C Squared - FIT - West 28th Street - SHoP Architects

[Merry]

Couldn't find this anywhere.


28th St. makeover: College expansion good FIT for area needing dressing up

BY Jason Sheftell


The Fashion Institute of Technology is in the process of putting up an addition to their campus, "C Squared," at the south side of 28th Street between 8th and 7th Avenue.

University expansion has been a dirty word in New York City. Until now. While Columbia and New York University struggle with community groups over complaints of ugly new buildings polluting historic neighborhoods, locals have blessed the Fashion Institute of Technology’s (FIT) plans for a groundbreaking new building.

Designed by New York’s SHoP Architects, the all-glass structure will provide FIT with a vertical campus where students will take classes,
create designs and congregate. It will also fill out a section of 28th St. between Seventh and Eighth Aves. that has been a barren, desolate, even scary stretch for more than 50 years.

With a brick wall separating the back end of FIT and the empty sidewalk, the north side of 28th St. has become home to pizza joints, two nightclubs, wholesale underwear stores, a plumbing-supply warehouse and a restaurant open from 10 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. on weekends for the club crowd. One neighbor said clubgoers use the street as a latrine.

“When people ask about substandard streets in New York City, I always respond first with the area around 27th St. and Seventh Ave.,” says Dan Biederman, a trailblazer in New York neighborhood development who founded the Bryant Park Corp., the 34th Street Partnership and the Grand Central Partnership — all organizations that brought businesses, residents and tourists to once-troubled city locales. “There’s lots of graffiti. The streets are dark. There’s illegal signage from retailers and solid gates that show no windows at night.”

Despite eyesores, the area around FIT has strong neighborhood bones. Towering wedding-cake Art Deco office buildings where insurance companies operated in the 1950s loom over FIT. These spaces could be converted to one-bedroom or large apartments. Some already have, with rents in nearby buildings starting at $1,800 for studios; sales prices for several floor-through lofts have averaged $1.3 million.

While banks, cell-phone companies and national fast-food chains anchor the area now, retail remains raw between Madison Square Garden and 23rd St. Bike shops, hardware stores and coin laundries are hidden between mom-and-pop restaurants and tourist-class hotels. Rare in Manhattan, this is an area that hasn’t been saddled with overdevelopment — yet.

Evan Haymes, a principal in Bronfman-Haymes Real Estate Partners, saw opportunity in this area and seized it. His company built the neighborhood’s first luxury condominium, the Onyx Chelsea, on the corner of 28th St. and Eighth Ave. Designed by FXFowle Architects, the Onyx has a black zinc facade and plaster lobby sculpture featuring a Vera Wang design, upping the architectural ante on the unbecoming stretch. The building, where apartments started around $795,000, sold out in less than two years.

“While everyone else was looking in Williamsburg and Long Island City, I thought Manhattan itself hadn’t been fully utilized,” said Haymes, a native New Yorker whose father developed 5 Penn Plaza in the early 1980s.

“Our strip on Eighth Ave. was underappreciated though the infrastructure was there, with 28th St. between Seventh and Eighth Avenues flanked by subways and a bus stop directly in front of our retail. We are also a few blocks south of the biggest single mass-transportation hub in America: Penn Station. The Onyx was always meant to bring positive impact. When you bring light to a corner, you bring safety and identity to a neighborhood.”

Which brings us to the proposed FIT building. “C2,” as it’s called, is an extension of the “C” building that currently acts as the school’s main entrance. The new structure will give FIT an architectural identity to match its standing as the global fashion industry’s top school and draw pedestrians to the little-used street.

“Architecture needs to invite people in and change street life,” says SHoP partner William Sharples, who’s handling the project for the downtown firm. “The glass facade and transparency will show constant movement. The building is essentially a monumental vessel for light and air, both of which will consistently move through the building. Half the volume of this building is air.”

Directing the flow of people toward a three-story student-life hall in the middle floors, C2 will house escalators coming from different directions to connect all university’s structures.

“We had to think about how to move the student body around the building,” says SHoP partner Gregg Pasquarelli. “We thought of a campus quad, like a college green, and we folded it up. We also made sure the flow of the people in the building could become part of the street traffic outside, essentially bringing the university together with the community around it.”

C2 will be separated from the C building by a slim outdoor space, allowing light to come into the building from all sides. It could also be the first structure to use unusual green technology. The building will capture heat and create electricity from sunlight, but not in the usual ways: The equipment for doing this will be incorporated into a section of its facade.

Having been recently approved by Community Board 5, C2 must receive a variance for a setback allowing wider sidewalks and less height than zoning allows. FIT also needs to raise money for the $148 million building’s completion. As part of the SUNY system, FIT has already won funding from the state for half the project. The other $74 million must come from the City of New York, and it must be delivered within the four years the state has given the university to raise the additional funds. If the city does not come up with the money, the plan for the building would be scrapped.

“This building is a statement about FIT’s place of importance in the world of design,” says FIT President Joyce F. Brown. “The college is a critical element in the business of creativity that defines New York. This new addition will further strengthen our curriculum, allowing the college to continue its longtime partnership with the many industries that mark New York as the creative center of the world, to use Mayor Bloomberg’s phrase.”

With more than 12,000 students, 90% of whom find full-time work in the industry of their choice upon graduation (and with 93% of those staying in New York City), FIT sees its success as linked to Bloomberg’s goal of keeping media and fashion companies in the city. In other words, if FIT suffers, so will the city of New York.

Thus far, the only opposition to the building has come from nightclub and other business owners who would see an increase in rent and a radical improvement to 28th St. retail.

One of the new building’s highlights will be full visibility from street level of FIT’s textile lab, a working classroom where students will use giant weaving machines to fabricate garments, drawing on one of the largest libraries of fabrics in the world. The front window of C2 will show off students’ work and allow the neighborhood to share in the creative energy of the university.

“We’ve been waiting for something like this to happen from the beginning,” says developer Haymes, who is renting the Onyx’s ground-floor retail space and refurbishing other area investments. “We felt that Onyx would be a catalyst for additional development in north Chelsea. The SHoP FIT building is a gain for the neighborhood and Onyx residents. We’re committed to working with FIT in any way we can to make it happen.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/real_esta...essing_up.html

[lofter1]

Coverage from CURBED with many images there ...

SHoP's Form-Fitting FIT Expansion Revealed

Monday, June 15, 2009

The Fashion Institute of Technology promised a new building in its ominous sounding 10-year Master Plan, and now the proposed design of "C2" is winning rave reviews, including a big OK from Community Board 5. The SHoP Architects design, featuring a woven facade incorporating techniques from the world of fashion, would rise on an empty plot on West 28th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and back up onto FIT's original C Building (aka the Martin Feldman Center)—a mid-century classic of metal panels in a harlequin pattern that was completed in 1959. CB5's vote is the first step toward granting FIT a waiver on certain setback regulations that will enable the narrow 10-story building to hit the runway.

SHoP's 130-foot-tall, 99,908-square-foot plan would be the first ground-up construction project at FIT in over 30 years. The design is from SHoP's William Sharples, and the undulating materials are inspired by the stitching and folding of fabric. The design also features a fifth-floor North Quad that will be both light-filled and column-free, allowing direct accessibility to the original C Building's South Quad. Expanses of glass at street level will replace an existing long and tall brick wall that runs half the length of 28th Street. All the new activity on this desolate stretch might give the dwellers at The Onyx, sitting catty-corner across the way, something to ponder besides their great views of the Empire State Building.

[lbjefferies]

It looks good. Really good.

[londonlawyer]

I like it. I hope that one day, FIT razes and redevelops those horrible concrete, commie-blocks on 7th Ave. The young, hot chicks at FIT deserve better.

[MidtownGuy]

No way, it's great!
I find it attractive and classy. As it bridges the street it creates the feeling of a semi enclosed campus on that little stretch of 27th. Passing under it, you feel like you're entering a special zone, a place that is a part of the city yet also private.
On the inside you can walk from your classes in the C Building all the way over and across to the library without going outside.

The new plans for the 28th street building look excellent.

[londonlawyer]

.... Passing under it, you feel like you're entering a special zone, a place that is a part of the city yet also private.
On the inside....

Hi, amigo. It sounds like a vagina the way that you describe it!

[Alonzo-ny]

An attractive and classy one at that!

[lofter1]

No way they will tear down the D Building. They went through all sorts of hoops back in the day to get the OKs to span the street and have tried (unsuccessfully) to have that stretch of street de-mapped so it becomes part of their campus.

Imagine what they'd have to go through today to get such a scheme through the NYC review process. If anything they'd build up from it along Seventh, using the D Building as a base. But there is no mention of any of that in their long term plans which have been outlined in FIT's discussion of the new C addition.

[Prometheus]

What a difference this will make. Jane Jacobs would be happy to see the street level space on 28th reengage the neighborhood.

I agree with LL about the D building though...it seems incongruous that it houses a fashion school to me because it's overbearing and heavy. However, I'm sure it does create a nice experience once one walks into the, um..."va-jay-jay".

[lofter1]

Not fashion worthy?

Look at the D Building from across Seventh Avenue, taking in the entire two block structure.

You might see a heavyset person in a very short and boxy skirt, stumpy legs spread wide and straddling W 27th Street.

[Derek2k3]

This design has been around for 7 years now. Get on with it.

[lofter1]

7 years? It was only approved in the last couple of months.

[ablarc]

^ Tempus fugit.

[Merry]

Project Fund Ways

New building for FIT's Chelsea campus needs $52 million in local funding.

Tom Stoelker


Inside FIT's proposed new building designed by SHoP Architects. Courtesy SHoP Architects

In a 2003 design competition, SHoP architects won over the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and the school’s Chelsea neighbors with a proposal for a slender glass building on 28th Street that contrasted with the brooding Brutalist buildings of the existing campus. The same year, the state (FIT is part of the SUNY system) allocated an additional $74 million toward the $148 million project, to be matched by local funding no later than March 2013. Since then, the proposal has fallen off the radar. In 2006, the city and state put up $4 million ($2 million each), and SHoP completed the design. But after budget battles this summer, the city allocated just $20 million to be distributed over the course of the next four years. That leaves FIT coming up about $52 million short.

“The city chooses its priorities,” allowed FIT treasurer Sherry Brabham. “It’s not like spreading peanut butter, everybody doesn’t get a piece of it.” Brabham expects that a combination of working with the city, value engineering, and private donations will see the project through.

Exterior views of FIT's proposed new building by SHoP.

It’s not surprising that Community Board 4 supports the project. The side streets just south of Penn Station between Seventh and Eighth avenues compose a seedy stretch of Chelsea. FIT’s inward facing buildings don’t help matters, particularly on the “back” side of the campus at 28th Street, where a 220 by 75 foot lot sits empty. City Planning recently addressed the issue by rezoning the area for residential development from the north side of 28th Street to the south side of 30th Street. Edison Properties is already planning a through-block residential complex to be designed by Handel Architects.


Detail of the building's facade.

The SHoP design promises to fill the empty lot with a ten-story glass building that holds 100,000 square feet of classrooms, studios, and a three-story-high student lounge atrium at its heart.

SHoP’s William Sharples described the facade as a 12-foot-wide “woven wall” that is suspended over an extra-wide sidewalk below, with various stairs and halls jutting out like “shuttles in a loom.” A green roof and south-facing HeliOptix glass wall on the ninth and tenth floors aid in an effort for LEED Gold. At street level, visitors can glimpse through glass panels onto machines in the Bill Blass Weaving Labs, and a runway situated directly behind plate glass windows offers a catwalk and display area to showcase student designs.

Sharples said that the company’s SHoP Construction division, formed in 2007, got plenty of experience in value engineering at Barclays Center. “We just don’t throw it over to someone else and say you figure it out,” he said. “We feel we can do that without sacrificing the look and the feel or the programming of the project.”

The building’s working title is C-Squared, as it connects to an older structure known as the “C-Building.” But naming rights could also help close the gap, the schools says. Hopes are high that an illustrious alum will step forward to help with the financing. If not, FIT will have to forfeit the funds.

http://www.archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5614

[scumonkey]

value engineering, and private donations will see the project through.

MMmmmm wonder what that will leave us with- a plain, flat, glass face perhaps?