Architecture is always built in negotiation - with clients, contractors, codes, economies, site conditions, gravity, and time. This studio makes that negotiation explicit and central. Unlike studios led solely by architects, we are inviting the developer’s discipline into the conversation, not as a constraint to be managed, but as an equal intellectual position.
What do we mean when we talk about bringing “value” to a site? It could be said that land in NYC is less a physical fact than a political one. Property lines, zoning envelopes, FAR, setback rules, air rights; these are all legislative constructs, the accumulated decisions of generations of policy makers layered onto ground that was once marsh, then industry, then neglect, and now possibility. The architect and the developer are both working within and against that legislative reality. What does it mean, then, to bring value to this particular surface of earth, and for whom? Economists will measure exchange prices. Planners will measure public benefit. Architects will measure spatial qualities. Community organizers will measure the degree of belonging; whether the people who were here before still want and can afford to be here after. These are different value systems and they are often in tension, but, occasionally they converge.
This studio is organized around that convergence and around the figure of the architect-developer who pursues it deliberately. Tankhouse believes that building cities should be done hyper-locally. They build in the borough in which the principals live. Proximity to their sites - as residents of the same neighborhoods they are developing - creates a different kind of accountability than the typical developer’s relationship to a site. This is rooted in the belief that genuine community investment requires a literal investment in place in order to demonstrate that rigorous design intelligence and viable development are not mutually exclusive but mutually generative.
THE PLACE
A Canal
Before the canal, Gowanus was water and marsh; a brackish tidal estuary threading through salt meadows between the glacial ridges that are now Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. New York State authorized the canal’s construction in 1849; by 1869 it was complete, a 100-foot-wide cut extending from Gowanus Bay to Butler Street, which is the location of this studio’s site. By the early 1900s it was the busiest industrial canal in the United States, carrying six million tons of cargo annually, lined with tanneries, cement works, chemical plants, coal yards, and manufactured gas plants. The R.G. Dun Company built its printing plant at the canal’s head in 1913.
The canal was also, from the beginning, a sewer. Coal tar, industrial waste, and raw sewage accumulated in its water and soil. The layer of contaminated sediment at the bottom, described in technical reports as “black mayonnaise,” is more than 20 feet deep in some sections.
The EPA designated the Gowanus Canal a Superfund site in 2010. Remediation is ongoing. Combined sewer overflows still pour raw sewage into the canal during heavy rain. Climate projections indicate the site will face significantly increased flood risk over the lifetime of any building constructed now.
Rezoning
The 2021 Gowanus Neighborhood Rezoning recast 82 blocks from light-industrial to mixed residential use, permitting towers of up to 30 stories along the canal and projecting 8,500 new housing units across the district, roughly 3,000 of them affordable. It mandates Mandatory Inclusionary Housing in every new residential building: a minimum of 25% of units at 60% AMI (Area Median Income). The canal still floods, yet the first post-rezoning residential tower has opened. Tankhouse’s own Anagram project, 20 stories at 450 Union Street, designed by SO-IL, is rising. The neighborhood is mid-transformation, past the point of reversal but not yet settled in its new identity.
255 Butler Street sits at the northern gateway of the rezoning district, the threshold between what Gowanus was and what it is becoming.
The Building
The existing structure on our site is a four-story reinforced concrete loft building of 90,000–95,000 square feet, designed by Renwick, Aspinwall & Tucker and completed in 1914 as the printing plant for R.G. Dun & Company, the firm that became Dun & Bradstreet. It has a regular structural bay, generous floor-to-floor heights, and a scale that gives it presence along the full Butler Street block face. It has resisted every development proposal brought to it: a luxury hotel, a WeWork conversion, an office space. It has sat largely dormant while the neighborhood around it transforms. Tankhouse has been negotiating the purchase of the property for several years, as well as the one storey parcel adjacent to the building. Together, this existing building and lot constitute the full scope of our project site.
A (VERY) BRIEF HOUSING HISTORY
New York City is the origin of one of the most inventive yet more brutal housing typologies in architectural history. The tenement block - multistory buildings packed onto 25 by 100 foot contiguous lots, were designed not by architects but by builders maximizing rentable income. By 1864 they housed more than 60% of New York’s population, most of it in inhospitable conditions of darkness, overcrowding, overheating, and disease. The 1901 Tenement House Act required outward facing windows in every room and indoor plumbing. It was progress, but it did not undo what was already there.
An exception was Alfred T. White, a Brooklyn businessman who built model tenements in Cobble Hill beginning in 1877, just a short walk from our site. His Tower and Home Buildings gave every unit cross-ventilation, exterior balcony access, and shared courtyard space with a fountain and a stage. They were generous and financially viable. His position was that good housing and reasonable return are not incompatible. Yet the mainstream of the development industry largely ignored him for another century.
The postwar tower-in-the-park, derived from Le Corbusier via Robert Moses, demolished more housing than it replaced, severed streets, and produced environments that privileged sunlight diagrams over the lived experience of a community. Its failures were both social and architectural. The reaction against it - Jane Jacobs, the return of the street, the recovered interest in the block and the building type - has shaped the housing conversation since.
The questions this history leaves unresolved are existential: who is housing for? Who decides what it looks like? What does the developer owe to the community that will outlast any individual project? These do not have architectural answers, per se, but they have architectural dimensions. We are asking you to search for them.
THE CITY TODAY
Zohran Mamdani took office as the 112th Mayor of New York City on January 1, 2026, after a campaign that made the housing crisis its central subject. He described it as a moral emergency. In office, his administration has proven more pragmatic than his campaign suggested: his housing plan, “Block by Block,” allocates $22 billion toward 200,000 affordable units over the next decade and relies substantially on private developers to deliver them. At the same time, he has established a Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, ended tax breaks for luxury condo development, and directed city-owned land toward community land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives.
This is a genuinely unsettled moment in New York housing policy, one in which the range of development models that are politically and financially viable is broader than it has been in decades. A project that pushes beyond the MIH minimum, that imagines deeper affordability or community-controlled space or longer-term ownership structures is possible. A project that is well-designed, financially coherent, and genuinely mixed-income is exactly what this administration says it wants.
BUILDING FOR THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS
In a neighborhood built on a Superfund site, in a floodplain, in a city whose buildings produce 70% of its greenhouse gas emissions, sustainability is a primary design condition, and Local Law 97 makes it a legal one.
Adaptive reuse is of course itself a sustainability position. The carbon embodied in the material and energy that produced the R.G. Dun building is already spent, so keeping the building avoids that expenditure being incurred again. While there may be a sentimental argument for preservation, there is also a thermodynamic one.
Students should treat the site’s environmental conditions - the contaminated ground, the floodplain, the stormwater, the thermal performance of a century-old concrete envelope - not as constraints to manage but as design intelligence to develop.
ZONING
The 2021 rezoning measure allows residential FAR of up to 7.2 with Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) applied, towers of up to approximately 30 stories near the canal, mandatory ground-floor activation along primary street frontages, and 25–30% affordable units in every new residential building. Students must become familiar with these parameters - FAR, height, setback, MIH options, use regulations, the landmark implications of the existing building - in order to use them opportunistically and/or defend intelligent alternatives.
Students are encouraged to propose departures from the as-of-right envelope, but you must be prepared to argue for them specifically: what does the departure make possible, for whom, and why is that possibility worth pursuing? The criteria for such arguments are social, environmental, and economic — not just formal. We see an intelligent challenge to a zoning parameter not as a fantasy but as an act of urban advocacy.
PROGRAMMING
This studio will consider the program as a design variable, not a given. Students may test co-living arrangements that complicate the line between private unit and shared infrastructure like communal kitchens, flexible-occupancy units, live/work hybrids, intergenerational or artist-specific housing models alongside programs that let the existing industrial building support uses a conventional multifamily building couldn’t: fabrication space, gallery or performance venues, education space, ground-floor production tied directly to the units above. The ambition is a building whose section and plan make a case for a different way of living and working.
ARCHITECT AND DEVELOPER
For most of the 20th century, the developer held the land and the capital while the architect gave those things form. The design was a service and the building was a product. This structure produced successful work and it produced the blight of speculative apartment towers we see in just about every American city; buildings whose intelligence was entirely financial and whose architecture was banal.
The best developer-architect partnerships begin early, engage more deeply, and produce buildings that neither discipline could have produced alone. The developer brings market knowledge, financial discipline, and regulatory fluency. The architect brings spatial intelligence, material knowledge, and the ability to see how decisions at the scale of the unit affect the scale of the block.
Students in this studio are not developers. You have not committed capital or managed risk. The freedom this creates should be used with purpose. A scheme that is architecturally compelling but financially incoherent is incomplete, just as a scheme that is financially efficient but spatially or socially uninventive has missed the mark. The territory where those things intersect is where we want to be.
TRAVEL
We will visit New York City outside of travel week to see the project site and other Tankhouse projects within Brooklyn, but our dedicated travel week will be to Amsterdam to study a built tradition of multifamily housing that has no direct equivalent in the United States. Amsterdam’s housing is shaped by a fundamentally different relationship between government, developer, and architect, and by a culture that has long treated housing quality as a civic, not merely a market-driven, question. The Netherlands is a country where housing corporations (woningcorporaties) have historically provided more than 30% of the national housing stock, where architects have been given genuine latitude to experiment with typology and program at the scale of the neighborhood, and where the results over decades have produced a wide range and ambition of residential work. Amsterdam in particular offers an unparalleled opportunity to study housing at every scale: from the 17th-century canal house to the postwar reconstruction blocks of the Westelijke Tuinsteden, to the IJ waterfront’s contemporary mixed-use districts, to the recently completed projects that are redefining what dense urban housing can look like and feel like. This trip will be directly instructive for designing a mixed-income, mixed-use project on a contaminated waterfront in Brooklyn.