GLUCK+

Studio campuses spread out: individual soundstage boxes, each its own building, on a backlot and connected by golf carts and an interior self-contained street network. In some places land is available to think horizontally. In New York City, it isn’t. The question at Sunnyside Studios was how to compress the program—stages, production support, loading, parking, catering, crew, talent—into a single urban block without losing the logic that makes a campus work.

The project’s answer was vertical: three column-free soundstages anchor the ground floor while a five-story production hub rises between them, housing offices, support spaces, and a rooftop stage with views of the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines. Everything a campus needs—stacked, connected, and on one block.

Designed by modernist architect William Lescaze and completed in 1961, Manhattanville Houses replaced a dense grid of four- to six-story tenements, most built around the turn of the 20th century. The 535,000-square-foot superblock comprises six 20-story buildings containing 1,272 units. Emphasizing open space, light, and air, the development did not utilize the maximum floor area permitted by zoning—an approach typical of mid-century public housing. What remained was a different kind of city: towers in the park, standing apart.

In November 2013, a fire destroyed the supermarket that had occupied the small privately owned parcel at the edge of the complex. The burned-out lot could only support a six-story, 51-unit building, designed by GLUCK+ within the constraints of existing zoning. It was a reasonable building—contextual in height, useful in program—but it barely registered against the scale of what surrounded it. Most importantly, the neighborhood needed more housing and the site had more to give.

1440 Amsterdam was made possible through a land acquisition and development-rights transfer between a private developer and the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Already owner of the vacant lot, the developer acquired the adjacent NYCHA parking lot—adding 100 feet of street frontage—and purchased 280,000 square feet of unused air rights from the public-housing campus, channeling $28 million directly back into Manhattanville Houses for long-overdue repairs. The building delivers 490 new apartments, 30% of which are regulated by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) middle-income affordable housing program.

The same local supermarket that burned in 2013 reopened on the ground floor, returning to the neighborhood it had served for decades.

NYCHA’s superblocks repeat across the five boroughs, large campuses with underbuilt land and unused air rights that current zoning could accommodate. At Manhattanville alone, nearly 200,000 square feet of allowable floor area remain unbuilt. Multiplied across the city, the untapped potential is enormous.

1510 Broadway occupies the triangular block where Broadway, Hancock Street, and Saratoga Avenue converge. The straightforward answer to a shape like this—and the most direct way to maximize square footage—is a single volume running parallel to the widest frontage.  However, the elevated J train runs directly in front of the site, its columns coming down on the sidewalk. A building oriented toward Broadway would be a building whose residents wake up facing the train. How to design a better building?

Commercial overlays are mapped within residential neighborhoods, typically along high-traffic streets, to provide essential retail and services at the ground floor of otherwise residential buildings. Zoning requires buildings to orient their primary facade to the commercial street. But at 1510, the commercial overlay covered the entire block. That unusual condition permitted something the zoning code would have normally blocked: turn the building away from Broadway and instead orient the apartments toward the quieter residential streets.

The result is a V-shaped building with two wings pulled back along Hancock Street and Saratoga Avenue. Broadway gets an active retail base at street level—fulfilling what the commercial overlay intends—but the housing above faces away from the noise and hustle of the elevated train platform, instead overlooking a 7,000-square-foot landscaped courtyard.

The second floor is where the building’s shared life concentrates: the resident recreation room, laundry, and play areas all open directly onto the courtyard. It is the only floor where the two wings of the building connect.

Splitting the building into two independent wings—each with its own elevator core and compact scissor stair—meant each corridor serves only a handful of apartments, each ending in a window. Shorter halls, natural light: a building that yields better quality of living on every floor.

The concept of Understory House is inseparable from its site—a second-growth forest in the foothills of the Catskills. The house is a single-story structure, shaped by the clients’ desire to inhabit the mid-canopy without having to use stairs. From the uphill approach, the house reads as a low, quiet form nestled into the slope.

Both roof and floor are folded into a simple form. Within this platform, subtle articulations emerge—interior and exterior thresholds layered to enhance spatial depth and human interaction.

Materially, the house is conceived as a double-layered C—dark and muted on the outside; warm and tactile within, lined in maple that wraps the spaces of daily life. A folded hard shell, a soft core—an architectural response to rugged surroundings.

Perched lightly on slender steel columns, the house barely touches the ground, a suspended atmosphere above the forest understory.

The site for CitySquash is tight, too long and too narrow for a sports facility layout. Rather than forcing a conventional solution onto an unconventional site, the building was conceived not as a linear sequence of courts, but as a compact world of squash organized around a shared center.

The courts were lifted to the second floor. This move made it possible to cluster four courts tightly together, a place where players could see one another, coaches could supervise multiple games at once, and the collective energy of the sport became part of the architecture.

This vital core—part circulation, part void, part stage—is the heart of the building. Conceived as an extension of the courts, it is where the building gathers itself. Arriving from the street, visitors move inward and upward through it. On the ground floor, the stair widens into amphitheater-like seating. Maple—the required surface of the squash courts—reappears on the walls and within the stair opening, visually and materially pulling the world of squash down into the main lobby.

The ascent is deliberately sensory. Sound travels downward through the vital core—the sharp echoes of balls striking walls above. Before seeing the games, you hear them. Upstairs, a floating mezzanine reinforces the core’s role as a shared observatory.

Situated on a small infill site in Lower Manhattan, the existing structure featured a split-level office for a local builder with a two-floor residence above. Over the years, the building deteriorated and its details were badly degraded. Taking cues from the original composition, the new 21st-century design scales up, delivering a referential yet clearly modern interpretation of the historic form. The residential portion of the façade is clad with narrow rectangular bricks, contains windows with red powder-coated aluminum frames, and includes a slender guardrail at the roof terrace, a nod to the historic cornice. In contrast, the commercial storefront is clad in mahogany, unifying the two-story space and differentiating it from its residential counterpart.

The new commercial volume features clean, airy, and light-filled loft-like spaces. A three-story steel stair, floor-to-ceiling glass partitions, and large south-facing windows combine to unify the space and provide visual and spatial connections across the levels.

In cities like New York, where real estate is scarce and housing demand high, offsite construction offers a unique solution. By utilizing infill sites—small, vacant parcels of land that are typically difficult and costly to develop—this approach can creatively address the housing shortage.

As we were building 5,000 square feet of infrastructure and foundations on site, a 28,000-square-foot, six-story building was being completed in the factory, where construction workers worked in dry, warm, optimal conditions. The two components, on-site and off-site construction, came together in a four-week installation period. This approach reduced time and site supervision, significantly lowering the overall project cost and enabling the building to generate income sooner.

Another bonus of offsite construction is that it greatly reduces the period of disruption to the neighborhood. Street closures, parking impacts, sidewalk re-routing, scaffolding and street bridge erection—all are minimized to the benefit of everyone who lives and works in the vicinity. Offsite construction is also more sustainable, as it makes waste management and recycling easier.

This adaptive reuse project overlays the ethos —the culture and mission— of Legal Outreach onto an existing industrial building. This overlay is programmatic, spatial, and graphic. The project façade is painted gray with what appear to be abstract geometric shapes in accent yellow. An oblique approach along the street reveals their true meaning: a modified version of LO, the Legal Outreach logo, offering a glimpse of the special world happening within.

The graphics then fold into the building’s entrance and continue through the three interior levels. Three ribbons of color guide students and staff, creating a colorful canvas to share news or showcase remarkable work. A central metallic stair, the only architectural insertion of the project onto the original skeleton, is paired with motivational words. Imprinted on the three-level wall, the vertical connection becomes the core of the building, a constant reminder of the power of words, respect, and hard work.

On a thickly forested site, a group of buildings and play fields stand disconnected. The shore and waters of the lake are the only consistent features throughout; nevertheless, somehow always over there. To bring together the lake, forest and disparate elements on the property, Pool Pavilion’s site strategy implements a series of precise landscape and architectural interventions.

First, the project clears a central area of the forest. The clearing becomes the locus of indoor and outdoor programming, a central gathering space, a viewing platform for the rest of the site. The sloping cleared ground is then cut and lifted. This rift allows the program to bifurcate between two ground planes, the Pool Pavilion itself becoming the transition between the newly created upper and lower levels. Finally, the rift is sculpted to orient spaces towards views and to create a unified and disappearing whole. An opening is punched into the surface to create a sunken courtyard. A portion of the sunken courtyard is popped up to create a vertical element, an interior “lookout” space.

Arranged to mirror the region’s agricultural fields, Artist Retreat offers a perfect blend of private creative spaces and communal gathering areas. Its eight single room structures are divided by function—live, sleep, create. Living, dining and bedrooms comprise the main cluster, centered around a shared outdoor space, while a detached pair of cubes house the photography studio and darkroom. Each of the individual bedrooms contains a private bathroom, a window opened to a specific view, and intimate space to think, write, contemplate, offering each guest their own world.

There is a porosity to the interior world of this retreat. Glass hallways link the boxes and transform into open air bridges that surround the central deck. The result is privacy between the different programmatic elements in each cube, with a visual layering of space as the land is slowly revealed.

Integrating larger multi-family structures into single-family residential areas is a challenge when densifying modern suburbs and small cities across the United States. Since the 1990s, New Haven, and specifically Whitney Avenue, has witnessed the construction of several multi-family apartment projects that attempt to emulate the city’s Victorian housing stock. However, these efforts fall short due to an increase in scale, inherently low-cost detailing, and the resulting disconnection when mimicry replaces authenticity.

The design of Whitney Modern takes a different approach, reinforcing the existing context while engaging in a dynamic architectural dialogue with its older neighbors. First, “The Modern” steps back and preserves the front yard to the street, continuing the urban character of the neighborhood. Contrary to convention, the entry of the new building faces the historic Abner Hendee House rather than Whitney Avenue, transforming a typical asphalt driveway into a well-defined urban facade with sidewalks, plantings, and streetlights.

The overall building mass is bifurcated into a neutral “wrapper” and a warmer, more intimately scaled volume. Clad in wood, the more inviting scale of this building highlights the entrance and creates a plaza, extending the residential fabric and bringing it into the project.

The first phase of the campus, CQA I occupies two large, 35,000-square-foot floor plates. Their sheer size, coupled with an irregular shape, increases the design’s complexity. Conceptually, the project uses the Elmhurst neighborhood grid and overlays it onto the building (the podium’s mass itself was determined by the urban grid). The resulting lines trace the geometric logic of the city onto the floor plate, delineating blocks and circulation paths. These blocks become villages, with classrooms and commons forming neighborhoods.

Each cluster is tied to a “Commons”, a shared space outside the classroom designed to foster creative engagement among students from up to 30 different nations, transcending the boundaries of traditional classroom learning. Each Commons has a distinct identity, featuring playful yet non-prescriptive elements: green ‘grass’ turf floors for jumping up and down; a 20-foot-long white board that doubles as a movie screen; amphitheater seating with nooks for books and shoes; and a Crossroads Commons for informal conversations with faculty and friends on the way to class.

At street level, movable curtains around a multipurpose space and a flexible gym can be drawn to create smaller learning environments or fully open arrangements for all-school assembly or lunch service.

How to develop a large black box, spanning several thousand square feet, within a tight urban site in NYC? In contrast to most film studios—which have land to spread out among numerous single-story buildings—Kaufman Studios’ new home is conceived as a stacked L-shape with different yet complementary programs. A four-story building houses two soundstages at the base, production support spaces on the second floor and office spaces on the third and fourth floors, with a parking garage in the cellar that serves the entire campus.

With the program in place, how to design the building to be sensible to its immediate urban context? Astoria in Queens presents a mix of manufacturing and residential zoning districts coexisting side-by-side. Considering the pedestrian experience of users and neighbors, ONstage’s 40-foot-tall base is embroidered with a pattern of façade incisions, reminiscent of film strips, that change prominence based on the angle of the sun throughout the day. In the evening, some of these vertical tick lines light up, enhancing sidewalk safety. A playful composition of windows extends the film strip to the three floors above the stages, providing expansive city views for the support spaces and offices. At the same time, the more porous façade downscales the presence of the building, creating an inviting atmosphere for the neighborhood.

The building includes direct access and support to the backlot, allowing Kaufman Astoria Studios to work with local organizations on free, public events that benefit the larger community.

Traditional barns separated different functions into separate wings to allow for feeding, breeding and showing. In its new incarnation after the fire, Barn with Aedicule’s division of function persists but is now consistent with its new residential use.

Sleeping, living, playing; the layout of the original barn accommodates them all, ensuring privacy, ease of circulation and acoustic separation. The longest wing of the compound serves a dual purpose, with recreation spaces below and dormitories above. The main barn structure is transformed into a Great Room to host extended family gatherings.

Inserted into the Great Room, a steel aedicule—both structural frame and spatial marker—encloses a kitchen below and a library above.

From the start, the intent for The Malt House was to restore, repair and reuse the old, while expressing the new as something different. The block, occupied by an early 20th-century brewery, was not designated by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, so the main question was an architectural one: how to add and create something new while celebrating the historic nature of the old? The easiest approach would have been to demolish the existing building. But the old brick has a texture, a certain unquantifiable value—and a very quantifiable one in terms of embodied energy and carbon.

Bookended by two old structures and responding to the setback requirement, The Malt House completes the street wall, blending the existing brick with a unitized curtain wall. Matching the height of its pre-existing neighbors, the new glass façade clearly differentiates from the brick but maintains a similar tone and character with the rest of its surroundings: the rhythm of the new curtain wall acknowledges the composition of the existing façade; glass inside corners are reminiscent of brick inside corners; the use of four different tints of glass adds texture and detail while reducing the scale of the building’s base.

Inside, the old is left as raw as possible—the existing state of the building treated as a historic witness—while the new pieces are distinct and clearly delineated.

At the back, the contextual strategy was to blend old and new by creating a patchwork of pieces that embraces the original hodge podge. In a sentence: The Malt House reflects its context.

Bridge – 205 Race addresses a critical issue faced by most cities in the United States. Located on the edge of Philadelphia’s Old City, where some of the country’s oldest urban fabric stands side by side with the Ben Franklin Bridge (an epitome of 20th-century industrial infrastructure), the project sits at a unique crossroads. As productive and recreational activities make a comeback to Philly’s waterfront and Center City, new development and changing demographics demand housing and commercial accommodations, reviving a preference for living downtown.

Although zoning allows for a building close to the bridge, it is not marketable for housing. The design stacks that portion of the building on top, away from the bridge. When rotated, it optimizes views of the city and the waterfront. A notch in the tower extends the street wall and preserves the view of the bridge. By reinterpreting and extending the façade rhythm and proportion of historic adjacent rowhouses, the four-story podium integrates with the neighborhood. The sculpted tower negotiates height, density, speed, and views of the Delaware River, becoming an architectural expression of its time, relating to the historic fabric of the street and the bridge.

The entire 5th floor is dedicated to residential amenity spaces, including an expansive 8,000-square-foot outdoor terrace with visual connections to the pedestrian promenade of the Ben Franklin Bridge and downtown Philly. From the street-level retail below, a mirrored soffit reflects views of the activity on the common roof terrace, inviting the city into the building.

Architecturally speaking, some neighborhoods in New York City, brownstone neighborhoods, for instance, are likely to maintain a certain uniformity, they tend to look more or less the same. But in the Lower East Side, buildings go up and down, in and out. They are designed in diverse styles and serve diverse uses—the eclectic nature of the Lower East Side’s building stock cannot be ignored. 150 Rivington embraces these conditions and finds a language to express the vitality of its context.

Mediating the desire for openness and views and the domestic need for enclosure and protection, the team explored patterns of open and closed sections, akin to keys on a piano. Apartments in the building do not always align from floor to floor, so when programmatic elements were mapped onto the façade, unexpected patterns began to appear, breaking down the vertical sections and helping to scale down an otherwise monolithic facade.

How to raise a living room above the 40-feet-high forest canopy?

Tower House takes the traditional residential hallway, with bedrooms connected to it, and tilts it up, stacking the bedrooms one on top of the other with floor to ceiling windows. The hallway is then swapped with a glass enclosed yellow staircase—a vertical procession to the living room up in the trees. Corner windows frame moments of the forest and an open ribbon reveals the panoramic view.

Steel and glass evoke a skyscraper in the city, not a cabin in the woods. Counterintuitively, the dark green enameled back-painted glass of Tower House camouflages it by reflecting the surrounding woods and dematerializing its form. The house disappears, or even better, it becomes part of the pervasive canopy. A gesture as whimsical as it is rational.

Location is the most important aspect driving the design of 145 CPN. The building is on Central Park North, one of its four defining facades. The goal of the project was to complete the parkwall while maintaining the scale and character of the neighborhood. To do so, it was important to articulate the three portions of the building—its base, middle, and top.

The base relates to the rusticated historic buildings by segmenting the ground floor façade into stone and glass panels. The rhythm of these elements and the height of the floating canopy further articulate the experience of passing by pedestrians.

Above the canopy and up to the eighth floor, which coincides with the first zoning setback, the middle portion of the building incorporates deep bronze profiles, each covering two floors: instead of eight stories, this section of the façade expresses only four horizontal divisions towards the street—an implied cornise line, directly relating with the scale of the neighboring buildings. Finally, the top, taller than the adjacent structures, becomes abstract and reflective, almost disappearing as it recedes in height.

Located between a busy commercial street and a residential suburban neighborhood, the existing buildings —including an underused 1950s Ukrainian church school— accommodate Lady Liberty’s lower grade classrooms and a separate gym. To house the middle school, we designed a new, three-sided volume that wraps round the existing structures.

The building itself becomes a protective fence for kids at play, and simultaneously shields the residential neighbors from playground noise. The courtyard becomes an easily monitored outdoor recess space and provides an overall ‘campus’ feel from where students and faculty alike participate in the school’s vibrant life.