New Tower May Spice up Jersey City Waterfront

New design by Rem Koolhaas in a booming waterfront district. Also, New York City advances plans for African art museum's permanent home.

Koolhaas Unveils Jersey City Tower

A new 52-story "vertical city" in Jersey City is under design by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner Rem Koolhaas of the Holland-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

The $400 million, mixed-use, high rise at 111 First St. is Koolhaas's first residential project in the United States, where he has designed the Seattle Public Library and Milstein Hall at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. New York-based BLDG Management Group, which owns the site, and New York-based Athena Group, which is developing a $110 million, 33-story condominium building across the street, are joint developers of the new project.

Demolition is under way on a 137-year-old wood and masonry structure now on the 111 First St. site that had most recently housed artist and performance space until the developers brokered a deal with municipal leaders last summer. The city agreed to rezone the plot for residential development partly in exchange for the developer including 117 affordable housing units and 120 artist studios in the new building.

The Koolhaas design features three blocks stacked atop one another and rotated 90 degrees to create terraces. The 1.2-million-sq-ft tower is mildly reminiscent of Santiago Calatrava's design for 80 South Street, an 835-ft-tall tower of individually stacked cubes arranged in a zigzag pattern that Sciame Construction has proposed building in Lower Manhattan, though that project is currently stalled, awaiting sales.

The new Koolhaas tower will include condominium units, a hotel, artist lofts, gallery, and retail spaces, and parking. The construction team is being assembled, according to a spokeswoman for the developers, and no date has been set for a groundbreaking. The project is still undergoing other city approvals.

Construction is expected to take three to four years.

African Art Museum Gets a Home

The Museum for African Art is set to receive its first permanent address with the construction of a new Fifth Avenue facility in Harlem, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office.

After 22 years of residing in rented spaces all around the city, the lone independent museum in the United States dedicated solely to African art will finally have a home in 850,000 sq ft of space on the corner of 110th Street along the stretch known as "Museum Mile." Most recently, the museum's home has been in Long Island City.

Robert A. M. Stern Architects is designing the museum's new home, which will feature exhibition galleries, an interactive education center, theater, café-restaurant, gift shop, climate-controlled art storage, and conservation facilities. The facility will connect to a separate residential tower with 116 new units financed by a private developer.

Construction of the museum is expected to begin this summer with completion scheduled for late 2009. The city committed $12 million toward construction of the new facility.

New Arts School in the Bronx

A new 650-student school in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the Bronx is on the rise with a design focused on merging the creative needs of an arts institution with the stringent rules of school construction in New York City. Occupancy is slated for 2009. Construction began in March on the new six-story, 90,000-sq-ft Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists at Casita Maria, which will feature performing arts spaces, music rooms, science labs, and a library. The top floor will be used as administrative offices and community space for Casita Maria, a 73-year-old organization that arranges after-school education and job counseling for the city's Hispanic community.

The most challenging aspect of the design was merging the institution's need for open and flexible space with the pragmatic guidelines set by the N.Y.C. School Construction Authority, says Roger Goodhill, lead architect on the project for Hillier Architecture of Princeton.

The design includes an atrium that connects to the basement level, which will be used for rehearsal space, as well as to the library on the second floor. The atrium also incorporates a glass façade to open the school to the street as well as create a "lantern effect" in the evenings. The interior design stresses color and a playful tone, including overscale polka dots.

AMCC Corp. of Long Island City in Queens is general contractor on the $46 million project, with New York-based Ysrael A. Seinuk as structural engineer, New York's Loring Consulting Engineers in charge of M-E-P work, and Langan Engineering of Elmwood Park, N.J., as the civil engineer.

NYIT Plans New Arboretum

The New York Institute of Technology is planning to develop an arboretum on its 220-acre campus in Old Westbury, N.Y.

NYIT was planning the start of the project's first phase around spring weather conditions, using a landscape design by New York's Vollmer Associates. The site chosen for the $125,000 project is a shaded walk connecting three campus buildings.

A grant from the New York State Department of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation is funding the work, which will have plantings consisting mainly of native shade-tolerant trees, shrubs, and ground covers. The school had not named the contractor by early spring but was expecting the project to take several months.

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