Overview
This semester’s Bass Developer Studio will explore how design and development can help an arts organization optimize its resources and maximize its community impact. Using as a case study a real arts non-profit contemplating physical and institutional change, students will confront the triple prompt of renovating an historic structure, bolstering an existing arts organization, and integrating a financially sustainable residential program for artists.
Originally founded as the “Clay Club” in 1928, Sculpture Center occupies a former trolley warehouse on Purves Street in Long Island City. A recent investigation uncovered unused air-rights that could triple the building’s size; this would allow Sculpture Center to expand its space while also incorporating residential units into a neighborhood that has become increasingly unaffordable to the artists who have historically lived and worked there. Students will determine the type of housing and how it can be both financially feasible and consistent with the mission of the Sculpture Center.
History of Long Island City
But first, some context and history. Our site is in Long Island City, ancestral lands of the Lenape tribe, which became an independent municipality in 1870:
“…At that time Long Island City was a thriving manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping center organized around ferry service…. This role began to change in 1909 with the opening of the Queensborough (now Ed Koch) Bridge… that connected the new Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan with the Long Island RR and the entire Pennsylvania RR system …. By the 1930s greater Long Island City had become a major industrial area [that] …. produced everything from paint to chewing gum.
After World War II industrial employment throughout New York City began a slow and steady decline. In 1946, anticipating that decline [various architects] … proposed the … redevelopment of everything between 48th Avenue and the Queensborough Bridge….Finally, in 1989, the New York State Urban Development Corp., the Port Authority of N.Y. and N.J., and the City of New York approved the redevelopment of the entire waterfront between 45th Road and Newtown Creek, [called “Queens West”]…In 2009, the Bloomberg administration took over Queens West, renamed it Hunters Point South, and combined it with a 30-acre mixed-use, middle-income housing development….
Despite the city’s declining industrial base, a 1980 study reported that demand for industrial space in Long Island City was “very high” and estimated the occupancy rate to be “95-98%.” Four years later a report by the NYC Department of City Planning stated that Hunters Point area of Long Island City (between the Queensborough Bridge, Newtown Creek and the Sunnyside Rail Yards) was “one of the city’s oldest and most vital industrial centers… which continued to thrive while other areas” experienced a decline in manufacturing. By 1993, … the agency was reporting that the same area had become a neighborhood for some 4,000 residents and 400 businesses with “a small, but thriving artist community.”
Indeed, many artists sought live/work space in Long Island City thanks to low rents and large, open industrial floor plates. Sculpture Center, the Noguchi Museum, MoMA PS 1, and Socrates Sculpture Park are some of these enduring establishments. As the area became a cultural destination, restaurants, bars and other infrastructure followed; this led to increased demand for real estate (commercial and residential) and, with it, increased prices. Eventually, as has been the case with SoHo, Chelsea, and Williamsburg, artists found themselves priced out of the neighborhood they had originally sought for its affordability. A central theme of this studio is how to address the need for affordable housing, supporting the artists who made – and continue to make - LIC what it is today.
History of Sculpture Center
Enter SculptureCenter. Sculpture Center (originally “The Clay Club”) , was first located in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. In 1932, it moved to the West Village and in 1948 to the Upper East Side. In 2001, the non-profit found a permanent home in a former trolley warehouse on Purves Street and enlisted Maya Lin to transform it into an exhibition space with forty-foot-high ceilings and reinforced-concrete floors. About a decade later, Andrew Berman expanded the Center to include 2,000 sf of interior space and 1,500 sf of exterior courtyard space.
As a not-for-profit contemporary art museum, SculptureCenter has presented works by over 750 artists, including Turner Prize winners and Hugo Boss Prize winners. Its annual program includes three exhibition cycles of 1–2 commissioning programs by mid-career artists, 10–15 projects and commissions by emerging artists, and 3–6 solo and group exhibitions. SculptureCenter offers free public programs and events including artist talks, performances, film screenings, and publications.
The Brief
Today, Sculpture Center is at a crossroads. A popular and respected destination, SculptureCenter is bursting at the seams and needs more exhibition space and administrative offices. Any undertaking must be done thoughtfully to preserve the historic trolley warehouse, which is itself an excellent example of adaptive reuse. SculptureCenter has also found that organizing studio space or housing for visiting artists is challenging given the costs of neighborhood rentals. Therefore, they are also considering how to integrate new residential or live/work space, which would allow them to offer longer term residencies.
Outside their door, the neighborhood continues to change thanks to the construction of hundreds of market rate apartments on Jackson Avenue, providing the Center with potential donors and visitors. And in their literal backyard, The Department of Transportation and a local developer, Lions Group, have enlisted Studio V to design The Underline, a series of public spaces below the overpass of Dutch Kills Street and Jackson Avenue. Already a destination thanks to Side Hustle and Dutch Kills bars, this reinvigorated public space will increase pedestrian traffic; the team at Sculpture Center wonders if they should capitalize on this traffic and add an entry, or commercial or program space along the backside of their property.
What resources and mechanisms does SculptureCenter have to engage with these challenges and opportunities? Air rights. The team at SculptureCenter has discovered that, as an M1-5/R9 they are entitled, as-of-right, to significantly more square footage than their current 11,800 sf built space, which can include residential, arts and/or commercial programming. The exact amount of available square footage, whether as-of-right or with a variance, will be one of the first things that the Studio investigates.
Should they sell the air-rights and use the proceeds? Should they use the air-rights and solve some of their spatial challenges? How to begin this daunting process? Enter the Architect and the Developer to help their Client, the SculptureCenter.
Methodology
The Bass Studio was created in 2004 at the Yale School of Architecture to provide students with insight into the real-world development process, and the role of the architect on the development team. Students work with private and public sector clients and developers to forge integrated solutions that take into account design, program, feasibility, community and sustainability.
This year’s studio offers three unique perspectives that students must integrate into their projects, guided by the critic (Abigail Chang): those of the client (Justin Beal, SculptureCenter), the developer (Antonia Devine), and the architect (Billie Tsien). The client outlines their mission, goals, needs, and budget. The developer leverages their knowledge of the market, zoning, entitlements and financing to help craft a long-term feasible solution. The architect brings these variables to life in a three-dimensional form.
The studio will follow the rough sequence of a real development lifecycle, divided into three parts over the semester: Evaluation, Exploration and Execution. In Part I: Evaluation, we identify needs and opportunities, including performing site, market, zoning, community & demographic analyses, and initial feasibility studies. In Part II: Exploration, we conduct precedent research, do preliminary design, and nurture the interplay between feasibility and design. And in Part III: Execution, students are off to the races with their design and production.
Considerations
In creating a comprehensive design and development strategy for the site, the studio will consider the following questions:
- Urban planning: How can organizations adapt to, or change, their neighborhoods? Is the strategy different in historic versus developing areas? How can architects use access, orientation, and views to connect to the urban fabric?
- Community: how can foundations address their own needs, those of their intended audience, and those of the community? How can public/private partnerships guide an institution? How can equitable mission-driven design be achieved?
- Real Estate Development: How can institutions use air rights and zoning codes to inform design? What does “highest and best” use mean for arts organization? How can we develop a model that aligns the long-term interests of real-estate developers and artists/non-profits? What development strategies can be deployed to fund the renovation, support future fundraising, and/or produce a revenue-generating space?
- Housing: What types of housing can support artists through subsidies, affordable units, live/work or communal models? How integrated is the residential program with the arts organization? How do the variables of market, feasibility, zoning and financing inform the viability of a particular housing model?
- Sculpture: What does it mean to design for sculpture and sculptors and what can we, as architects, learn from the spatial and material strategies of artists working in three dimensions?
Students must think at the scale of the sculpture, exhibition space, building, site, and neighborhood.