Mixed Use
Albany and Woodland Urban Redevelopment Hartford, CT
This winning design-build competition proposal entailed programming and preliminary site and building design used to redevelop a virtual node in the City of Hartford. The Albany and Woodland function both as an access point to the city for commuters, as a vibrant neighborhood providing critical community, and cultural functions and services. It is a neighborhood in the process of regeneration, Accordingly, the design mandate was to both provide local amenities and housing, as well as to secure engagement with commuters with retail and foodservice establishments.
The architectural approach acknowledges the rich architectural history of Hartford and the local fabrics of the built environment in materials, proportions, and detailing, while at the same time creating energetic modern massing, Multiple build-out scenarios were studied for the developers in order to work with potential tenants and tenant types. The directives of local neighborhood groups and stakeholders and the City of Hartford also meshed with those of the developer in order to conceive the winning proposal.
San Juan Bosco Urban Redevelopment Miami, FL
The San Juan Bosco is a vibrant parish serving the Calle Ocho (Little Havana) district in the heart of Miami. In addition to its religious functions, the parish provides an exemplary level of service to the community, providing support and guidance to south Florida’s immigrant community. The goal of the project is to provide a development structure in support of both the parish’s vital community functions of the school, child care, senior, legal, and health services while achieving a viable development build-out scenario for the developer to achieve a viable return on the investment.
Towards that end, we studied a number of build-out scenarios for various developers to examine with the Archdiocese of Miami and the parish. Mixes and configurations of retail, parking, multi-family, residential, and parish functions were pursued interlocking across this inner-city block. At the heart of the block and the parish is the existing church, around which these various configurations were deployed. A courtyard surrounding the church provides the destination, that which in combination with the church is the identity of the parish and locus from which all parish functions are accessed. Retail is accessible directly from the street, while residential has private access via access from smaller side streets and directly from parking. Located within the buildings inside a horseshoe below the buildings, covered parking is provided for retail, parish, and residential users. Residential density is achieved via towers.
Arena Block Urban Redevelopment New Haven, CT
Inspired by the local planning precedent employed for Yale campus planning, this full-block redevelopment works to provide a livable urban environment by engaging the surrounding city while providing a pedestrian-oriented core to the project. The project bucks the area planning trend that speeds traffic through the city and instead allows for faster traffic at the periphery while providing slower ‘calmed’ local traffic adjacent to street-level retail and amenities. The goal is to provide both efficacy and community in the belief that the two are intimately linked. The diagonal cut through the block acknowledges the canal as a pedestrian amenity and site component around which basic site organization is formulated.
Costa Miami Urban Redevelopment North Miami, FL
This project was designed to revise and redevelop three blocks in the North Miami area from the current low rise retail build-out to a denser, mixed-used context with high rise multi-family residential above, with retail street level and lower floors on the larger avenues bounding the blocks and parking at the blocks’ cores. Live-work pedestrian-friendly townhouses and loft apartments on the smaller streets between the blocks create viable, pedestrian-oriented street life and residential neighborhood scale at the street level off of the main arteries. This vision of providing a more lifestyle-oriented, mixed-use development of mixed residential approaches was forward-thinking for the area in the early 2000s- an approach that is now being adopted throughout South Florida.
Bank and Howard Urban Redevelopment
New London, CT
On this project, we worked with a developer to secure the right to option the Bank and Howard parcel in new London. Two phases of the study were pursued working both with the developer and its possible tenants and also in conjunction with the City of New London based on its redevelopment directives for that district and on its feedback to our proposals. In that iterative process, acceptable proposals were defined that both met the City’s criteria as well as provided for the Developer’s ROI and tenant build-out requirements. Proposals for both retail with multi-family were developed.
Certain LEED certification strategies were pursued, including a vegetated roof over the retail building. That approach also provided a more pleasant view for those apartments facing in that direction. This specific, smaller urban context lent itself towards employing synergistic assets related to the site, such as the proximity to multiple amenities including the shoreline, and to the multi-modal transportation infrastructure put in place by the city. Our approach was to leverage the dovetailing site potentials that supported both LEED criteria as well as tax credit opportunities for the developer.