11 New York Design Projects to Watch

Hudson Yards

It's the largest private development in the U.S. and the biggest build-out in New York since Rockefeller Center. Descriptions of Hudson Yards tend to sound hyperbolic. It’s no exaggeration, however, that a whole swath of the city is now taking shape on 28 acres on the far western reaches of Midtown—built, as improbable as it sounds, on two massive platforms suspended over the rail yards where Amtrak and commuter trains continue to roll. The developer spearheading this engineering and construction feat is Related in a joint venture with Oxford Properties Group. Offering offices, apartments, a hotel, a department store, restaurants and more, the 16 buildings, mostly tall, are the work of a variety of top firms in the hopes that, although the development is master-planned, Related Hudson Yards president Jay Cross explains, it won’t feel master-designed. 

Tenants including Coach and L’Oreal have moved into Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates’s 52-story office tower, already fully occupied. That’s adjacent to the inland platform over the rail yards, now in place with buildings going up on it. Also rising there is Hudson Yards’ signature flourish, equivalent to the ice rink at Rockefeller Center: Heatherwick Studio’s 150-foot-tall copper-colored steel Vessel will be a sculptural jungle gym composed of intertwining staircases.

Yet to be constructed, the platform on the Hudson River side of the site will support development expected to feel more like a 24/7 neighborhood, featuring a public school and a far greater proportion of residences. In addition to Related and Oxford, there are two public partner “developers”: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has extended a subway line to the site, and city government has provided property tax exemptions to companies relocating there and constructed a park. Eventually, half the acreage will be devoted to landscaped open space.

Photo courtesy of Related Hudson Yards and Oxford Properties Group

Kearny Point

It may not end up with nine lives, but it’s going to have at least four. The first was as a shipyard, established along the Hackensack River. By World War II, this was the U.S. Navy’s preferred place to build vessels. After purchasing it in the 1960’s, the Neu family started to dismantle ships there, salvaging the materials to sell. It was during the next phase, as a distribution center, that Hurricane Sandy inundated the buildings, prompting Wendy Neu to add “developer” to her resume. The Hugo Neu Corporation is now transforming the 130 acres into a sustainable enclave called Kearny Point.

WXY Architecture + Urban Design founding principal Claire Weisz and Studios Architecture associate principal Graham Clegg worked on the master plan. The pair have also renovated a craneway and kitted it out as office space. In the pipeline: a waterfront promenade to create a destination not just for those who work there but for everyone. 

Image by Studios Architecture and WXY Architecture + Urban Design

The Shed at Hudson Yards

A dynamic new cultural center, quite literally, the Shed is being developed by the city, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Elizabeth Diller in collaboration with Rockwell Group’s David Rockwell. And we bet that, even before the opening in 2019, many will head over just to ogle. Never mind the Shed’s un-glamorous name. This is truly an architectural marvel.

Adjacent to a Hudson Yards apartment tower, the base building contains art galleries and a theater. When it’s time for a big concert or dance performance, an outer shell composed of steel ribs, with a translucent polymer skin, will telescope outward—the 6-foot-wide wheels rolling along tracks to cover an outdoor plaza. The resulting enclosed space could accommodate a standing audience of up to 3,000 people. Cue the applause.

Photo by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group

Asbury Park

Call it the 10-year plan. After purchasing 35 oceanfront acres in Asbury Park, the Jersey Shore town where Bruce Springsteen got his start, iStar CEO Jay Sugarman knew that his revitalization plans wouldn’t be realized overnight. But he also placed himself in good hands, hiring Anda Andrei as creative director of the 20 projects. Andrei had recently launched Anda Andrei Design after decades with the Ian Schrager Company, and now it was her turn to handpick collaborators. First up: enlisting Stonehill & Taylor Architects and Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture to convert a long-vacant Salvation Army retired officers’ residence into the hip 110-room Asbury, the first hotel to open in town in perhaps half a century. Enrico Bonetti and Dominic Kozerski are now restoring Asbury Lanes, a 1960’s bowling and music venue. Oppenheim Architecture & Design's Chad Oppenheim, who grew up nearby, took on a luxury apartment building. Some of the 34 units have private terraces equipped with fireplaces and grills. Downstairs, there’s not only storage for bicycles but also racks for stashing surfboards.

Photo courtesy of iStar

Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center and Bell Laboratories

One of the hottest designers today died in 1961. Eero Saarinen’s illustrious career in architecture and furniture design is again in the limelight, as two of the most admired buildings by Eero Saarinen and Associates are being buffed and put to new uses.

At John F. Kennedy International Airport, the TWA Flight Center—beloved for swooping forms that capture the spirit of the jet age and listed on the National Register of Historic Places—has been shuttered since 2001. Finally, MCR Development has enlisted Beyer Blinder Belle, Inc Architecture & Design, Lubrano Ciavarra Architects and Stonehill & Taylor Architects to restore the 129,000-square-foot concrete-shell structure and add a 505-room hotel behind.

Moving from planes to phones, Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., is where cellular and laser technologies were invented—and where Somerset Development has spearheaded a mixed-use conversion called Bell Works. Alexander Gorlin Architects, Interior Architects, Mancini Duffy and NPZ Style + Decor are all taking part in the 2 million-square-foot project, to feature offices for start-ups, a public library, a hotel, a fitness club, retail and restaurants. Live music will soon join the art exhibitions and film screenings currently taking place in the skylit central atrium, a stupendous 1,100-foot-long by 100-foot-wide space. It already boasts floor patterns that Alexander Gorlin based on paintings by Josef Albers.

Photo courtesy of MCR Development

Affordable Housing

The building boom of recent years has left many neighborhoods awash in luxury apartment towers. For citizens of limited means, however, just paying the rent is increasingly beyond reach. City government and nonprofit real-estate developers are trying to help.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in an effort to make good on a campaign promise to build or preserve 200,000 affordable units over the next decade, has increased funding. That’s in addition to giving tax incentives and rewriting zoning codes to encourage developers of market-rate housing to earmark units for those who meet income requirements and apply through a lottery system. Among nonprofits opening all-affordable projects, Breaking Ground goes the extra distance by enlisting the finest talents in the cause. President and CEO Brenda Rosen hired Alexander Gorlin Architects for a colorful supportive-housing project in Morrisania that has won abundant praise and CookFox Architects for a Belmont building scheduled to welcome tenants in October, offering apartments large enough to accommodate families with children. 

Photo by Michael Moran/Otto

Ian Schrager's Public and 160 Leroy

To call him a “real-estate developer” is to miss the point. A longtime impresario of nightclubs, hotels, restaurants and more, Ian Schrager has an uncanny ability to read the design zeitgeist. Schrager has tapped many of the world’s top talents in the service of his projects, and he continues to experiment with new enterprises.

In 2005, he sold Morgans Hotel Group, the company that made him a household name, and went into business as the Ian Schrager Company—not that he left hotels behind. He collaborates with Marriott International on its luxury brand Edition. Simultaneously, he is expanding his own mid-market Public chain, which debuted in Chicago with a renovation by Yabu Pushelberg and has now come to the Lower East Side with a ground-up building by Herzog & de Meuron Basel.

Pursuing luxury residential projects, too, he’s currently developing another Herzog & de Meuron design, 160 Leroy, in the West Village—a curvy 14-story, 57-apartment building to feature Hudson River views and lush landscaping. Back at the Public, there are also 11 condominium units at the top. 

Photo by Nikolas Koenig

ESSEX CROSSING

After sitting mostly vacant for a mind-boggling 50 years, a 6-acre urban renewal area on the Lower East Side has finally come back to life. No fewer than three separate developers, BFC Partners, L+M Development Partners and Taconic Investment Partners, have temporarily joined forces as Delancey Street Associates to complete this mega-project, named Essex Crossing and composed of nine sites slated to offer rental and condominium apartment buildings, a medical center, a movie theater and more. Since food halls have been all the rage, “more” will include the Market Line. The developers are aiming for something like Pike Place Market in Seattle—only in subterranean form running beneath three buildings, among them a collaboration between Handel Architects and SHoP Architects. A “light scoop” carved into the structures will bathe the bazaar’s butchers and cheese mongers as well as fashion boutiques and art galleries in sunshine. Rest assured, though: Market Line will not be a cookie-cutter “mall,” which New Yorkers tend to loathe. No national chains allowed. 

Photo courtesy of Handel Architects

Columbia and Cornell Satellite Campuses

It may seem odd to think of universities as developers, but New York state’s two most prestigious institutions of higher education, Columbia and Cornell Universities, are in expansionist mode. Columbia, which prides itself on its McKim, Mead & White main campus in Morningside Heights, is going in a very different stylistic direction on 17 acres in nearby Manhattanville. Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the firm of Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Renzo Piano, is designing four buildings. The first to open are the Jerome L. Greene Science Center and the Lenfest Center for the Arts. Both feature plenty of painted aluminum, and the Lenfest Center adds double glazing to the materials palette in order to mute the sound of taxis and subways.

Meanwhile, Ithaca-based Cornell is partnering with Technion–Israel Institute of Technology to build a 12-acre sustainable outpost devoted to applied science on Roosevelt Island, floating in the East River. Although the full build-out of Cornell Tech isn’t expected until 2043, a couple of buildings are complete: the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center, an academic hub by another Pritzker winner, Thom Mayne of Morphosis; and the Bridge, Weiss/Manfredi Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism’s incubator, where established tech companies and start-ups work side by side with Cornell researchers. Ivy League? Yes. Ivory tower? Most definitely no.

Photo by Frank Oudeman/ Columbia University

Design-Build Projects by DDG and Tamarkin

Being a designer is certainly challenging. Ditto for being a developer. But some firms manage to both design and to develop.

DDG sometimes goes even further, constructing and managing its properties as well. For 180 East 88th Street, at 50 stories soon to be the tallest apartment building on the Upper East Side, DDG is throwing some curves into the design. Arches will evoke both caves and cathedrals in the lobby, then reappear at the pinnacle of the facade, fronting penthouse terraces. While the handmade bricks for the exterior are imported from Denmark, and the oversize windows are Italian, the views are genuine New York.

Tamarkin Co.’s founder and president, trained architect Cary Tamarkin, usually draws inspiration from what’s down on street level—the tough, workaday buildings of the city. His designs rely on brick, concrete and factory-style gridded steel-framed windows as a way to fit in with the old industrial buildings in Chelsea and the West Village, where his projects tends to be. But that is not to say they’re cookie-cutter. With 550 West 29th Street, a 12-story apartment building currently under construction, he’s taken the factory-window concept to the nth degree. 

Photo by Hayes Davidson

WATERLINE SQUARE

It’s truly towering. And we’re not talking just height. We’re talking talent. Preeminent architecture and interiors firms, normally in competition with one another for commissions, have united for Waterline Square, the Upper West Side mega-project led by GID Development Group president James Linsley. Assigned to sites clustered in a parklike setting of 5 acres facing the Hudson River, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates’s William Pedersen, Richard Meier & Partners Architects and Rafael Vinoly Architects each has designed a glassy, angular building of 34 to 38 stories with condominiums at the top, rentals below. At ground level in the KPF building, Martin Brudnizki Design Studio will contribute a food hall. Connecting everything below ground is an amenities “club” orchestrated by Rockwell Group’s  David Rockwell. As for the towers’ interiors, Champalimaud Design’s Alexandra Champalimaud is outfitting Richard Meier’s, Yabu Pushelberg’s George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg are doing KPF’s, and Groves & Co.’s Russell Groves is paired with Rafael Vinoly. Dynamic duos, all.

Photo courtesy of Noe & Associates and Boundary