I don't know if I'll ever get to work on a site again that is next to a roller coaster overlooking the Atlantic Ocean with stunning views of the historic parachute drop. It looks diagonally right down at Nathan's Hot Dogs. And it's catty corner to the iconic cyclone. So really, it's a fantastic site. Historically, all of these elements that I just described were part of it.

 

And historically it was part of the whole Coney Island landscape. But by the time we got there, it was a parking lot. There was nothing there. And so really it's an opportunity on this major avenue that had so much historic importance in Coney Island to really help rebuild one of the essential centers of this community.

 

00;08;49;19 - 00;08;55;18

DP

Yeah, you must have been amazed when you got out there and stood on that property and looked out, thought, wow, this is going to be really cool.

 

00;08;55;25 - 00;09;17;26

JV

Even now that construction is going along very well and it's fully tapped out and they're adding all the facade elements as we climb up through the building. It's stunning the relationship it has to the Manhattan skyline, to the ocean, to these iconic architectural rides and amusements and buildings. It really sits in the landscape and kind of draws these elements into it in a way like no other site I've ever had.

 

00;09;17;28 - 00;09;21;24

DP

So what was the scope of the project? What were the client's programmatic requirements?

 

00;09;21;27 - 00;10;02;00

JV

So it's very complex. It's two residential towers and it's mixed use. It has retail at the base and one of the towers is market rate and the other is affordable. And yet they wanted us to treat them both with the highest degree of quality, with a series of kind of astonishing amenities and public spaces that link them together, including a fantastic pool deck overlooking the ocean, overlooking the roller coaster, and a whole series of public spaces.

 

Public spaces, meaning spaces for the residents to share because, you know, there's a social life to a building, too. And I think this is one of the key elements of the building that we were inspired by the social life of residential buildings in New York and how we could create spaces that would bring people together.

 

00;10;02;07 - 00;10;14;15

DP

So let's talk a little bit about the building design. So we already discussed the site. There weren't any unique topographic features raised, just a giant flat parking lot. Was it a parking deck or was it just a giant lot?

 

00;10;14;21 - 00;11;14;17

JV

It was an open parking lot, and I guess the geographic features would just be these iconic buildings and structures that surrounded it and the ocean itself. The ocean is one of the key elements that did really influence the project, though, because there's a topography to the project, even though the site was flat that responds to the ocean. And that, of course, is resiliency.

 

You'd mentioned earlier, Doug, that we do a lot of waterfront projects. And one of the things for me is that this sits in the middle of a vast floodplain and we're creating 461 new residences, and we're really at the forefront of dealing with resiliency and climate change. We're very proud of the work we do there, including pro-bono work.

 

So one of the things we had to do is elevate the entire building and yet still really engage the streetscape. So as a matter of fact, this led to the main design concept, the vertical boardwalk, the idea of elevating the building with a series of step platforms that protects it, and major storm events such as Sandy, and yet also creates a series of spiraling public spaces that work their way up through the building and create these stunning views of the surrounding landscape.

 

00;11;14;24 - 00;11;23;13

DP

So that's a good way to segue. Tell us a little bit about the project restrictions, the zoning codes, how far off the ground to the building have to be raised?

 

00;11;23;16 - 00;12;56;02

JV

Sure. So of course, like most buildings in New York City, it's an as of right building. So we worked within the existing zoning ordinance. And so in a sense, some of the massing of the towers was pre-established city planning had done a rezoning of this community a few years before, and that actually led to this development and has helped catalyze the transformation of Coney Island.

 

But then within that, there are certain requirements from FEMA and from flood requirements. But I'll tell you also that the client was very supportive of this. We exceeded those requirements. We didn't just meet the code, we added additional feet of elevation. We did three feet of free board. On top of that, we really pride ourselves on exceeding the code requirements.

 

As a matter of fact, after we finished the initial permitting of the building, the city amended the code partly in response to advocating that we had done in order to allow buildings to increase their height, to allow extra elevation for climate change and have that not count against the development because it's a positive thing to lift the building up.

 

The other thing we did that was also important though, is not just lifting it up, it's still engaging the street. So for example, at the corner of 15th Street and Surf Avenue, we created this great porch as the client had this idea that we really need to bring back the streetscape, the retail streetscape, and that would be a fantastic site for a restaurant.

 

So we created this wonderful porch that has multiple levels that actually allows it to engage the street instead of being too far elevated seven or eight feet up. That's only three feet up. And we allow that to flood in a storm event. But it doesn't go into the building. And that way we can have these series of stepped platforms and public spaces that activate the streetscape and bring Surf Avenue back to life.

 

00;12;56;05 - 00;13;01;23

DP

So how do you do that? How do you make these objects that can flood and yet they're still functional?

 

00;13;01;29 - 00;13;53;26

JV

So we really worked with a great team of people, the overall residential levels and all the habitable levels are well above the floodplain. So they're really up to about elevation 13, which is three feet of freeboard above. These are NAVD 88, which is the datum that's used in New York City. And then for the lower areas, really the lobby is accessible.

 

So we're using flood barriers there to protect one tiny small area, which is a grade which allows the full lobby to be accessible. But all the areas are elevated and then the retail spaces are also elevated. But we stepped it down with this outdoor porch, and that's designed very specifically so that the floodwaters can come in, but they won't enter the building.

 

They just enter this kind of lower porch level that really engages the street. There's also a parking garage and that does go a bit below grade, and that is allowed to flood. But it has special vents and special technical requirements for the materials that allow it to be flooded and to drain out. And that's the right way to do it.

 

00;13;53;29 - 00;13;57;10

DP

So tell us about the building plans. We've got two buildings out there.

 

00;13;57;13 - 00;15;41;24

JV

So the building plans were really interesting. And this is one of the things we did in the competition. It's a little hard to describe, but there are the kind of inside corners of buildings where it's difficult to put residences, the kind of the reentrant in corners when you have large, complex residential buildings, it's difficult because you can't put windows there.

 

And so we came up with a really, I think, creative scheme, and that's actually what helped us win the competition. What we did is we took the left over the dead spaces where you could put windows and we created double height amenity spaces, public spaces for the residents, and we created the coolest, craziest collection of these spaces. There's a media library with a basketball court overlooking it and an elaborate kitchen and a pool deck and a gym.

 

All these different elements weave together and overlook one another. So we took the kind of hidden corners and places that you normally can't use in the development. And we created instead vast, soaring two story spaces overlooking one another, creating this almost voyeuristic experience where one space in one activity overlooks another. We find today, too, in a post-COVID environment or whatever environment we're in now, that more people are living and working in more creative ways, sometimes they're working from home, sometimes they're going to work.

 

And we think the idea of having this fantastic residence right on the Coney Island beach, but then you can work within the building. We created many different spaces for people to interact socially, for co-working, for living, for entertaining. And so these staggered multilevel spaces work their way all the way up through the plan. And it's even kind of telegraphed under the facade with this series of folded plans that you referred to earlier that really bring you all the way up to the rooftop and to the pool deck. And so this was really the big move on the plan. And the client was so excited about that that they awarded us the project.

 

00;15;41;27 - 00;15;45;04

DP

So how long was the design process then?

 

00;15;45;04 - 00;16;36;15

JV

Overall to do a building of this complexity, the complete design probably takes about a year. One reason why I think this was also a great client is we really collaborated from the beginning. We didn't just do a design and then hope it would work out. We worked with them at every step with their marketing people, their technical people, their construction people.

 

We did budgeting throughout, which is really important to me. As a matter of fact, it's critical that if we're going to do a creative design, we have to work with the client in order to figure out how we're going to hit their budget exactly, which I'm very proud of with this project. For example, we have a whole series of highly sculptural elements that are made of GFRC, glass fiber reinforced concrete, and they really wrap around the brick elements, which we'll talk about a little bit later and kind of create these wonderful transitions.

 

These are very complex forms, and we really had to work closely from the beginning to make sure we could meet budgets. Same thing on the brick. We're using some really unusual and more expensive and more fine forms of brick and custom brick that we'll talk about. And we had to make sure that we could really work within budgets and yet maximize the impact and create something that would be really special that hadn't really been done in this neighborhood before.

 

00;16;51;25 - 00;17;02;12

DP

So that's a good segway to style choice and the style that your office works within and the style that you chose for this building. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

00;17;02;18 - 00;17;58;10

JV

Well, I believe I'm an unrepentant modernist. I believe that we live in an astonishing time in the 21st century when we're redefining so many things technologically, socially. So I believe very much in creating works that are of our time and that are contemporary. But I love to combine that with traditional understandings of urbanism, of the way people live within cities and materials.

 

So, for example, a project like this really combines both of those where we're really using first we're creating very unusual forms, complex shapes. We're working with special computer technology in order to model these. We're working with computer numerically controlled bills and robots to actually build components of the building. And on the other hand, we're working with Brick, which is one of the most ancient materials that we have, one of the most enduring and beautiful materials.

 

And I love the idea that we're combining these different elements together to create something that is both timeless and of our time.

 

00;17;58;12 - 00;18;06;26

DP

So you said design was about a year long after that. What about city review? And then ultimately it's still under construction right?

 

00;18;06;28 - 00;18;59;24

JV

So I would say the total design process to complete all the technical documents and we did this project in Revit, we did it to the highest technical standards and construction documents, which is really helpful to figure out the different components takes about a year overall for the full design, but really at the same time as we're doing that, we're working on the permitting.

 

And so the permitting was really ready to go right at the conclusion of that. And because the project was as of right as we were developing the final technical documents, we were already going through the process of doing permits and then obtaining the foundation permit and then moving directly into constructions that really allowed us to facilitate the schedule and go quickly.

 

I would say one of the challenges on the design, which is really one of its greatest features, is the geothermal, because that required a lot of planning up ahead and doing a geothermal project of this scale in New York was very difficult in the construction because it required coordinating all of the geothermal wells with the foundation elements and doing that right from the beginning.

 

00;18;59;27 - 00;19;02;25

DP

So whose idea was it to do geothermal?

 

00;19;02;28 - 00;20;13;23

JV

I have to give the client credit again, like we really do a lot of projects that address sustainability, and I was very excited to do the largest geothermal project in New York, but it really required the commitment of the client and they had a great partner in Eco Save who was the engineering and geothermal firm that actually helped develop the geothermal systems and also work out the financial models that would allow it to work.

 

So this was really a terrific thing, but the client gets the credit and that's really also due to the changing codes in New York City, which are so stringent that the client felt it was worth the investment in new sustainable technologies. Well, actually, geothermal is a very old technology, but applying it in new ways, in ways that aren't typically done.

 

One of the things I'm most proud of is the second largest geothermal project in New York today, after this one's finished, is called St Patrick's Cathedral. So really doing geothermal on this scale for a residential rental building is the bread and butter of New York City, that kind of makes up the fabric of neighborhoods for me as groundbreaking. And also one of the buildings is an affordable building.

 

So the fact that we could do that level of sustainable design and help combat some of the future issues we're dealing with energy and climate change with this kind of building, I think is the extraordinary thing.

 

00;20;13;25 - 00;20;33;07

DP

So you said that you brought in the contractor early, so as a high end residential architect, we typically bring a contractor in right after schematic design to take a look at the project and help us determine whether or not we're going to be even close in terms of price, did that help you guys working with the contractor early on?

 

00;20;33;14 - 00;21;24;10

JV

Absolutely. And again, L Corps had a partnership with LRC Construction, So they're the construction manager doing the job. And really we worked with them on a pre-construction basis closely with the client. You know, often it's described as sort of a three legged stool with architects, you know, the architect, the owner and the contractor and really if one leg of the stool doesn't hold up, you know, it falls down.

 

And so really all three of us worked together intensely from the beginning. And this was critical, for example, with some of the brick elements, because we wanted to work with this beautiful format called Roman Maximus, very unusual format. We really found that very compelling. It was something we wanted to do from the beginning of the job and we had to work out how would we meet budgets, what would the cost of that be, how would we integrate that with the other elements, how much of it would we use? And so we really worked out those elements of the pricing very early in the schematic phases of the design. Instead of waiting till the end.

 

00;21;24;13 - 00;21;28;01

DP

Did you ever think about using another material rather than rrick?

 

00;21;28;03 - 00;21;56;05

JV

You know, we looked at different things for the building and we looked at GFRC at first for the whole building. But I love the idea of brick because I think it's such a classic material and in the end we ended up doing a hybrid where the brick is the majority material for the building, which I think works very well.

 

And the GFRC elements, these kind of sculptural concrete pieces are sort of the transitional pieces around the front entries and around the main amenity spaces and public spaces of the building. So I think it's very balanced by having both of them, although brick is the main material.

 

00;21;56;07 - 00;21;58;20

DP

So how did you end up dealing with Glen Gary.

 

00;21;58;22 - 00;23;19;27

JV

So Glen Gary really was very special for the project because they had this really unique product we've been looking for actually for years before I'd even heard of Glen Gary, I loved Roman Brick for my own studies. Even as a student at Cornell and at Harvard, I would travel extensively around the world. I would travel through Europe, and I loved the old Roman brick, which of course is a longer thinner brick.

 

And I saw in contemporary brick manufacturing they were starting to return to that. As a matter of fact, for years I tried to use it and so few manufacturers would really work with it. Then we found Glen Gary was doing something even more special. It was a longer thinner brick, what they call Roman Maximus, if you will. It's even more elongated and there's something special about that proportion.

 

It doesn't just stack up in the way that regular bricks do, which is fine too, but it almost creates a beautiful surface. And then we also did the detailing which was very important, where we created deep reveals along the horizontal edges of the brick. It's an old trick that Frank Lloyd Wright used to use. And so by creating a raked joint at the horizontals, it kind of creates this beautiful texture, almost like corduroy, and that along with the long, thin proportions of the brick, gives it a kind of a beautiful surface quality that's much more monolithic and much more beautiful.

 

And so we use this material all around the base of the building in order to really accentuate that and create a very strong presence to the street.

 

00;23;20;00 - 00;23;22;05

DP

So you had a good mason from the get go.

 

00;23;22;11 - 00;23;33;08

JV

We had to work very closely with our Mason and work out all of the details. Let's just say that there were a lot of mockups and a lot of reviews in order to make sure that we would maintain the quality of the project.

 

00;23;33;10 - 00;23;40;07

DP

So did you do drawings in house? First of combinations of brick or colors or you worked most of that out in the field?

 

00;23;40;09 - 00;24;06;17

JV

We actually worked extensively on all of that, so we had to work out special brick shapes. We did do curved bricks because they're a series of curves throughout the project, which were critical and we had to do specials for that. We work closely with the technicians at Glen-Gery as well as with the masons in order to work out how to do the specials.

 

We also had a great facade consultant, Frank Seta & Associates who were really integral to helping us work out the different components of the brick, the attachment, the waterproofing. They're really terrific.

 

00;24;06;24 - 00;24;16;10

DP

Interesting. We had talked a little bit about geothermal and sustainability. Was that a larger issue for some of the wall systems, insulation, etc.?

 

00;24;16;14 - 00;24;30;23

JV

Absolutely. I mean, the building has a very, very robust energy envelope and again, as I say, helped us with that as well as we did full energy modeling with IMG Engineering of the building in order to make sure that it met and exceeded really all the sustainability standards. Absolutely.

 

00;24;30;26 - 00;24;34;23

DP

So you talked a little bit about Revit. How long has your office been on Revit?

 

00;24;34;25 - 00;25;44;26

JV

That is a great question, Doug. So really, I guess we probably did our first Revit project ten years ago, and it was pretty early for us. We've always embraced new forms of technology and always embraced tools that help us be better designers. But I would say in the last several years, we've really moved towards using Revit on all of our larger projects.

 

We don't use it on every project yet, but more and more, even in our own office building, even on our own studio building that we're building out now for ourselves, we're doing the project and Revit, so we're moving towards using it now on smaller projects as well as definitely on all of our larger ones. I have to tell you what I like about it, in addition to the technical aspects, the way it helps you with construction takeoffs, integrating different components in real time of the architectural drawings, having them refer to each other, updating drawings. But I love it as a design tool. And in this project where we had this whole series of really interesting, complex spaces, Revit was terrific for actually allowing us to really make cuts through the building and understand the relationship of all the different components, relationship of inside to outside, relationship of one space to another, relationship of one material and how it meets another. Revit was fantastic as a design tool and really helped us do this building in particular.

 

00;25;45;04 - 00;25;57;23

DP

Yeah, I would imagine clients. Well, I already know this. I mean, clients love looking at three dimensional renderings. They come in and or you send them drawings by email and they're blown away right? I mean, it's like the building's already done.

 

00;25;57;25 - 00;26;53;19

JV

Renderings are a big part of what we do. And it's interesting here we were talking a little bit earlier because to me, one of the things I'm impressed by is we work really hard to make the renderings reflect the final design, but it's almost impossible to convey ideas of color and lighting and in renderings. People often think they represent reality, but you can manipulate it.

 

One of the things we did in the renderings for this project was we really tried to convey the color and character of the brick, where you could really sense the warmth of it when the light hit it and how it changes color and becomes a little bit more neutral and shadow. And it creates a real modeling for the building in sunlight, which I think is really critical.

 

And something I'm proud of with the renderings that we did is I'm amazed as the brick goes on now, I can see that it really reflects exactly how the brick is operating and how it takes on different colors and textures in changing patterns of light. It's especially important on a site like this, which is open and facing south directly overlooking the ocean. So it really gets tremendous light.

 

00;26;53;21 - 00;26;58;00

DP

Did you guys end up with any masonry on the interior? Any brick on the interior?

 

00;26;58;02 - 00;27;51;25

JV

So I love the idea of bringing inside and outside together. And so there are a few key places where we brought the brick into the interior. Actually, in the lobby we're doing something very special where I brought the brick right into the inside and actually made it a major feature right behind the front desk, kind of the entry point and I even pushed and pulled that great Roman Maximus brick to give it fantastic texture.

 

And we lit it beautifully. We're working with Susanne Tillotson, a remarkable lighting designer who's going to light up the texture of that. We're going to put artwork there too, and we brought brick into a few other places in the interior. Also, it's at the rooftop space that we call the Skydeck, where it folds in and becomes the base for some of the seating.

 

There's an area that we call the living room with the kitchen that overlooks a giant garden over the parking garage. And we pulled the brick in there too. It's in a few places in the entry sequence, going up to the gardens from the lobby. So I like the idea of referring to the brick. It's mostly on the outside, but there's a couple of key places where it makes its appearance on the interior.

 

00;27;52;02 - 00;28;10;29

DP

Might be a dumb question. You do a lot of projects along the water. Of course it affects the materials and the choices you make, but is it a large consideration for you in most of the buildings that you do? I see a lot of wood on the interior at the front entryway here. What are you guys doing? Are you treating those materials differently?

 

00;28;11;01 - 00;28;42;01

JV

Absolutely. So it's very important when doing projects on the water that we have to address that it really probably affects other things more. It certainly affects our window specifications. It affects the coatings used on the windows, which have to be to a higher standard. Again, this is where FSA was a great help to us. Brick is a great material for the waterfront because it's really a rain screen.

 

Brick doesn't really stop the water. The water barriers are behind the brick, but the brick itself is so durable that it does really well in, you know, difficult environments such as Coney Island where we really have a maritime environment and a lot of salt in the air.

 

00;28;42;03 - 00;28;44;22

DP

So how big was the team that worked on the job?

 

00;28;44;24 - 00;28;51;07

JV

Gosh, it's hard to say because there were so many different people. I would say, you know, a dozen people. And then, of course, there's a really wonderful team of consultants that we worked with. So a very large number, probably 12 or 15 consultants who really played a key role. And then the client too. It was really a tremendous team and a really great group effort.

 

00;29;06;26 - 00;29;16;01

DP

So did your office or you in specific learn anything unusual or interesting along this journey of making these two buildings?

 

00;29;16;07 - 00;30;10;16

JV

You know, I learned things from every project. My favorite thing about my job today is that I feel like I'm certainly teaching a great deal and hopefully working hard too, if I can lead and inspire. But I find my younger staff are teaching me every day. They're showing me how they're using the technology, they're showing me better ways of doing things.

 

So I learned a tremendous amount in this. I certainly learned a lot about and I thought I knew quite a lot about brick detailing, doing special bricks, some of the special fabrication we're doing, the robotic fabrication with the GFRC. And to me, every project is really an opportunity to figure out how can we do that even better? How can we apply to the next job, how can we build our body of knowledge?

 

I also love the fact that all of our projects are different. Our real signature at Studio V is that each design is really unique to that site, that client. So for example, we're doing another building with this client now on a different site in New Rochelle, and it's a completely different look and feel, even if the program is somewhat similar.

 

00;30;10;22 - 00;30;23;20

DP

It must be reassuring for the client, right? Because they feel a lot more special because the building you're designing every time the program changes and the site changes, you change with that, right? So that must be great for them.

 

00;30;23;25 - 00;31;20;04

JV

Exactly. Doug I don't believe in the idea of like the architect as an agent where they kind of put their name on it even. That's why I said it's not Valgora Architects, it's Studio V, it's a collective of people. And to me what's really important is that we find a solution for each project. We definitely have obsessions and themes that I think work through our work.

 

For example, we were just in the Venice Biennale early this year and we're still up actually, it's up through November and we showcase this project along with four other projects. And so one of the themes of that show was called On Edge, where we talked about all of our work, which is about edges, gaps, interstices, kind of repairing the frayed edges of our cities.

 

And Coney Island is one of them, both literally and figuratively as a community, as well as an oceanfront site. And so to me, the idea of instilling a series of social spaces within that and yet kind of repairing the edge of this community, remaking Surf Avenue and really helping be an agent for transformation is really what our work is about.

 

00;31;20;07 - 00;31;28;17

DP

So you've been an architect for some time. If you could give your younger self some career advice, can you think of something you'd tell yourself many years ago?

 

00;31;28;19 - 00;32;50;11

JV

I guess I've certainly made many mistakes in my career, and although those have been things that I've learned greatly from. But the other thing that's driven my career is optimism. Where I would often go from project to project, place to place, city to city early in my career, I actually found myself going from San Francisco to London to Toronto and eventually ending up in New York.

 

And really I feel lucky about that. So I guess in terms of advice, I'm wondering if there was a kind of serendipity to that kind of an unplanned nature to that, and I would almost hate to interfere with that. I think the freedom that I had in my youth to try different things, learn from different people, live different places, was actually the most transformative thing.

 

So I guess I would say that to myself, but I guess I was lucky enough just to fall into that. Maybe some of it came from where I grew up because I guess I couldn't really stay in Buffalo when my dad worked in the steel mills when I was part of those industrial buildings. That was just at the point when that was all failing and they were getting ready to tear it down.

 

Now, the mill where my father worked is no longer there, but now my greatest inspiration is to go back and try to reinvent those communities. One of the things I'm most proud of is that I'm going back to Buffalo and doing work there now to bring back my hometown and to create transformative buildings there, including at the old grain elevators at Silo City are other projects in the heart of Buffalo, like where we're doing projects over in the Elmwood District, our wonderful historic district where we're doing a new building now.

 

00;32;50;13 - 00;32;57;07

DP

Wow. Well Jay it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about Studio V Architects and yourself?

 

00;32;57;09 - 00;33;23;22

JV

Well, they can certainly find us online at StudioV.com. They can find us at our Instagram site. And most of all, you know, if you're ever in New York City, we'd encourage you to come see us. Come visit us at our studio itself, which is going to be at 111 East 29th Street. Or visit some of our projects, such as the Empire Stores, one of our most iconic projects in Brooklyn that's been very popular with people. We'd really welcome to have people get in touch with us or please come by the studio.

 

00;33;23;26

DP

Thank you very much.

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;16

Doug Patt (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;19 - 00;00;34;08

Todd Poisson (TP)

They wanted to expand the building, and a vertical expansion is taboo for individual landmarks. So, in order to get them any significant square footage additions up there, we wanted to go bold. Why not propose a more robust, bold roof scape? And given the history of Chief Tamanend being the namesake of Tammany and with this desire to really honor the Lenape, why not be inspired by the Lenape's origin story of a rising turtle coming out of the water, shedding water?

 

00;00;34;11 - 00;03;33;28

DP

This is my guest, Todd Poisson. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we’ll highlight Todd's project, 44 Union Square.

44 Union Square sits at the northeast corner of Union Square Park in Manhattan. The project includes a remarkable contemporary steel and glass dome addition to the storied landmark building on Union Square's northeast corner for Redding International Ink.

The new building expands the usable square footage of the historic building and adds an iconic anchor to Union Square. The building's former life was as the last headquarters for the political machine, Tammany Hall, an American organization founded in 1786, famous for controlling New York City and state politics for a time.

The restoration and expansion of the building includes preserving two facades, new bronze storefronts in the likeness of the original 1928 design and a three-story rooftop addition. This wild steel and glass building cap is composed of a self-supporting free form shell grid dome atop a reconstructed hipped roof with gray terracotta sunshades.

If you're wondering, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously approved this incredibly creative design.

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault.

Today we're talking to Todd Poisson. Todd received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University. He became a partner at BKSK in 2007 and has over 30 years of experience in the architecture profession. Todd has been responsible for the design and construction of some of the firm's most ambitious projects, ranging between residential mixed use and institutional works. Recent award-winning projects include the Gansevoort Row redevelopment for Aurora Capital and 44 Union Square, which we'll discuss today.

Other notable recent projects of Todd's are 200 East 21st Street, a 20 story, highly sustainable residential tower in Gramercy for Alpha Development and 470 Columbus, a passive house, multifamily development on the Upper West Side for the Rowe Corporation. Todd is currently a volunteer with the American Youth Soccer Organization and a long-term coach of regional athletic leagues.

In addition, Todd is a lecturer and volunteer interviewer for Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. So welcome, Todd. Nice to have you with us today.

We're going to talk about 44 Union Square. But before we do, I should mention that we recently interviewed one of Todd's peers at BKSK, David Kubik. He told us a bit about the firm. But for those who haven't listened to that episode, tell us a little bit about BKSK in New York City. Where are you guys located? What's the size of the firm and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;34;01 - 00;04;31;07

TP

Sure. So, thank you for having me. BKSK Architects is headquartered in New York City in Manhattan, not too far away from your center here on West 38th Street in the garment center of Manhattan. We've been in business since 1985 celebrating 38 years. David and I are kind of second-generation partners. We've been in business about 38 years. We have over 200 built projects. David and I both joined the firm about 20 years ago plus and were made partners about the same time.

BKSK specializes in many things. We like to say if you know New York, you know our work. Our work is kind of separated between, generally speaking, cultural, institutional work, libraries, religious structures, parks, and commercial buildings and residential buildings. Residential projects ranging from new condominium buildings, towers or private residential projects, combining units or renovating someone's home.

 

00;04;31;10 - 00;04;34;01

DP

Do you guys do residential projects outside of New York City?

 

00;04;34;07 - 00;04;45;21

TP

We do. In fact, we have a little annex office out in Oklahoma City that we had so much Midwest work. Now we have private residential projects, upstate New York and in Connecticut and in New Jersey.

 

00;04;45;23 - 00;04;53;11

DP

So, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up at BKSK? How long have you been there – I believe you just said that. What's your role in the office?

 

00;04;53;13 - 00;05;49;13

TP

Well, I joined back in 1998. So, 25 years ago I answered a New York Times wanted ad – remember those, actually where you had to get the newspaper Saturday, the Sunday paper? You got to subscribe to get them a day early to rifle through the want ads. And I answered a want ad for a project manager at an architecture firm called Burns, Kendall, Schieferdecker, with this crazy name. I thought it was a law firm. Back then there was no websites. You couldn't look up the firms. You had to go to these places, and you'd open the front door and you'd be disappointed but had to sit through the interviews to see what kind of work they did.

But the moment I met George Schieferdecker – he interviewed me 25 years ago, he's still there, one of the founding partners – knew immediately that I had found the mothership. You know, these guys knew each other from school way back. They were so intellectual. They all had lives outside the office. This was not a sweatshop kind of architecture firm that one sometimes encounters. And I've just had just a great time with them.

 

00;05;49;16 - 00;06;05;23

DP

It's funny, when you were saying that, all these awful memories started flooding in of making one phone call after another and going through the phone book and then showing up and knowing nothing about the work of that architect, and endless interviews. So where were you working before BKSK?

 

00;06;05;25 - 00;06;23;21

TP

I was here in Manhattan already. I was working for Stephen Jacobs Group, an architect who specialized, at the time, in new construction residential work. So, I really cut my teeth as a young architect in the field, hardcore development construction experience in Manhattan, which has paid off a great deal.

 

00;06;23;24 - 00;06;28;20

DP

So now you're partners. So, what's your role like now? Has it changed significantly?

 

00;06;28;22 - 00;07;48;02

TP

Sure. So over time, our roles change as partners as we grow in the firm. David and I and Julie Nelson, the other second-generation partner. Julie, David, and I really grew up there and our roles have evolved from being in the trenches and drawing every line and every detail for projects that get built. Lucky for us, our sites tend to be in Manhattan.

We're also a little bit regional. We have some work in New Jersey and Philadelphia and Connecticut, but still about 80% in Manhattan. So, we are very lucky. We could visit sites very easily to get hands on experience. And so, our roles really evolved quickly into project management, into client facing roles, consultant coordination, field work. When we were promoted to partners, our roles shift gradually into more finding work, finding new work, finding repeat clients, developing those relationships to continue getting new projects, setting the design direction for new projects, and then just kind of being the face of the project.

We pride ourselves to being involved with every phase of design as partners. We don't just disappear after landing a new project. We really stay involved in the trenches at meetings. I just came from a mechanical coordination meeting for a new hotel project we're doing. I really love that stuff. I really love the details – love the field work as well as the design and the client facing opportunities.

 

00;07;48;04 - 00;07;51;00

DP

I'm curious how big was BKSK when you joined them?

 

00;07;51;07 - 00;07;54;08

TP

So, they were about 15 people, I think, in 1998.

 

00;07;54;12 - 00;07;55;15

DP

And now you're 50.

 

00;07;55;15 - 00;07;57;19

TP

We're about 50, 52 people. Yes.

 

00;07;57;26 - 00;08;03;24

DP

Interesting. I love the field stuff, too. I love the people stuff. It's just the best part of the job.

 

00;08;03;26 - 00;08;21;19

TP

The soap opera arcs during it, like a seven, eight year project are just terrific. We refer to them at project meetings or say previously on this project in season two, you might recall that the elevator consultant said the opposite of what you just said. Like years later, it's a way to keep things light at these construction meetings.

 

00;08;21;23 - 00;08;22;20

DP

That is really funny.

 

00;08;23;04 - 00;08;43;02

TP

We try to keep it light and funny, and the construction industry has changed a great deal, as you could imagine, along with everything else. But in the last 35 years since I've been working, you know, sites are tech savvy. It seems to be it's a much more civilized kind of operation, and there's opportunities to really develop great relationships with the builders and consultants.

 

00;08;43;09 - 00;08;50;28

DP

Great insight. Totally true. So, let's dig in here and talk about the building. Tell us about 44 Union Square. So how did your office get the project?

 

00;08;51;00 - 00;17;44;06

TP

So back in 2012, the phone rang. It was Michael Buckley calling from Edifice Real Estate Partners. He invited us – because of our strength of our record of getting very challenging approvals through the Landmark Commission of New York City – invited us to join, I think it was a group of five firms that competed in a competition that lasted a month of design work, and then we each presented our work to the owner, Margaret Cotter of Redding International that month.

The design happened to coincide with when Hurricane Sandy hit Manhattan. So, our office, like many offices in Lower Manhattan, lost power. So, I brought the competition work home with me, and at the time I had a five-year-old daughter, and she sat in my lap, and we drew together. It really resonates with me to this day because fast forward ten years and there we were finishing the project during a global pandemic where we all had to work from home again. So, this project really bookended two kind of catastrophes in New York City, starting with Hurricane Sandy, working from home and then ending with the pandemic and closing out the project in 2020, using my daughter's big scooter to scoot down to Union Square. During the height of the pandemic, as work was finishing up.

So anyway, Michael invited BKSK to join this limited design competition. I dived into the history of the building. We're all students of history. We feel that every project, even if it's not a landmark project, has its history, has context to learn from. And immediately I learned the story of Tammany Hall that was different from what we're all taught in school, at least in the Northeast. We're taught that Tammany Hall is synonymous with greed and corruption and graft. And while that's all true, Tammany Hall is not named after an Irish politician of the 19th century, which you might think given the Boss Tweed stories and the background of Tammany Hall, that's in the social conscious. But in fact, the namesake of Tammany Hall is an indigenous 17th century chief, Chief Tamanend of the Lenape, who signed a peaceful coexistence treaty with William Penn in 1680, an event that's documented in our Capitol's rotunda in Washington, DC, rules that really held in place for quite some time.

Chief Tamanend was revered and legendary to the European settlers as a native representative who welcomed visitors and who wanted to listen to all voices. And listening to all voices became kind of the theme of these early social clubs, which became known as Tammany Societies. We were surprised to learn that there were dozens of these Tammany societies that dotted the East Coast from New York to Cleveland in the early days of the Republic, and I think they even predated the revolution. I think they, maybe, formalized themselves after the revolution, but the clubhouses began even before the American Revolution, where people joined and sat around talking about what ideals the New Republic should represent. And they chose Chief Tamanend to represent them as a symbol of listening to all voices. Over the centuries that story was lost. The only Tammany society to make it into the 20th century was ours here in New York, only to become known for craft, greed and corruption.

So right from the beginning we thought it was an opportunity to rebrand the building in Chief Tamanend’s name – kind of erase this idea that Tammany is associated with just greed and corruption, but is associated with the indigenous population of North America, of the Northeast, especially of the Lenape. Given that background, looking at this Neo-Georgian red brick and limestone building at the corner Union Square, which was designed originally to emulate Federal Hall downtown. Federal Hall is where George Washington was inaugurated on the balcony. Federal Hall was demolished in 1812, but it looked like Tammany Hall does today, except Federal Hall had a much more robust roof line, had a big hipped roof and a cupola, whereas Tammany Hall and Union Square chose the architects Thompson, Holmes, and Converse out of Philadelphia in 1928 – chose to replicate the federal Hall facade quite literally, but they gave Tammany Hall here in Union Square a much more tepid roof.

And so, the thought was, given the brief from Edifice for Redding International, they wanted to expand the building, they wanted to rebrand the building, but they knew it was a landmark. They knew it was an individual New York City landmark. So, demolition was out of the question. And a vertical expansion is taboo for individual landmarks. Typically, the New York City Landmarks Commission approves maybe a handful each year, but they're very difficult to convince the commission that it's an appropriate addition to the base landmark. Union Square is such a vast public space that we knew immediately that even if you put like a shampoo bottle on top of the roof, it would be seen from across the square. So, in order to get them any significant square footage addition up there, we wanted to go bold. We felt that, given this Neo-Georgian base that used to have or was modeled after a building that had a bigger roof, why not propose a more robust, bold roof scape?

So, the question is what form should that take? And given the history of Chief Tamanend being the namesake of Tammany, and with this desire to really honor the Lenape, why not be inspired by the Lenape’s origin story of a giant turtle rising from the sea, creating land to give this Neo-Georgian building the dome that it would have, could have, should have had if Tammany Hall perhaps was more honest with its intentions in 1928, when Thompson, Holmes, and Converse designed this building, which really cloaked them in kind of quasi-governmental garb at this very federal style red brick and limestone building with a pediment, portico, but a tepid roof.

So, we decided to model a very contemporary glass and steel dome modeled after a rising turtle coming out of the water, shedding water as the kind of volume to hold, to house three additional floors. And the landmarks, as you mentioned, Landmarks Commission unanimously approved it. We only had to go back once to tweak the height of the dome and some of the details.

The dome kind of erupts from a reconstructed hip roof. So, we removed the slate hip roof and recreated it in the same inclined plane with terracotta sunshades that intermittently cover the beginning of the glass and steel dome. So, the glass and steel dome starts off as in the form of a hip roof, but then quickly transforms into this parametric shell that looks like classically proportioned when one stands in front of it in Union Square. Looks like any other dome on a classic building, in terms of its proportion. But when one turns the corner and looks more obliquely on it, its organic source kind of becomes more apparent. You kind of sense something is going on there and it's turtle like as it faces north over this arched pediment that was top of the Tammany Hall's balustrade in the middle of the East 17th Street North facade.

 

The original building had this odd arch pediment that was kind of just vertically cantilever in there. We didn't quite realize what it was until we looked more into the history of Tammany Hall. And sure enough, they used to – before this building was built in 1928 – they occupied a clubhouse on East 14th Street down at the other corner of Union Square. And on top of that building is a giant arched, decorative element with, in fact, a 15-foot-tall statue of Chief Tamanend. That building was demolished for ConEd’s expansion in the 1920s, and that's what spurred Tammany Hall to move to this location on the northeast corner of Union Square. Chief Tamanend is only recalled on our facade in 1928 with a headshot, a limestone medallion that faces, on the north facade, over what was Tammany Hall's front door. So, the classical portico facade that faces Union Square was really always a commercial facade. The ground floor was always a retail store location. In 1928 was a manufacturer's trust bank, for example. And now just last week, we celebrated the grand opening of Petco as the new national headquarters giant, 30,000 square foot new store in the ground floor cellar and second floor of the building.

So, it's still a retail presence. And then the upper floors are remodeled to be open office space. So Tammany Hall's front door used to be below that arched pediment facing northeast 17th Street and that's where we decided to kind of turn the turtle's head on the roof. So, the glass dome takes on a little bit more of a turtle-like form as it turns its head to give that arched pediment a little bit of a home. And we think it gives it a little bit more of a reason to exist than it ever did before. And it signals that that was Tammany's front door, once upon a time.

 

00;17;44;08 - 00;18;00;17

DP

Wow. Some great information. There's so much to talk about here, you know, it reminds me of - I'm still a big fan of Coop Himmelblau, it's far more organized, right – but it reminds me of that kind of approach to architecture. So, there were five entries. Did you see the entries?

 

00;18;00;23 - 00;18;39;25

TP

We never saw the other entries. We presented our work to Margaret at Redding, like December of 2012, after a bit of a delay because of Hurricane Sandy. We were awarded the project. It took about a year for contracts and everything to be negotiated to become their architect, but we were awarded the project so roughly late 2013. We brought it to the Landmarks Commission in, I believe in 2014. We received final building department and Landmarks approval in the following year or so, and then it took a few years to build. It was interrupted a bit by the pandemic, but we finished. Construction was finished in 2020.

 

00;18;39;28 - 00;18;42;16

DP

So, start to finish, how long was it then?

 

00;18;42;19 - 00;18;54;08

TP

From the day the phone rang in 2012 to 2020. So about eight years. We've stayed on call as the landlord's architect to help coordinate work for the tenants looking at space inside.

 

00;18;54;13 - 00;18;58;17

DP

And this was mostly a renovation project, but there was some new construction?

 

00;18;58;24 - 00;20;29;26

TP

So that's great that you ask that because it appears from a lot of photographs and even as you walk around it and even when you're in it, it's hard to realize that it's actually a new building behind the 100-year-old street walls. Everything was removed except the two street-facing walls. So, we think that's a real success, that people think it is a rooftop addition with maybe a little renovation inside, because that really was the intent to be as deferential and respectful of the historic landmark as possible. But, in fact, everything was removed. The historic masonry walls were decoupled from the structure. They were braced in place by tower braces that had their own foundation systems through the sidewalk, including through a giant vault that lines the 17th Street side that has a giant ConEd steam pipe running through it. So very complex coordination that the structural engineers at Thornton Tomasetti coordinated with our construction managers at CNY to develop this very intricate tower bracing system.

I should mention Buro Happold also as engineers of the project. So, the facades were decoupled from the structure. Everything was removed inside, including the foundation. A deeper foundation was dug to give the building a very deep cellar and six new stories. So, what was a three-story building with the little caretaker's apartment hidden behind the hipped roof at the front is now a 70,000 square foot class-A commercial building, growing from about 35,000 to begin with.

 

00;20;29;29 - 00;20;32;23

DP

So, you had to match the existing brick.

 

00;20;32;26 - 00;24;16;27

TP

So yes, finally we could talk about brick. Big part of the project was restoring those two street walls, the two 100-year-old historic street walls that are red brick and limestone, modeled after Federal Hall downtown. We researched the brick. Our design partners at Buro Happold gave us a roadmap – and the restoration contractors at Pullman – very detailed road map of the two street facades of which parts needed to be replaced. But remarkably, not a lot of the brick had to be removed. We did repoint 100% of the brick, meaning partially removing, breaking back the mortar joints and replacing the mortar. The front about three-quarters-inch of mortar on all the joints, but only replaced maybe about 15, 10%, maybe less of the brick.

The brick we found; we researched where the brick was in 1928. It was from the old Virginia brick company in Salem, Virginia. And we found an advertisement in 1929 after the building was completed, and they are bragging about their new building on Union Square, and they are linking it – as a Virginia company, they’re proud of this project for many reasons – but including the fact that Tammany Hall was linked to Thomas Jefferson's ideals and Thomas Jefferson, of course, is from Virginia and is famous for designing his home at Monticello. So, the old Virginia brick company has this advertisement that we found in the Archives of Public Library here in New York that they link the brick here at Tammany Hall to the brick used at Monticello. But if you read the fine print, it's not literally the same brick, it's not from the same kilns. They say it's, quote, “in the same size and made in the same kind of cherry and maple molds as those of Jefferson's beloved Monticello.” So even though Salem, Virginia, which is right next to Roanoke, Virginia, still is about, these days, even a two hour drive from Monticello, they wanted to connect themselves to the legacy of Thomas Jefferson with this new building for Tammany Hall, which was pretending to be or, you know, acting as a quasi-governmental building.

They were really a social agency too. We shouldn't forget that even though that they were known for terrible greed and corruption and fixed elections and did all kinds of bad stuff, they really operated as a social service organization for newly arrived immigrants here in New York City. So, they, however, used Lenape iconography in ways that weren't so appealing to us, from our point of view, looking back. They didn't care for the land of a people. They use their imagery. They used Chief Tamanend's name, but they didn't necessarily care for the Lenape people. And we wanted to reintroduce the Lenape authentic voice into this project. So early on, right after we won the competition, we reached out to the Lenape center here in Manhattan. We wanted to make sure that we weren't offending people by the use of Chief Tamanend’s clan's symbol of the rising turtle. We met with Joe Baker and Hadrien Coumans, some of the co-founders of the Lenape Center here in Manhattan, and they were thrilled. I was so relieved with their reaction when we showed them this design, a good ten years ago now. And they've been friends ever since. They've been great proponents of the project. They supported it through the regulatory process, writing letters to the Landmarks Commission, appearing with us side by side. So, they've been a great partner with this, and we've shared the design as it developed with them. So, we like to think of them as one of our collaborators in this project. It wasn't part of the brief, it wasn't part of the commercial real estate project, but we kind of thought it was very important to bring an authentic voice to this project from the Lenape point of view.

 

00;24;16;29 - 00;24;28;08

DP

So, we know that you guys had to match the existing brick out there. Was it challenging to find a brick that you could use, and what was that process? What did you ultimately go with?

 

00;24;28;10 - 00;25;50;02

TP

So, looking at the existing conditions of the brick walls, they were in remarkably good shape, considering it was 100-year-old building. We removed maybe five, ten percent of them. We used our construction manager partners at CNY, hired Pullman, incredibly talented folk at Pullman to restore the brick. They used, I think it was like a four-inch diameter grinder blade to remove the first, say, three quarters of an inch of mortar out of all the joints. 100% of the joints were repointed with mortar that we selected to match the original mortar.

The bricks themselves are an incredible mixture of Glen-Gery molded brick, and Heathcote, and spec sand DD-58, and Catawba, and a Roanoke Original. So that is all mixed in to create the dappled, dark red, velvety, rich red brick that are dappled with a very dark rowlock. Some of the rowlocks are very dark, so there's many bricks that are mixed into this, specifically chosen for each moment, each part of the facade that was being replaced. It's only about ten or twelve bricks at a time, in little clumps, that had to be replaced where there was a crack that was going through them. So that's how we restored the Flemish bond of the building. That bond of the landmark has a beautiful Flemish bond pattern to it that we restored.

 

00;25;50;05 - 00;26;02;13

DP

So, let's go back to the roof for a little bit. Was there any discussion internally when you were working on the design that it was just way too contemporary? This was not going to fly?

 

00;26;02;15 - 00;27;41;12

TP

Sure. So, we looked through history at examples of iconic, bold, contemporary rooftop additions onto landmark or historic structures. We looked at, specifically, for example, the Reichstag in Berlin. Lord Foster designed a striking, bold, contemporary glass dome onto the government building in Berlin. Of course, they lost their dome through war and bombing, and it was reconstructed in a contemporary fashion. But, interestingly enough the original Reichstag Dome did have glass in it. That's a fascinating case study for us.

We also looked at other freeform shell grid structures. That is the technical name for this structural system that can span over vast spaces without any vertical supports. So, the entire dome, the entire roof is not supported by any internal column or wall. It rests on new perimeter concrete walls that go all the way down to the new foundation. The loads are distributed down columns that are in between all the windows, in the historic facade, down to the new foundation in the cellar. So, we looked at Foster's courtyard cover at the British Museum, for example, that utilizes the same kind of system of freeform shell grid, which is also boldly, iconically, contemporary against a landmark base. The thought here was by restoring the base, by restoring all the brickwork and the limestone, we strengthen the landmark base in order to allow it to have a contrasting style on the roof, that the roof could be strikingly contemporary as long as we paid attention and were respectful to the restoration of the base.

 

00;27;41;14 - 00;27;55;03

DP

So, I read a little bit about the solar insulation, light infiltration. You were concerned glare clearly was going to be an issue. Could you elaborate on the probability studies you did investigating those elements and how they impacted design?

 

00;27;55;03 - 00;29;31;14

TP

Our partners at Buro Happold did fascinating studies with daylight. We directed them and wanted to make sure that we weren't going to cause reflection problems with this parabolic to other buildings. There are some case studies around the world of curved glass buildings causing problems to their neighbors, including there's one in London that focuses heat to the degree that it was causing fires on the sidewalk across the street. So, we certainly did not want to be known for that. So Buro Happold helped us study the probability of reflection on to the neighbors. We pinpointed the pieces of glass that would be the culprits – the whole selection process of the type of glass, with Buro Happold's help and all their studies – it was determined that a combination of tint and clear glass was the solution to inhibit reflection, but also to prevent too much solar heat gain and also to prevent too much internal glare.

So, from the outside, the glass appears a bit dark. On sunny days, it's reflective just enough to give it a shiny kind of silvery tone, and you can see the clouds, but it doesn't reflect rays of sunlight directly, like laser beams into the neighbors. And while you're on the inside, even though the glass on the outside has a darker appearance from the inside, your eyeballs adjust and it's all color corrected. Your eyes don't see dark. They see blue sky. They see the beautiful terracotta details of the neighboring historic buildings. It was, in the end, success of glass selection to inhibit all those potential problems.

 

00;29;31;16 - 00;29;40;17

DP

So, did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process doing something this unique? I would imagine you've never done a roof like this in the office before.

 

00;29;40;21 - 00;30;52;21

TP

We haven’t. It's our first freeform shell grid. It was New York's first freeform shell grid. There is a similar covering at Moynihan Train Hall to their barrel vaults, but they opened six months after we did, so we are happy to say, after an eight-year design process and construction, we kept saying we're going to be New York's first freeform shell grid. We're the first one to enclose internal space. I think there's a similar system that might be on some like entry canopies. There's one for like the seven-train extension to Hudson Yards and there's one out in Yonkers, but those do not enclose covered space and they're not nearly this large. So, we're proud to say we're New York's first freeform shell grid.

They use acres of this system in Asia and Europe. It's a very common system to span large swaths of space. It is used here in this country. For example, we visited the Smithsonian Institute down in Washington, DC. The Portrait Gallery has a courtyard cover that's similar to the British Museum cover. Foster came here and did kind of an encore for us in 2007 with the Smithsonian cover. We studied that system too, in terms of how it let light in, and in our studies of glare, etc..

 

00;30;52;24 - 00;31;05;21

DP

Yeah. What I find so interesting about the roof is that you could have simply created a typical Mansard roof and then added glass to the top. But the whole thing is glass, which is so unique.

 

00;31;05;21 - 00;31;52;26

TP

And a mansard roof, of an appropriate proportion, wouldn’t enclose nearly this much square footage. So, we wanted to get our client as much square footage as possible on top of this historic building. And it needed that extra oomph. The dome portion in the middle, which would never be able to be really enclosed by a mansard of any kind of historically accurate proportion. So that's what led us to both the form and the structure to enclose it, because the freeform shell grid is kind of the perfect device to span such great distances so the interior can be super flexible.

We built three floors within it, but those could be removed, they could be remodeled, they could be reconstructed to serve any purpose because all the loads from the roof system just go down the side perimeter walls.

 

00;31;53;02 - 00;32;18;06

DP

It's a great project for architecture students to look at in terms of learning how to develop an idea to make form, right. It's just so clear. And yet if you knew nothing about it, you just say, “Wow, they just put a glass dome on top.” But there's so much more to it that created so many unique details and so many beautiful things and facets, and I'm sure that space on the interior is wonderful.

 

00;32;18;09 - 00;32;25;04

TP

It's really terrific. There's opportunities to connect all three floors interconnecting and the possibilities are endless in there.

 

00;32;25;06 - 00;32;40;23

DP

So, you've obviously been an architect for quite some time, over 30 years. So, what career advice would you give your younger self, looking back after practicing for all this time? What have you learned? What's an idea that you've really locked on to that you'll never forget?

 

00;32;40;25 - 00;32;53;00

TP

One of the founding partners at BKSK, Joan Krevlin, said to me 25 years ago when I joined the - one of the things that she always kept with her as a young architect is do your job and tell the truth.

 

00;32;53;02 - 00;32;55;22

DP

What great advice! I love that!

 

00;32;55;29 - 00;33;42;02

TP

It's a great profession. And as you said, students of architecture have a great time in design studios. And this is a project that is really right out of studio in a way. I love showing it to students because like you said, it's super accessible in terms of the visuals, but it has a great connection to social history and the importance of context, the importance of research that you just don't come into a vacuum and design a building. You look at the context, you look at history, and you look at what you can learn from it. Because this could have been, like you said, just a flat top mansard roof. But discovering the history of the Lenape connection to this building was just remarkable and a great opportunity. I've met the Lenape Center folk. They've asked me to join their advisory steering committee. It's just been a wonderful experience.

 

00;33;42;04 - 00;34;03;22

DP

I love what you said. You don't just come into a vacuum and design a building. You don't. You don't. And that's what you learn in school. And hopefully you get to use that information, use that process, use that paradigm when you graduate, and you become a real architect. Right. So, Todd, it's been great to have you here. Thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about BKSK architects?

 

00;34;03;27 - 00;34;09;06

TP

We can be found at www.bksk.com

 

00;34;09;08 - 00;34;11;09

DP

Todd, it’s been great to have you, man. That was really cool.

 

00;34;11;25 - 00;34;16;12

TP

Thanks. This was really fun.

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;19

Doug Patt (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;21 - 00;00;28;06

Gavri Slasky (GS)

We were given the site. Needed to build as many units as we could, but to keep the center open and accessible to the public. This courtyard, this Village Green, was intended to be used by the Village for tree lighting ceremonies or other public events. The idea was to try to incorporate the public into the building as much as possible.

 

00;00;28;14 - 00;02;31;27

DP

This is my guest, Gavri Slasky. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault will highlight Gavri’s project Morgan Parc. The Morgan Parc Project is comprised of 267 residential units situated above retail space. The nine story building is composed of a central tower at the far side of the square, flanked by two symmetrical wings, the masonry facades draw upon turn of the century mill buildings whose architecture is expressed in their strong, deep structural piers and intricate brick details.

The building facade is composed of masonry piers that extend the full height of the building, opening up a ground floor to create a retail arcade that wraps a courtyard. Large industrial sized window units span between the deep piers. The building is capped by glass, enclosed rooftop amenity spaces, an outdoor pool and terracing roofs, which overlook Long Island.

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault.

Today we're talking to Gavri Slasky, AIA, LEED AP. Gavri received his master’s in architecture from Princeton University and his B.A. from Columbia University in Architecture. Gavri started his career at Stephen B. Jacobs Group as the project manager for an 11 story 311-unit residential building in Long Island. Since then, together with Mr. Stephen Jacobs, he has designed and managed over 3 million square feet of residential new construction throughout New York and developed an expertise in building codes of the city and state.

Gavri specializes in piloting projects from conception to completion, testifying at local zoning boards, producing documentation for building department approval, overseeing construction administration and working together with the general contractor and owner in achieving building occupancy. Today, we're going to talk to Gavri about SBJ's Morgan Parc project. So welcome, Gavri.

 

00;02;32;00 - 00;02;34;00

GS

Thank you, Doug. Good to see you.

 

00;02;34;02 - 00;02;47;26

DP

And it's great to see you. It's nice to have you with us today. So, before we get started, tell us a little bit about Stephen B. Jacobs Group. Where are they located in New York? What's the size of the firm? And what type of work too they do?

 

00;02;47;28 - 00;03;38;20

GS

So, we are a mid-sized firm, about 30 architects and interior designers in Manhattan, where we're on Park Avenue South and 27th Street. So just north of the side iron building there. Our firm has been around for quite a long time. The founder of the firm, Stephen Jacobs, created the firm in 1967. So, it's been over 50 years. And the amount of work that he's done in New York is uncountable. So, over this time, you go to any street in New York and there's a building by SBJ Group.

For the most part, we specialize in multifamily housing. We've done quite a number of hotels and we've diversified recently into school buildings, commercial buildings, and we do quite a range of work.

 

00;03;38;23 - 00;03;46;15

DP

That's pretty impressive walking around New York City. Do you ever count on how many buildings they've done? Is it like a hundred? Like 200?

 

00;03;46;17 - 00;03;49;09

GS

No, there's definitely thousands, for sure.

 

00;03;49;10 - 00;03;50;04

DP

Oh, my goodness.

 

00;03;50;11 - 00;04;05;00

GS

We have this old Sanborn book, and every time that we got a project, I remember one of the former principals of the firm, Herb Weber, would just shade the lot in and so he would be able to flip through and keep track of it that way.

 

00;04;05;06 - 00;04;30;07

DP

Those Sanborn maps are pretty incredible. When I was at Penn State. My thesis was Housing for the Homeless in Times Square, if you can believe it. But I sent away for the specific Sanborn maps for that location, and I believe they were used by firemen. Yeah, they had to have been 75, 80 years old. They were updating at one point. I don't even know what they do today. Can you even get Sanborn maps?

 

00;04;30;14 - 00;04;48;05

GS

You can. Now, everything is digitally available. You have digital tax maps. They're super precise and updated. You can rewind history and go back to see what this looked like a decade ago or a hundred years ago and see how the site has evolved. Just a fun site analysis.

 

00;04;48;07 - 00;05;11;22

DP

Yeah. The maps have a footprint of the building at that particular location at the particular time, and then they have the heights of the buildings of various heights as you move around the building so you can literally build a model from them. So, tell us a little bit about yourself. So, this interview's pretty unique because you're in Israel and we oddly enough, know one another. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

 

00;05;11;25 - 00;05;15;22

GS

Yeah. It's great to see you. It's been almost 20 years.

 

00;05;15;23 - 00;05;17;15

DP

Oh, my goodness gracious.

 

00;05;17;17 - 00;05;35;14

GS

That's hard to say. The summer of 2004, I had just graduated Columbia. My teacher, Joeb Moore, offered me a summer internship at his firm in Greenwich. My seat was actually right next to your seat. I was wondering if you would remember me. It's been a long time.

 

00;05;35;16 - 00;05;45;20

DP

I do. I was like Gavry Slasky. Yes! I remember the name! It was a long time ago.

 

00;05;45;24 - 00;05;49;10

GS

It was. And to be fair, I was only there for a summer.

 

00;05;49;11 - 00;06;04;04

DP

So yeah. I joined Joeb in 1999, I believe, and I worked with him for about 20 years, 15 of those as a consultant. So, it was a great experience. He's an amazing architect, one of the most talented men I've ever met in my life.

 

00;06;04;07 - 00;06;09;26

GS

He's an amazing architect and such a kind person. Does such beautiful work.

 

00;06;09;28 - 00;06;21;15

DP

He does. If you're interested, Joeb Moore, joebmoore.com. Check it out. So how long have you been with Stephen B Jacobs group? Tell us more about your role in the Office.

 

00;06;21;17 - 00;06;22;13

GS

So I've been.

 

00;06;22;13 - 00;08;06;24

GS

At group for about a decade, and the first project I worked on, which he mentioned actually was in Mineola. It's not this Morgan Parc project. It was sort of the predecessor to this. We were working on a 300 plus unit apartment building, around the corner from this Morgan Parc project, called One Third Avenue, and that was my first project working with Stephen, and with this same client, Kevin Lalezarian.

That was a new experience for me. I had previously worked on single family homes. I worked for a year at KPF, so that was completely different, working on Super Towers in Asia. This was New York. This was something that was extremely practical. It's going to get built. It was going to get built, and fast. And the people in the office, they knew what they were doing. They done that type of work for a long time. So, it was quite a learning curve for me. That was a great project.

And during construction of that project, One Third Avenue, the client decided to go ahead with the second project around the corner from that. He had faith that he wouldn't be competing with himself. He'd be able to fill up all of his units.

We started designing Morgan Parc. That was such a rewarding project for me because I was on that from day zero, going with the client and Stephen to the Planning Board meetings and really seeing how a project starts from its conception, being in every single meeting, hearing how the building gets massed out, all the different considerations of it through the years of approvals and construction. And it opened about three years ago, during the pandemic, actually.

 

00;08;06;26 - 00;08;39;17

DP

So, let's talk a little bit about the building. Just as an aside, so I met Isaac Daniel Astrachan a couple of weeks back. He also works for SBJ. I was a host for a panel discussion here at the Brickworks Design Studio on 5th Avenue, and Isaac was on the panel talking about the Morgan Parc project. So, I know a little bit about it, but let's get into the details. So, you just explained how your office got the project. Your client wanted to do another building with you guys. Had SBJ worked with those clients for a number of years, even before the project you came in on?

 

00;08;39;20 - 00;09;13;28

GS

Yes. The Lalezarians are a family of real estate developers and property owners, second generation and repeat clients for us, as are many of our clients. That's what they do. They build buildings, they hold on to the buildings, they manage them, and we try to give them the best service that we can, be as efficient as possible and make the most beautiful building that we can with the budget. And they come back to us. That is basically the goal. So, most of our clients are repeat clients like that.

 

00;09;14;00 - 00;09;36;04

DP

Well, it's really impressive. It's the most important thing for an architect, right, to get word of mouth business. You're not marketing your company all the time. You've got a steady stream of people that are coming back to you after they get to work with you, you know, the first time. So that's wonderful to hear. So, tell us a little bit about the history of the location of Morgan Parc and what impact that might have had on the design.

 

00;09;36;08 - 00;10;24;05

GS

So, Morgan Parc is on a piece of property right in the center of Mineola, which is the seat of Nassau County. The property is right across the street from the train station, so it is uniquely located for a transit-oriented development. It is right in the center of their downtown.

Prior to our client owning the property, all that existed on that property was a single Citibank building and a sea of parking. Actually, during the construction of One Third Avenue that I mentioned before, our client, when he purchased the Morgan Parc property, moved the Citibank tenants into One Third Avenue building and making way for this second development.

 

00;10;24;08 - 00;10;25;12

DP

That's really interesting.

 

00;10;25;15 - 00;11;00;26

GS

It's located at the heart of their downtown right next to the train station. NYU Langone is right across the street there as well. So, it's a busy area. And on Mineola’s master plan from a few decades ago, this site was labeled as the village green. It was their sort of center, their downtown. But that was a sort of future hope that somebody would make that a reality. Village Green was actually a working name of our project until marketing came along and made it into Morgan Parc. But that was always in the forefront of the design.

 

00;11;00;28 - 00;11;05;24

DP

So, that's a good segway. So, tell us a little bit about the programmatic requirements from the client.

 

00;11;05;27 - 00;12;00;08

GS

We were given the site. Needed to build as many units as we could, but to keep the center open and accessible to the public. This courtyard, this Village Green, was intended to be used by the Village for tree lighting ceremonies or other public events. The idea was to try to incorporate the public into the building as much as possible – or when I say the building, the site. It's a large square shaped property. While it was a parking lot for Citibank, people would use it as a cut through, as a shortcut to get to the train station. And so that also became part of the program. The client wanted to maintain access, crisscrossing through the site so people can still get to the train station without having to walk all the way around the block. So, we created these openings between the different wings of the building so people can get from one side to the other.

 

00;12;00;11 - 00;12;02;21

DP

Describe the building plan to us then.

 

00;12;02;24 - 00;12;44;18

GS

It's a U-shaped building which has its tallest portion on the tracks, which is that front street. So it’s the back of the building. So that's a nine story structure at that point. It has the two wings of the “U” that gradually step down to six stories at Second Street, which is the downtown street.

The scale of the building respectfully interacts with the existing context there. The larger buildings that I mentioned at NYU and some other buildings are situated at the train tracks in that zone. And then the historic downtown is lower scale, three- or four-story buildings.

 

00;12;44;20 - 00;12;47;29

DP

So, you're a little bit of an expert on zoning codes.

 

00;12;48;01 - 00;12;50;29

GS

I've had my share of reading-

 

00;12;51;01 - 00;13;04;22

DP

Right! So, it sounds to me like a project like this, you really got pretty good at what's going on with the city – what the requirements are. So, tell us a little bit about the project restrictions for this particular job, maybe a little bit about the zoning codes.

 

00;13;04;25 - 00;13;39;19

GS

They don't quite have a zone sort of set up for this. So, what we had to do is go in and propose what it is that we wanted to build there – look around at other developments in that area and see what would be appropriate and then open that up to discussion to the public. And that project was in front of the planning board maybe four times. These meetings, which started about 7 p.m. or so, they would go till 11 p.m. they would have standing room only of people giving comments pro and against.

 

00;13;39;25 - 00;13;47;25

DP

Their local people come to the meeting, and they want to say what they think of the architecture. So, this is like an architectural review board, right?

 

00;13;47;29 - 00;15;02;11

GS

Sorta. You know, it's interesting because the comments were less about the architecture, more about planning, traffic, and heights of buildings and schoolchildren. So those were the major concerns that they had, but it was the democratic process. So, watching it play out, seeing everybody given the opportunity to have a voice, and through that process, the building changed as well. In reaction to that, the building got smaller.

And we were given the opportunity also to present the benefits of the building and what the building would be offering the city, because as we were designing this, this wasn't a building that we were designing in isolation from far away and imposing it onto the local town, but rather with the village of Mineola in mind constantly. And so, so much of the building was being built and designed not just for the residents but for the people of the town. And I used to go out there during construction every week or two and go to the coffee shop across the street and really got to see this downtown come together where there used to be, essentially, a hole in the middle of it with this enormous parking lot. The building has so many different facets to it, but the public side of it was really rewarding.

 

00;15;02;13 - 00;15;10;09

DP

Well, again, a good segway. Why don't you talk a little bit about the style choice and how it reflects or relates to the buildings that are around and in the neighborhood?

 

00;15;10;12 - 00;16;11;05

GS

So, when Stephen conceived of the design of this building, he was thinking of historic mill buildings, turn of the century factory buildings that were made of brick, that had large openings, had repeated structural piers. They were built in an efficient way, allowing for large openings to light up the factories where the work would be taking place in. And they were often clad in brick by masons who were extremely talented. And it's hard to find people of that talent today, but that was their craft.

So that was in the back of Stephen's head and a lot of the work that he did in the early period of his career in the late sixties, early seventies was adaptive reuse. He had taken these types of buildings and turned them into lofts, but at this point he was creating this new building that based off of its old historic model.

 

00;16;11;08 - 00;16;28;14

DP

So, when the clients came to you guys and you talked a little bit about aesthetics, did they give you any historical precedents or did they say, hey, this building has got to match the aesthetic of what's around it? And then maybe talk a little bit about your use of brick and why you guys chose that particular brick and that color.

 

00;16;28;17 - 00;17;47;13

GS

I had mentioned that these were repeat clients, so we knew them very well. We knew their tastes. We knew their preferences. They came to us, and they said that they wanted a timeless building, a building that wasn't a fad that would be dated in a decade or so. They wanted something timeless. They don't build buildings and then sell them. They build them, and then they keep them and maintain them as part of their portfolio. So, they were looking to create something for the long run.

So, I think at that point, Stephen started to think about these historic buildings that are so beautiful that they become historic landmarks and get adapted for one use, changing to another, use. I brought people to see this building after it was completed and they asked me, what was this building before? It's funny to think that this is a brand-new building, but I thought that that was actually quite a compliment. We are trying to emulate historic buildings. We never thought that we would be able to fool people that this was historic. That wasn't the intent, but it just fits. And when the client asked for timeless, I feel like that type of reaction from people that visit the building didn't know the site before. I feel like that accomplished the goal that the client was looking for.

 

00;17;47;20 - 00;18;28;19

DP

Yeah, Issac said the same thing when he was here that people had asked how long the building had been there, you know, after the building had been constructed. So interestingly, when you go to school, when you go to architecture school, one of the first things I learned was that the architect is striving for timelessness in their work, right?

Not all architects choose to do that, but at Penn State they talked about that a lot. I found it pretty interesting. I like to ask people that come in whether or not brick solved any design challenges or design problems for you guys. And clearly it did in this aesthetic realm. But can you think of any other way that you were able to use Masonry and it solved some design challenges?

 

00;18;28;22 - 00;19;51;00

GS

There's a lot of different facets of this building, but I think the brick is one of the key factors that brought this whole building together. It's a large building. There could have been other approaches to take using different materials to break up the mass, and you see that quite a lot around the suburbs. What Stephen wanted to do was to embrace that this was a large building and take one material, being brick, and use it as many ways as possible and unify the building, make one unified building out of it.

We worked on a few details. We worked on them and reworked them and got feedback from masons, reworked them again. We created a couple of unique shaped bricks. We were playing with all sorts of articulation, ins and outs and we ended up with a detail for the pier and detail for the cornice, a detail for a second-floor band – it was really about three or four typical details that we worked out. And then repeated it in a rhythm and executed it. And it was wonderful working with the masons on site as well, because as architects we can draw what we want, but at the end of the day it's all about the execution of the craftsperson. We were fortunate to have a great mason on the project.

 

00;19;51;07 - 00;19;55;05

DP

So, did you guys build actual physical mock ups that were out there?

 

00;19;55;07 - 00;20;18;10

GS

Yes, we did. We built a couple of mockups and made a couple of adjustments during that period. And then they started and they were able to start low down on the building, did a few portions, and then once they got those couple of details down, they're able to run with it. And it was a long process and a lot of brick, and the client had faith in it. I was very fortunate about that and it came out great.

 

00;20;18;12 - 00;20;38;12

DP

So, two quick questions about how long everything took. I'd like to think about how large is the set of drawings when you're going to build a building like Morgan Parc? Did you guys draw the thing in 2D and 3D? And how long did this whole process take? Through Planning, city review, design, and then construction.

 

00;20;38;14 - 00;21;42;03

GS

Great question. The way that we work, we work in 3D and 2D. At the same time, we usually model the building in Revit. We’ll work out the massing, the elevations, study different details in three dimensions and color, testing out different color combinations. We had gone back and forth on whether the windowsills should be metal or cast stone or brick. And we tested out these options in three dimensions and 3D models.

The working drawings at the end of the day were all done two dimension CAD, and they were, you know, as precise as we could get. It's actually interesting. The building is a U-shaped plan, but it's two Ls that are joined at the center to make this U-shaped. So, the building is actually mirrored down that center. So, we were able to draw it, one L, and mirror it. That was part of my struggle over the years, was to try to keep it as symmetrical as possible so that we can keep on using that for efficiency.

 

00;21;42;06 - 00;21;45;16

DP

That's pretty cool. So, you really only had to draw half the building, right?

 

00;21;45;19 - 00;21;47;11

GS

For the most part.

 

00;21;47;13 - 00;22;13;14

DP

I'm sure there's way more that goes into it, but when you first say that, you say, Oh wow, that's pretty cool. So, the thing is simply mirrored. I'm sure there's a lot of differentiation that goes from one L to the other, but it's pretty interesting.

So, what's, kind of, top of mind for a lot of people today is sustainability. Did you guys talk about that at all in terms of using masonry, or was that a request that the client had that you guys had to keep in mind?

 

00;22;13;19 - 00;24;17;16

GS

Sustainability is something that's viewed in every project that we do in one sense or another. Brick buildings allowed for a cavity wall and continuous insulation on the exterior of the backup wall. And so, it allows for a beautiful finish, but a very sustainable envelope. And the amount of insulation that you put in that cavity wall is really dependent on how large of a relieving angle you can get for the brick because the more insulation you have, the further the brick has to be on the backup wall. That's sort of the only limitation.

 

00;22;52;09 - 00;22;54;03

DP

And what did you guys end up doing?

 

00;22;54;04 - 00;24;17;16

GS

Yeah, it's been a couple of years. I don't remember exactly. We put as much as we could. We put insulation on the inside as well.

This is not exactly related to brick, but one of the most interesting, sustainable anecdotes from this building that I remember is in the excavation of the building. Long Island is built on sand primarily, and it's a great site for foundations to build shallow foundations. The sand takes the load, but another advantage of it was the contractor who excavated out the sand, and I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of truckloads of sand have to go out of this building – I didn't even mention that the building has three cellars for parking – so they went down 30, 40 feet into the ground for the entire site. So maybe a million and a half cubic feet.

The contractor who was excavating that, taking that sand away, sold that sand to a construction company for concrete. So concrete is a very carbon heavy building material. But what I like to think about was that the sand in the foundations in the site for this building, actually went back into the building process. I'm sure it didn't go to our building. It probably went to someone else's, but it wasn't just shipped off to someplace and dumped somewhere.

00;24;17;24 - 00;24;39;16

DP

We always have interesting experiences, right? So, was there anything as you went through this process of building Morgan Parc, designing it and ultimately going through the various stages with the town, with the city, then getting the thing built? Was her anything that you or your team learned that was really interesting for you? It was kind of a first.

 

00;24;39;19 - 00;25;48;27

GS

There's so many firsts. Every building process is a learning experience. There's this one lesson learned that was interesting. It was during the brick installation, actually. I noticed that there was this one detail at the corner of the building that wasn’t correct, and I was wondering how could they make that mistake?

It doesn't have the usual frame around it. The brick checker pattern just died into the side and I looked at our drawings and then I realized that the elevation was taken with a pier, hiding a portion of the elevation behind it. And so, it looked like that was the end of the building, but it actually continued another foot or so. And the mason was looking at the elevation and they didn't see that.

So, they just continued the same pattern until the end that maybe they thought there was a dimensional mistake or something. So, every week I would go to them and say, are you going to fix that detail? And he was like, at the end. And I was thinking to myself, oh, you better fix that at the end before Stephen comes to take a look at that. But he did. And that was an interesting lesson learned – to make sure that every elevation is drawn, nothing is being hidden by any portion of the building in and of itself.

 

00;25;49;00 - 00;26;36;13

DP

Well, I think about that a lot, I go out on to the job site and I see something and it's not exactly the way I had drawn it. And sometimes you're just not paying attention, sometimes I didn't cover it well enough in the drawings and unless you're out there on a weekly basis, these things just completely get away from you.

So, one last question before you go. This is very interesting to me. So, you're an expert on zoning and building codes. So, this is an incredibly valuable asset for any office. I would imagine at some point you could probably become an attorney with all the knowledge that you have. Was that something that you always gravitated toward that side of the business over time, or is that just you were kind of thrown into it? It was interesting to you. You were good at it, and that's how it evolved.

 

00;26;36;16 - 00;28;25;23

GS

It's funny, it's not the part of architecture that people are usually interested in, and it definitely wasn't so in the beginning for me. But the more I read through these things, the zoning – New York City, or every different town has their own zoning ordinances - there are so many nuances there, and these words that are written down there were written very carefully, and they create what you're building is going to be. And so, careful reading through these documents are critical, whether it's zoning or building code. And I came to really enjoy creating it. And it is probably the dorkiest thing, but I enjoy it and I enjoy getting emails or calls from colleagues saying, “Gavri, can you check what are we allowed to do here?” I love being able to look it up and learn. Each time I look at it, I learn more and then the codes change from 2008 to 2014, New York City now 2022, and New York State has their own codes. And then to compare in New York City versus New York State and to see what's allowed in one versus the other. They don't tell you why in these things, they just tell you what's allowed or what's not allowed.

You try to think about what is a consideration, what's the difference between New York and New York City in New York State. So, New York State has larger sites. So, their stair cores are allowed to be further away from the center. They try to direct people to have their egress stairs at the edges of the building. The dead end distances are shorter than they are in New York City. In New York City, they allow you to have scissor stairs in residential buildings because you have a small footprint and you don't really have much of a choice. These rules, they end up shaping the plan. They end up shaping every aspect of the building.

 

00;28;26;00 - 00;28;39;28

DP

Well, Gavri, I can tell you really love this stuff. And I'm sure Stephen B. Jacobs Group is very happy to have you. So, thank you very much for spending some time with us today. Where can people go to learn more about SBJ architects?

 

00;28;40;01 - 00;28;49;00

GS

Yeah, you can go to our website sbjgroup.com.

We are on 27th and Park Avenue South. Looking forward to hearing from everybody.

 

00;28;49;07 - 00;28;51;08

DP

It's a small world, man. It’s great to see you.

 

00;28;51;10 - 00;28;53;12

GS

It's great to see you, Doug. Thank you so much.

 

00;28;53;18 - 00;29;21;00

DP

Thanks, Gavri.

TRANSCRIPT

00;00;00;02 - 00;00;05;07

Doug Pat (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

 

00;00;05;10 - 00;00;30;11

Daniela Holt Voith (DHV)

Part of our design philosophy is to really make more of a home, both in terms of individual buildings, but also in terms of the context. And this design really is right up our alley in the sense that we love to combine mission and image. There is a strong mission to get the dining hall, which is for the fifth formers, a chance to rebond.

 

00;00;30;13 - 00;03;05;12

DP

This is my guest, Daniela Holt Voith. I'll share more about her shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we highlight Voith and MacTavish Architects Abbott Dining Hall in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The Abbott Dining Hall is located at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The renovation of the 1960s era dining hall exclusively serves senior or fifth form students in their last year on campus.

 

The project responds to the style of the adjacent upper house dorm and other Peabody and Sterns architecture and reminds one of both Shingle Style and Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. VMA’s reconfiguration blends seamlessly into the Lawrenceville esthetic with new brick facades, pitch slate roof and vaulted interior ceilings supported by glulam hammer beam trusses. In addition to a complete redesign of the kitchen and servery, custom white oak furniture and booth seating clad the interior, white oak paneling, terrazzo floor and over scaled fireplaces complete the vision.

 

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault. Daniela Holt Voith is an architect and founding principle of Voith and MacTavish Architects and Director of Design. She holds degrees from Yale University School of Architecture and Bryn Mawr College. Since the early 1980s, she's taught at Yale University as a TA, University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and has developed and taught Bryn Mawr College's Design Studio program.

 

Mayor Michael Nutter appointed her to serve on the city's award winning 2008 zoning code Commission, which revised the city's 50-year-old zoning code. Danielle is currently president of the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art, Philadelphia Chapter director of the Carpenters Company of Philadelphia and Board member of the Design Leadership Foundation. Daniela has dedicated her career to promoting the advancement of design for educational environments.

 

Her client-focused practice supports leading edge pedagogical thought and encourages mindful ways of living and learning. Daniela loves to travel, bike and ride trains. She speaks French and German, travels frequently and collects early 20th century train lithographs. So welcome, Daniela. It's nice to have you with us today. So tell us a little bit about Voith and MacTavish Architects or VMA in Philadelphia.

 

So where in the city are you guys located? What's the size of the firm? How long has it been around and what type of work do you do?

 

00;03;05;15 - 00;03;41;14

DHV

Our firm has been celebrating its 35th year this year. We are located just on the edge of Center City on the Schuylkill River. So we have fabulous views of the river and city skyline. We are about 40 people, I think maybe 41 just this minute. And our primary focus is on design for education from pre-K to post-collegiate. But that encompasses a wide range of services, preservation, planning, architecture, as well as we have an interior studio and a wide range of projects, which is why this client type is so exciting for me.

 

00;03;41;19 - 00;03;45;14

DP

Interesting. So the firm size has grown over the years, I would assume.

 

00;03;45;17 - 00;03;55;08

DHV

Yes, we started off as two people and now our, as I said, almost 40. We actually grew during the pandemic. I have no explanation for it.

 

00;03;55;11 - 00;03;58;08

DP

That's incredible. And was that mainly in school work?

 

00;03;58;13 - 00;04;33;09

DHV

Almost exclusively, we do architecture planning, interiors and preservation, and we service school work primarily, but we do other work for other institutions, primarily nonprofit. For example, we're just completing a almost 100,000 square foot renovation of some factory buildings for an organization called Philadelphia Youth Basketball. So it has seven basketball courts, classrooms, leadership training, those sorts of facilities up in one of the more disadvantaged areas of Philadelphia.

 

00;04;33;11 - 00;04;35;10

DP

And do you guys do any residential work?

 

00;04;35;14 - 00;04;45;27

DHV

We do, actually. Thanks for asking. We just brought on three new partners, one of whom is Scott O’Barr, and he is heading up our residential studio. It's fairly new for us.

 

00;04;46;00 - 00;04;48;11

DP

Well, that's great. That's actually my, that's what I do. I do.

 

00;04;48;11 - 00;04;55;25

DHV

All right. Well, we started off doing residential but grew out of that and now we're coming back to residential again with the addition of Scott.

 

00;04;56;02 - 00;05;04;22

DP

That's great work. Good for you. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been practicing and what's your role in the office as a principal and director of design?

 

00;05;04;24 - 00;06;15;06

DHV

Well, my first job in architect's office was when I was 19 at the Architects Collaborative. I got an internship between my sophomore year and junior year at Bryn Mawr, and I loved it so much I took a year off and stayed there. Sadly, that firm doesn't exist anymore, but it was a great introduction to very high level design.

 

I graduated from architecture school in ‘81 and I've been working pretty much since I formed a partnership with my first employer, Toni Atkins. So it became Atkin Voith and Associates. So that existed for sadly only about three years. We were doing great, but somehow the relationship just wasn't going as well as it should have been. So I broke away and formed a new firm with one of the people that was an employee at the previous firm.

 

So Cameron MacTavish, who is a wonderful human being and very talented person, and I just bought him out about five years ago because he wanted to do other things and we're still great friends. That's amazing. And just this January took on three new partners. One of the people who was a partner previously, John Cluver, heads up the Preservation Studio.

 

So there are now five of us, the VMA five.

 

00;06;15;08 - 00;06;28;12

DP

Well, it sounds like your firm clearly has grown and you do wonderful work. I've been on your website and we'll talk about that a little bit later. So let's talk a little bit about this project. How did your office get the project?

 

00;06;28;15 - 00;07;12;00

DHV

Well, just as we usually do, it's a competitive business. I think we won it at the interview. The RFP was one of the most unusual ones that we've ever gotten because the brief was written about love and loyalty and how can architecture help young students form a really strong bond with a place. There is also a lot of humor involved at Lawrenceville.

 

There are a funny bunch, they love to joke, and so in our visual response that we sent in with our portfolio, we photoshopped the head and face of the CFO, who had written the RFP into almost every photo that had people in it. So he only found five of them.

 

00;07;12;02 - 00;07;13;04

DP

Where's Waldo?

 

00;07;13;07 - 00;07;28;24

DHV

It was exactly like Where's Waldo? But we tried to approach the interview in responding exactly to that. How do you create a sense of belonging and a sense of fascination and otherness in a place?

 

00;07;28;27 - 00;07;30;25

DP

So you didn't know the clients and you got the job?

 

00;07;30;26 - 00;07;31;17

DHV

That's correct.

 

00;07;31;17 - 00;07;38;05

DP

That's wonderful. Good for you. So let's talk a little bit about the history of the location you said is kind of special.

 

00;07;38;07 - 00;09;17;03

DHV

So Lawrenceville is one of the premier boarding schools in the country. It has a long tradition. Its original campus was laid out by Olmstead, and a lot of the architecture was done, as you mentioned, by Peabody and Stearns. Originally, it was laid out in a circle as many older boarding schools are. And as it grew, the planning paradigm became more oriented around quads.

 

This dining hall was built as an addition to a Peabody and Stearns dormitory. It had a flat roof, a pretty unsympathetic brick, big glass curtain wall that faced West, which you can only imagine was sun beating in at dinner time. So they pulled the curtains. So it was almost always dark. And so there was a lot to improve, but they didn't really want to diverge too much from the footprint of the building.

 

But essentially we took the building down to its foundations. We left the steel, took off the roof and kept these two side wings that are almost square and planned and put a new roof and new structure. As you mentioned, the big glulam trusses that look like heavy timber and then made a basically a six foot addition on the Western facade to create some really deep windows so that that West facing sun would get mitigated as it comes in and then really responded to the facade of the original dormitory on the other side.

 

So the facade is characterized by a round tower which forms the entry and six Romanesque arched windows, three on either side. So it has this very heavy look about its sense of gravitas.

 

00;09;17;06 - 00;09;23;05

DP

So this building really looked nothing like what it does today. Is that correct? The facades are completely new.

 

00;09;23;09 - 00;09;25;00

DHV

Completely new.

 

00;09;25;02 - 00;09;41;01

DP

So what's interesting about that, as I'm reading about your renovation 1960s building, I'm thinking this was clearly a very talented architect in the sixties. Now, that's amazing, right? So this building, he just took it down to the foundations. Okay, Now it all makes perfect sense.

 

00;09;41;01 - 00;09;41;19

DHV

Pretty much.

 

00;09;41;19 - 00;09;44;16

DP

My goodness.

 

00;09;44;16 - 00;09;47;00

DHV

It was a flat roof, 1960s building with a curtain wall.

 

00;09;47;06 - 00;09;53;05

DP

Yeah. Wow, that. Okay, that's pretty cool. So you guys know what you're doing? This thing is beautiful.

 

00;09;53;05 - 00;10;36;19

DHV

Thank you. Thank you. Well, part of our design philosophy is to really make more of a home, both in terms of individual buildings, but also in terms of the context. And this design really is right up our alley in the sense that we love to combine mission and image. As I said before, there is a strong mission to get the dining hall, which is for the fifth formers, their culminating year at the school, a chance to rebond. The school is organized so that there's a freshman dorm, but then they divide up into houses and they're in those houses for two years and then they come back together again as a class. So it's a chance to rebond.

 

00;10;36;21 - 00;10;41;22

DP

So tell me a little bit about the scope or programmatic requirements of the project from the beginning.

 

00;10;41;29 - 00;11;53;02

DHV

Right? So the dining hall seats about 250 to 300. The servery was a very old fashioned cafeteria line, which is way outdated in terms of food service. So the kitchens had to be upgraded, the servery completely renovated, the loading dock assisted and that sort of thing. So they also wanted to be able to use the room as an event space.

 

So it needed to handle various different seating configurations, a lot of AV component ends, video, that sort of thing. And they wanted to be able to clear out the room, as I said, for some events like dances. So I worked very closely with Thomas Moser. There's a fine mill worker up at Maine to develop a table. It looked like a very heavy wooden table.

 

It is a very heavy wooden table, but the top flips and you can put it up onto skateboards essentially and move them away. So it's now called the Daniela table, and it's available on their contract side if you're looking for a nesting trestle table. And that was really about it. It serves three meals a day other than the events that they do.

 

So one of the first was a wedding for the head of school, his daughter.

 

00;11;53;05 - 00;11;59;26

DP

So they must have had a decent budget for the project, right? They ended up making some custom furniture.

 

00;11;59;28 - 00;12;15;24

DHV

I think by most standards it was decent. The project in the end all in was $8 million. It's a 13,000 square foot building, so it's not incredibly expensive by residential short, but a lot of value I think, for what they invested in this building.

 

00;12;16;00 - 00;12;29;03

DP

So let's go backwards a little bit and talk about the building stylistically. So you mentioned, I mentioned earlier, Peabody and Stearns Architecture. I guess they may have been well known for shingle style architecture.

 

00;12;29;09 - 00;12;44;00

DHV

They were they were a firm of big reputation. And so I think the board members must have nabbed them from New York and brought them down to Lawrenceville. Shingle style definitely. But also this kind of masonry structures as well.

 

00;12;44;02 - 00;13;06;21

DP

So let's talk a little bit about project restrictions. So I don't know a whole lot about how to get a building built on a boarding school campus. What was that like? And are you working with the town and zoning ordinances there? And you're also working with the school and with esthetic issues. And are there any historical challenges other than trying to match certain architecture?

 

00;13;06;28 - 00;14;22;12

DHV

The zoning was easy because we were really staying pretty much within the same footprint. We're not adding impervious coverage. The construction logistics were tricky and we essentially cut a new entrance road onto the campus, a construction entrance, and fenced off the construction area. Obviously, student safety is a huge concern. Embedded into our specification are behavioral guidelines, no smoking, shirts on, no swear words.

 

There's a lot of that sort of thing that's required by most school campuses, actually. The construction needed to happen within a year. They only took that dining hall offline for just one school year, basically a real tricky part of the project was that the original contractor was somebody that we had done maybe 15 to 20 projects with, went out of business in the middle of the project.

 

So that was heartbreaking because they were such good contractors and caused a huge hiccup and because they were having such trouble, there was construction work that was done that wasn't necessarily supervised, and the school wanted some work to continue. So there was a lot of logistical issues that happened in transferring to another contractor.

 

00;14;22;19 - 00;14;27;29

DP

Did you have to hire like a construction manager to come in and help put it all back together?

 

00;14;28;01 - 00;14;48;15

DHV

No, the school, you know, was fairly sophisticated in terms of construction. Many schools are not, but there was insurance involved. And so there was insurance oversight. There was banking issues. There were a lot of things in transferring all that knowledge from one contractor to another. Not having the backup was challenging, but they did an amazing job in the end.

 

00;14;48;18 - 00;14;52;03

DP

So how long did the planning and design process take?

 

00;14;52;06 - 00;15;28;09

DHV

Probably just about a year, maybe a smidge longer. There's always that moment. We go through the design. We made models, we did beautiful drawings. There wasn't, like there often is, a hiatus for fundraising because the project was fully funded from the get go, so a single donor basically anteed up. So it was a fairly smooth process from the beginning of concept through the construction documents, the construction documents were a thing of beauty.

 

The Millwork was so detailed, the brickwork is so detailed. There is a lot to that set. I'd love to show them to you at some point.

 

00;15;28;12 - 00;15;34;22

DP

I'd love to see that. So what was the size of the team that you had working on the project?

 

00;15;34;24 - 00;15;47;17

DHV

Core team of myself, the project manager, Sennah Loftus, the architect, Andrew Lipschitz. And then there were probably two other people who were helping. So that's 5.

 

00;15;47;17 - 00;15;51;06

DP

And did you guys work in 2D and 3D?

 

00;15;51;08 - 00;16;03;20

DHV

This is a project that was done entirely in CAD so much detail that it not a lot of repetition and so many one off kinds of details that working in Revit would have hindered us.

 

00;16;03;20 - 00;16;11;29

DP

I think and you guys presented I'm assuming, drawings and ultimately maybe even models to the clients along the way. Did they enjoy that?

 

00;16;12;01 - 00;16;24;23

DHV

Of course, there's nothing like a model. So we actually made a model where we could take the roof off. The client could actually understand the roof structure and then see the space inside and then put the roof back on.

 

00;16;24;25 - 00;16;27;01

DP

Did you guys hire that out or did you make them?

 

00;16;27;01 - 00;16;43;09

DHV

We did it in-house. We have a great shop where we can do both woodworking, we have a laser cutter and also 3D printing. I think we're in the midst of phasing out the woodshop, sadly. But the other aspects of it is that prototyping is really important to us.

 

00;16;43;12 - 00;16;55;01

DP

So that's a good segway to the building esthetics. So I'm looking at some photos of the architecture. Did you guys replicate some of the archways that you found on campus and other buildings?

 

00;16;55;09 - 00;17;44;11

DHV

The main arches that are on this facade are derived directly from the front of the original dormitory. It's called Upper House. So from the upper house facade. But the curved tower entry was something that, you know, we studied Peabody and Stern a fair amount and we thought that would be appropriate. It, of course, was very tricky construction and detailing wise because not only is it curved, but we also put an arched top over the main doors.

 

So that arch is curving in elevation and in plan. Interestingly, if you flatten it out, it's actually and ellipse and the underside of the arch as you get into the door itself actually expands from the doorframe to the door head. It gets steeper because the curve is coming around.

 

00;17;44;13 - 00;17;46;09

DP

So they built formwork for that?

 

00;17;46;11 - 00;18;34;12

DHV

No? Well, I'm sure they did in terms of having an arch to lay everything up on. But the arches are actually true arches and we wanted that really deep window recess. So the brick is laid up on a facing block. So it's actually an eight inch facade on top of the structural law we have that depth really makes those arches read.

 

The arches have a stone arch on the outside. Then there's another arch on the inside that's made up of a header and a stretcher. So it's that deep. And then there's a hinge brick underneath that has a molded shape on it, basically, not quite a full round, but I guess a three quarter around section. And then it goes back into the return, which as I said, varies in depth as it goes around.

 

00;18;34;14 - 00;18;38;11

DP

Did you have any trouble finding a mason to do that work?

 

00;18;38;14 - 00;19;20;00

DHV

So we didn't find the mason, the contractors did. And the Masons on this job were really good, so we were happy. The brick is kind of a orangish red. The way we've laid it out has a very, almost monolithic feel because we picked a mortar that blends with the brick. It doesn't highlight each individual brick. So the mortar itself has that a similar coloration to the brick.

 

There's not much of just facade and it's laid up in running bond. In between the arches we have round medallions that are also made of brick. And then the center those medallions are a herringbone pattern. So there's an incredible amount of richness in the brickwork and it's highlighted by these masonry elements.

 

00;19;20;02 - 00;19;25;09

DP

I would imagine you did a lot of drawings in house of what this, ultimately, the facades were going to look like.

 

00;19;25;09 - 00;19;28;04

DHV

And then the shop drawings were amazing.

 

00;19;28;06 - 00;19;31;01

DP

And did you do many mock ups in the field?

 

00;19;31;04 - 00;19;54;24

DHV

So we did a mock up of the wall and a return. We did not do a full on mock up with the window inserted. We often do, but in this case we didn't. Tricky part was putting one of these arched openings into the existing brick of those sidings that I mentioned To start with. The brick actually is slightly different than the 1960s brick. That's the only bit of facade that remained.

 

00;19;54;27 - 00;19;59;01

DP

So the brick facade remained on those wings and then you matched?

 

00;19;59;07 - 00;20;04;06

DHV

Now we didn't match their contrasting sixties. Brick has more variation in it.

 

00;20;04;10 - 00;20;06;13

DP

It looks a little redder in the photos.

 

00;20;06;16 - 00;20;21;19

DHV

Yeah, it's just has a little bit more variation in the brick. But we tried to choose a brick that would blend both with the original Peabody and Sterns and those existing pieces of wall. I mean, in the end we could have just taken them down and started over, but we didn't.

 

00;20;21;21 - 00;20;36;24

DP

Right. You always, at least in my experience, you kind of pick and choose what you're going to keep and what you're not going to keep. And you look back, you're like, man, we probably spent more money keeping things than just tearing it down to the foundation gradually.

 

00;20;36;25 - 00;20;50;17

DHV

Absolutely. But part of the transformation of this building was not only this incredibly detailed facade, but also the very, very steeply pitched roof that's all slate. The dormers have copper on them and the tower itself has some copper on it.

 

00;20;50;19 - 00;20;55;14

DP

They must have loved that, the peak roof, the idea that they were getting rid of this flat roof.

 

00;20;55;14 - 00;21;04;21

DHV

Absolutely. I'm still hearing, I mean this was finished a number of years ago, and I still hear from people who've been on campus how amazing the space is.

 

00;21;04;24 - 00;21;13;14

DP

Let's talk a little bit about the trusses on the interior, even though they're not masonry. So in my experience those are called hammer beam trusses. Am I incorrect?

 

00;21;13;16 - 00;21;51;24

DHV

No, but basically this is a modern building and the span was fairly large. And so our engineers wanted this to be self-supporting. So they're made up of glulam pieces and then bolted together. There is a lot of concern actually by the client when they first saw the trusses go up because they weren't stained yet. And it has these heavy bolts in the plates and they're really worried that this is going to get too industrial looking.

 

And we painted the steel bits in a color that kind of calms down the contrast between the steel and the wood. And by the time the roof went on and everything else was going on, everybody's in love.

 

00;21;51;26 - 00;21;57;02

DP

You would never know. And I looked at those photos online. You'd never know there was any steel.

 

00;21;57;04 - 00;22;07;02

DHV

Yeah, it's just the balls. Sometimes we've done roofs that look like they're heavy timber but are actually steel clad. But in this case, the wood is actually self-supporting.

 

00;22;07;05 - 00;22;08;23

DP

Yeah, the interior's stunning.

 

00;22;08;26 - 00;22;09;10

DHV

Thank you.

 

00;22;09;10 - 00;22;14;21

DP

Is that one large rectangular space on the first floor other than the wing?

 

00;22;14;21 - 00;23;21;18

DHV

Yeah, other than the wings, it's not quite rectangular because the ends have sort of apses. They're angular. And so in the middle of each and there's an enormous fireplace, we pulled the base of the fireplace up off the floor so that you could see in to the fireplaces from the seated position. And then we had these incredible carvings done that are representative of themes on the campus.

 

And then, they're not wood burning their gas, but they certainly give this incredible warmth to events and the floor is made of terrazzo. And we carefully made a pattern of the terazzo. So but I said, these people are jokesters, right? And so one of the things that you can do with terrazzo, so it's imbed brass shapes into it.

 

We found a number of shapes again of animals and other things that are kind of spread through the Lawrenceville law. And then we put cockroaches on the floor. That's so there's like five or six cockroaches. So there's the question always is, well, where's the cockroach?

 

00;23;21;20 - 00;23;23;03

DP

I'd love to see that.

 

00;23;23;05 - 00;23;25;04

DHV

I can send you a photograph.

 

00;23;25;12 - 00;23;31;03

DP

Please do. So, did your team learn anything interesting through the design and construction process? Anything kind of new for you?

 

00;23;31;05 - 00;24;04;08

DHV

One of the things that we were very interested in anyway was the issue of the Western exposure. And we're a firm that is oriented towards sustainability. It kind of is part and parcel of every project that we do. And so the light mitigation was a big piece of it. So we did a number of lighting studies to see how deep we needed to make the niches to really be able to cut off the direct glare to the inside.

 

That was an interesting piece of work for us. The combination of computer modeling, lighting, simulation and facade design.

 

00;24;04;11 - 00;24;18;24

DP

Very cool. So, Daniela, you've been an architect and educator for some time. Based on what you know today about being an architect, do you have any words of advice for your younger self or maybe for young people coming up in the field today?

 

00;24;18;27 - 00;25;06;09

DHV

So everybody has to find their own selves. And I mentor a lot of women. Our office is more than 50% women. Being an architect on the job site is always a challenge. I found my own way, partially because I played a lot of basketball growing up and I played a lot of basketball with men. I already had this kind of knowledge of both teamwork, competitiveness, defensiveness, all of that all plays out in sports and then into real life.

 

But most people don't have that experience. They're not as big as tall as I am. I try and say, You're going to have to find your own way. But ultimately on the job site anyway, the person who signs the requisition for payment has the power. So I think my biggest piece of advice is learn to trust yourself and stand on your own two feet.

 

00;25;06;16 - 00;25;23;26

DP

It's great advice. When I think about myself as a young architect, a young human being for that matter, I was always looking for answers from someone else, always asking someone, How do I do this or How do I get to where I want to go? Or what do I even want to do with my life.

 

00;25;23;28 - 00;25;25;09

DHV

That only comes from inside.

 

00;25;25;15 - 00;25;36;22

DP

But it takes a long time to figure that out. And it's really nice that there are people that come alongside you and say, Hey, you know what? You have to look inside. The answers are actually all there already.

 

00;25;36;24 - 00;25;37;27

DHV

Correct. Nice way to put it.

 

00;25;38;00 - 00;25;47;18

DP

Well, I'm glad you've been there for lots of other women. So, Daniela, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about VMA and yourself?

 

00;25;47;20 - 00;26;08;14

DHV

Our website is cumbersome in terms of its name, but its VoithandMacTavish.com. There's lots of information. If you want to know more about me, search Daniela Voith I think will get you there. You don't have to add my middle name, Holt. I even have a Wikipedia page. So there's a lot of information out there to be had about me.

 

00;26;08;20 - 00;26;12;18

DP

That's pretty cool. Well, thank you very much for your time today.

 

00;26;12;25 - 00;26;15;11

DHV

It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

 

00;26;15;14 - 00;26;42;05

DP

Our pleasure.