Designs for Downtown Tower Unveiled

F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc. and renowned Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava unveiled plans for an 835-foot-tall residential tower to be developed on the East River waterfront, just blocks from the World Trade Center site.

The slender, soaring tower will be the architect's first residential project in the United States. At present, the building is named after its address, 80 South Street Tower. The tower's residences, described as "Townhouses in the Sky," will consist of modular, 45-foot cubes. Twelve cubes, each containing four floors, will be cantilevered from, and stacked along, the tower's vertical axis. The tower's base is envisioned as the new home for a cultural or other institutional user.

The tower will contain 175,000 sq. ft. of public cultural and private living space. As envisioned by the architect, each of the townhouse cubes may contain its own individual elevator. Original plans call for two-story living rooms, but Calatrava said that he would be willing to design interior spaces according to the new resident's requirements.

Sciame is exploring whether the tower can be built "as of right" but is expecting it to be completed in summer 2005.

HOK Designing College Point Project

A 26-acre site in the College Point Corporate Park in Queens will become the location of a new building complex dedicated to the import and distribution of consumer products.

The New York office of the architecture firm Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum will design the center, which is expected to house close to 200 small businesses in 585,000 sq. ft. of space.

The developer for the complex is the Jonathan Rose Companies and Turner Construction Company is the construction manager. The architect's plans call for multiple 2-story buildings designed for showrooms, offices and distribution support facilities. The buildings and site plan are planned to incorporate sustainable design features. Tenants for the building will be primarily members of the Korean-American business community that are now located in Midtown Manhattan along the Broadway corridor.

Designs for Rutgers Facility Completed

The structural design for the new biomedical engineering facility on the Busch Campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in Piscataway, N.J. has been completed by Schoor DePalma and KSS Architects.

The 3-story, 80,000-sq.-ft. building on campus' Taylor Road will include a 200-seat auditorium, lecture halls, computer centers, various molecular, cellular and biology engineering labs, Magnetic Resonance Imaging equipment, and a vivarium.

At the building's expected completion in late 2006, the Department of Biomedical Engineering will move its operations from an 18,000 sq. ft. set of buildings on Bowser Road on the Busch campus.