by: Linda G. Miller
Snøhetta and APMA Expand Joslyn Art Museum
The expanded and transformed Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, NE, with a collection of over 12,000 objects, will open in September 2024 with the new 42,000-square-foot Hawks Pavilion, designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with local firm, Alley Poyner Macchietto Architecture (APMA). The pavilion, which will become the centerpiece of the museum complex as it creates a new visitor experience and expands gallery space by more than 40 percent. The pavilion extends directly out of the Museum’s existing buildings in the form of a curving, low-slung volume that emerges from the glass atrium that joins the original 1931 Art Deco building with the Foster & Partners 1994 addition. Complementing the Joslyn’s existing buildings, which appear anchored to the ground, the new Hawks Pavilion seems to float atop two granite garden walls, with a transparent first floor enclosing a new entry atrium, a museum shop, and a multi-function community space. These ground-floor spaces gradually rise to the level of the existing buildings via a gently sloping, ADA compliant walkway. The weightless effect of the expansion recalls the cloud formations above the Great Plains, as well as the deep overhangs and horizontal expression of Prairie School architecture. The horizontal texture of the new façade takes its cue from the stacked stone of the original Joslyn Building’s monumental Grand Steps, and the façade’s light-colored precast panels are embedded with vibrant pops of pink aggregate that reflect the rich, Georgia Pink marble of the existing buildings.
Rice+Lipka’s Restoration of Nuyorican Poets Café
The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and the NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC) announced the start of the construction on the renovation and expansion of the Nuyorican Poets Café, designed by Rice+Lipka Architects (RL). For the past 50 years, the Café has given voice to a diverse group of rising poets, actors, filmmakers, and musicians, all championing performance as a means of social empowerment for minority and underprivileged artists. Located at 236 East 3rd Street on the Lower East Side, the Café, upon completion in Spring 2026, will be able reach a wider audience for its presentation of groundbreaking works of poetry, music, theater, and visual arts. After over a decade of planning, RL is finally extending the building’s footprint to the south and sectionally upward at the roof, allowing for an organizational rethinking that makes the facility fully accessible for the first time. The project expands the Café’s programming to include two performance spaces with integral bar zones, rehearsal, educational, administrative, and support spaces distributed over five floors and 10,700-square-feet of space. Central to the project are the original coarse brick walls that have framed performances over the years. The primary street-level performance space is preserved as-is, and all other spaces are being transformed around it. Fitted with a new bar and AV booth formed from blackened steel, the raw space is prefigured by a modest brick lobby and entry path. The upper levels are organized around a new elevator also sheathed in shingled blackened steel. New rehearsal/flex and administrative areas are situated on two mid-levels, creating an acoustic separation vertically between the street performance space and the new upper-level performance space, which was added atop the existing third-floor roof. The building’s exterior street façade has been modified many times over, and this history is revealed through an array of cuts, fills, additions, and other modifications, which remain, and an overlay of large window openings cut in the façade will create a new layer of visual history organized by and reflecting the contemporary programmatic arrangement within. The building envelope will be rehabilitated, and MEP modernized, and an ADA ramp for public access will be added. RL is collaborating with Fisher Dachs Associates (FDA) on the theater planning and design. Through the NYC Percent for Art program, two site-specific works have been commissioned for the Café by the Brooklyn-based artist Cecilia Biagini.
Studio Gang Designs Harvard’s David Rubenstein Treehouse
Studio Gang designed the David Rubenstein Treehouse, Harvard’s first university-wide conference center which will serve as a gateway to their new Enterprise Research Campus (ERC) in Allston, MA. Highly sustainable, the 55,000-square-foot center is the school’s first to employ mass timber for its above-ground structure. The compact and pedestrian-scaled convening and innovation hub has a transparent ground level. Designed without a “back” and approachable from all sides, the building’s east and west are gently indented in the plan, producing a butterfly-like shape. Visitors enter via a double-height lobby that spills outward onto two covered porches. From the lobby, the building’s upper floors are accessible by way of a central stair lit by skylights. Ascending this stair evokes the feeling of climbing up into a treehouse. Branching outward like a tree to support the main conference space, the building’s expressed mass timber columns and cross-bracing frame views of the surrounding treetops, the campus, and the city beyond. V-shaped columns extend out and diagonals of the cross-bracing reach all the way to the roof, becoming finer the higher they rise, so spaces on the upper levels seem as if they are suspended within the surrounding tree canopy. The design for the ERC’s master plan, which transforms a large parcel of formerly industrial and inaccessible land, was co-led by Studio Gang and Henning Larsen, with landscape architecture by SCAPE and urban planning and local advisory by Utile, and organized to create opportunities for intersections between academia and education, community, health, and social impact. The Treehouse is part of the ERC’s Phase A, which consists of 900,000-square-feet of mixed-use development including residential areas, 25 percent of which will be affordable, publicly accessible green space, office and lab space, a hotel, restaurant, and retail locations. Targeting International Living Future Institute (ILFI) Living Building Challenge Core Green Building certification, the building is designed to meet ambitious reductions in both embodied and operational carbon emissions. The project is also pursuing the ILFI LBC Materials Petal, ensuring it was built with non-toxic and ecologically restorative materials.
Peterson Rich Office Transforms Former Catholic Church into Cultural Arts Center
Peterson Rich Office (PRO) has transformed a historic former Catholic church in Detroit into the Shepherd, a new cultural arts center that will open on May 18 with an expansive survey of Charles McGee (1924–2021), one of Detroit’s greatest artists. Located in Detroit’s East Village, a residential neighborhood that has been subject to decades of population decline, the Shepherd expands the operations of Library Street Collective, one of Detroit’s leading art galleries. Built in 1912, the Romanesque-style church was in good condition when it closed in 2016 and the surrounding area had degraded into vacant space. The adaptive reuse of the church focused on keeping the integrity of the original architecture intact while strategically inserting elements into the space to both introduce new programming, including gallery space, a library, and performance space, and to allow for new ways to experience the historic building. Ritual elements were stripped back leaving the essential forms of the building intact. Two art gallery volumes were inserted, one in the central nave and the second in the adjacent transept. Above the central gallery, a mezzanine level has been introduced, allowing visitors to walk within the barrel-vaulted ceiling. The central crossing and apse have been left open to create space for live performances and larger installations. The other transept houses the East Village Arts Library and new stone bookshelves and the existing church confessionals were repurposed into multimedia listening booths. A new arched-shaped, rounded-steel staircase rises in front of one of the original stained-glass windows to crease a formal resonance with the existing arches throughout the building. Similarly, the main gallery in the nave creates an axis from the entry point to the altar, framing this once-elemental feature of the former religious building. The galleries, finished in a textured plaster blend and a band of metal wraps around the top of the galleries, continuing the datum line of the surrounding ornate cornicing. The exterior is largely unchanged, though it’s been preserved and enhanced through the introduction of a thin, illuminated metal shroud around the central arched door which delineates a new entrance and signals the building’s new function. The project is part of a 3.75-acre master plan for what is now known as Little Village and developed by PRO in collaboration with OSD, a landscape design firm. OSD also designed the publicly accessible campus grounds which include Charles McGee Legacy Park and a skatepark designed by artist McArthur Binion and skate legend Tony Hawk. The centerpiece of OSD’s design is a community promenade dubbed the Nave, formerly a desolate alley that now connects the Shepherd with the surrounding neighborhood. The Shepherd is the first phase in the Library Street Collective’s creation of a new arts campus. PRO is developing the empty adjacent site which will include new artist live-work spaces, a bar, restaurant, and café, and expanded exhibition space with art storage. Detroit based Above the Fold and architecture firm Ark-Tec collaborated on the project.
Taller Frida Escobedo Designs Bergen Residence
Currently under construction is Bergen, the first residential condominium designed by Taller Frida Escobedo in New York City. Situated on a tree-lined street in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, Bergen is designed to complement the neighborhood fabric; it celebrates light and air through its angled facade and custom handmade blocks that vary in size and degree of opacity. The seven-story, 209,000-square-foot building is composed of two residential wings. The project will contain 105 units ranging from studios to five bedrooms, many with their own private outdoor spaces. At its center is a rectangular glass volume that acts as the building’s entry point. It houses an over 14,500-square-foot amenity space across four levels that are accessible via a cylindrical totem stair. Residents will also have access to 12,000 square feet of exterior amenities, including a resident’s only park and two common rooftop parks. Developed by Avdoo & Partners, the building is expected to be completed in 2025. DXA Studio is the project’s master planner who also collaborated with horticulturalist Patrick Cullina on the landscape design; Workstead is the interior designer, and GF55 serves as the architect-of-record.
Alexander Gray Associates Relocates to Tribeca
After 17 years in Chelsea, Alexander Gray Associates has relocated to a 7,000-square-foot ground floor and mezzanine space in a circa 1915 building at 384 Broadway in Tribeca’s Historic District. Designed by studioMDA, the focus of the renovation was to preserve what the studio describes as the “Raumgefühl,” or sense of space, of the original building, while turning it into a well-proportioned gallery for the exhibition of contemporary art. The gallery’s main entrance was shifted over to the building’s southeast bay to accommodate a ramp, and the original entrance has been replaced by a window that matches the existing street facing windows. The gallery consists of a primary gallery plus two viewing rooms, open and private offices as well as two large storages and one staging area. The original railing has been preserved and reused, while the wood flooring has been locally sourced from Upstate New York. In the primary gallery space, the original crown moldings and trims were restored. Where there used to be laylights, new ones were recreated to mimic a skylight condition. The space runs from Broadway back to Cortlandt Alley, where a new skylight and windows were installed to bring light into the office areas. To date, studioMDA has completed the renovation of 12 galleries in Tribeca, with two more including the 30,000-square-foot Marian Goodman Gallery currently in the works.
In Case You Missed It…
The New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (MOCEJ) released EJNYC: A Study of Environmental Justice Issues in New York City, a comprehensive 200-plus-page report on environmental inequities. Developed by a team led by Buro Happold and the community-centered urban design nonprofit Hester Street, the report lays the foundation for the next step of the Environmental Justice NYC (EJNYC) initiative, which is the development of a comprehensive citywide environmental justice strategy called the EJNYC Plan.
The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, working in partnership with the National Park Service, announced that construction has begun on work that will transform the National Museum of Immigration into a 21st century visitors center. Work by Highland Associates, and exhibit designer Ralph Applebaum Associates will enhance the overall museum experience, improve accessibility, double the number of immigration records available for public access, and help preserve the historic site for future generations.
ASLA-NY announced its 2024 Design Award recipients. Selected for this year’s Award of Excellence is Setting a New Ecological Agenda for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Lost New York, an exhibit that brings to life our lost landmarks from the original Penn Station, Croton Reservoir, Hippodrome Theater, and Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, will be on view at the New York Historical Society from April 19 through September 29, 2024.
Calvary St. George’s Episcopal Church has launched The Muhlenberg Fund, a new fundraising initiative that will support the restoration of historic buildings. Its current campaign sees the restoration of two historic New York City church buildings in Gramercy Park and Stuyvesant Square. Learn more here.