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Brooklyn Tower
New Condo High-Rise Set to Open in Industrial DUMBO District
Rising beside the Manhattan Bridge, a new 327-ft-tall tower aims to bring upscale flavor to a gritty Brooklyn neighborhood.
by Alex Padalka
A 31-story condominium tower nearing completion this summer is now the tallest structure in Brooklyn’s District Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.
The tower, known as J Condo, will have 267 condos ranging in price from $300,000 studios to penthouse suites topping $1 million, some of which are duplexes and one that has a 600-sq-ft terrace.
Hudson Cos. of New York, the developer, had sold 90% of the units by mid-spring, says Paul Colapinto, project manager for New York-based Monadnock Construction, the construction manager on the job and an affiliate of Hudson, which spent $100 million in hard construction costs on the project at 100 Jay St.
Hudson is partnering on the project with two other Brooklyn-based firms, Targia Development and Cara Construction and Development.
Unlike more isolated upscale residential construction taking place farther north in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods or Long Island City in Queens, DUMBO’s redevelopment into a luxury loft district has already sprouted Manhattan-style amenities, such as organic grocery stores, kid-friendly waterfront parks, and French cleaners. DUMBO’s architectural flavor, however, remains industrial, with full-block warehouses, cobblestone streets, and stretches of abandoned rail tracks.
To make sure the new 327-ft-tall tower meshed with the neighborhood, the building’s lower floors have a masonry and punched-window façade before giving way to curtain wall closer to the top. The masonry design continues all the way up on the Jay Street side of the tower.
“The base of the building was very important for the neighborhood, and we wanted it to have a human scale,” says Ivan Ilyashov, lead designer on the project for Gruzen Samton of New York, the architect. “We also felt that we had an obligation for the corner close to the subway. Therefore, our form resulted in a health club with a sloped roof and lots of glass.”
Hudson had first proposed to build an 18-story tower dubbed “Light Bridges” on the site, a former parking lot, and endured community complaints when it changed plans to instead erect the taller J Condo. But Hudson had zoning rights to build the larger 410,000-sq-ft structure, and was able to proceed with the plan.
Starting in late 2005, crews dug 30 ft deep and drove 600 piles to support the building. An adjacent Metropolitan Transportation Authority building south of the site complicated the process.
“An MTA inspector was onsite during the entire stage the piles were being driven,” Colapinto says. “[MTA] wouldn’t allow us to underpin it because it was a nonconventional foundation system.”
In addition to the piles, crews from Urban Foundations of Elmhurst, N.Y., the foundation subcontractor, had to add a secant wall on the edge of the MTA site. The structure consists of overlapping secant piles – 30-in-diameter rings of cast-in-place concrete – that are filled in with grout. Once the grout sets after one to two days on one set of piles, workers pull out the casings and drive the overlapping piles.
The pile-driving process encountered a few hurdles, including the remains of a former building’s foundation onsite, says Paul Bradley of De Nardis Engineering, the New York-based structural engineer on the building.
“There was a layer of rubble below grade that damaged a lot of piles that were being put in, so we had to redesign part of the foundation system on the fly,” he adds. “The contractor employed a couple of different techniques to make the piles drive through the layer of rock – a combination of augering and filling the piles, driving them a certain amount, filling them, and driving them again. The design and construction teams worked really well to put the building up efficiently.”
In addition, a Consolidated Edison utility vault was in the way of the foundation on Front Street, requiring project crews to remove it and install four additional vaults along Jay Street.
Close collaboration between the architect, engineer, and construction team also facilitated the effort once the cast-in-place reinforced concrete structure started rising in February 2006, Colapinto says.
In one case, the design changed to raise heat vents off of the floor to allow uninterrupted floor siding. Other moves shifted kitchen arches in the smaller apartments to allow air circulation to reach the living areas or rearranged kitchen cabinets to allow more room for closet space.
The exterior design also influenced the apartment layouts and mechanical system installation inside, Bradley says.
“There were a lot of transfer beams that had to be shifted around to accommodate some of the architectural features,” he adds. “And we had cantilevered slabs on the bridge side of the building.”
The units feature 8- to 10-ft ceilings, hardwood floors, kitchen islands, stainless steel appliances, and ceramic or limestone-and-marble baths. The living rooms are generally situated at corners and feature floor-to-ceiling windows.
In addition, 46 units have balconies and 16 have terraces, while the 30th floor has a common rooftop area. Units on the upper floors have views of the Manhattan skyline, East River, and the Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Williamsburg bridges.
The entire bottom floor is dedicated to five separate retail spaces, one of which will be a bank, Colapinto says. The third floor has a rooftop garden and the glassed-in fitness center overlooking the York Street subway station for the F train.
The design places the building’s cooling tower on the ground between the Manhattan Bridge and the tower. That area also serves as a separate entrance to the 75,000-sq-ft garage, which has three levels of parking, two of them above grade, and 439 spaces.
The most striking element of the design is a gently curved glass curtain wall covering the southwestern part of the building above the 12th floor in a stacked formation. Meant to evoke a billowing sail, the curtain wall also connects the underlying straight-angle street grid to the looming bulk of the Manhattan Bridge, which spans above almost everything in DUMBO at a 25-degree offset angle.
“Toward the harbor side and toward the bridge, we wanted a very different expression that would set this building apart,” Ilyashov says. “Asymmetry was a key element in the design of the building.”
Colapinto says that while Hudson is not seeking Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification, at least two features inside the units provide more flexibility and would qualify as LEED points at the same time.
The heating and cooling system uses pump units that allow tenants to bring in fresh air without opening windows, he says. The windows themselves are made of triple-glazed glass with a sound-proof rating of STC 45, which cuts noise from rumbling subway trains and traffic on the adjacent Manhattan Bridge.
Key Players
Developer: Hudson Cos., New York; Targia Development, Brooklyn; Cara Construction and Development, Brooklyn
Architect: Gruzen Samton, New York
Construction Manager: Monadnock Construction, New York
Structural Engineer: De Nardis Engineering, White Plains, N.Y.
Foundation: Urban Foundations, Elmhurst, N.Y.
Interior Design: Andrés Escobar & Associés, Montreal
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