The largest Facades+ event of the year returns to New York City next week on April 13 and 14. Featuring a full first day of in-person presentations at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan and a second day of virtual workshops, Facades+ will celebrate its 10th anniversary in the city where the conference series first started.
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In anticipation of next week’s big event, we’ve rounded up six projects that will be featured at Facades+ New York City. Learn more about them below:
130 William | Adjaye Associates
With 130 William, a 66-story residential tower in Manhattan’s Financial District, Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye wanted to re-enchant downtown’s skyline. The structure, darkly glamorous, pays homage to a bygone age of vertiginous dreams. Sensibly set back from William Street, the skyscraper is clad in richly textured precast concrete panels; tilted and tiered, they give the building a serrated profile and, from some angles, the bearing of a ziggurat (Early skyscraper builders keenly cultivated Babylonian imagery through their designs.) Arched windows and loggias, faint echoes of the Woolworth’s Gothic flourishes, break with today’s prevailing fashion for crisp grids, sharp diagonals, and other anodyne geometries.
Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University | Thomas Phifer and Partners
In 1952 Mies van der Rohe designed a house for Indiana University’s Pi Lambda Phi fraternity, but the project was shelved until 2019, when the university hired Thomas Phifer and Partners to transform the design into a multipurpose academic hall for its Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design.
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The team, which included SOM engineers, used high-performing 21st century materials while hewing as close as possible to Mies’ original plans. In AN‘s profile of the project last year, the designers explained that they adapted the steel bar-stock window detailing for the 1-inch-thick and 10-square-foot insulated glass panels through a slight increase in the mullion stop size. The larger glazing pockets were accommodated by reducing tolerances across the facade. Insulation was added to the 15-inch spandrel channel at the soffit and roof to further boost enclosure performance.
Queens Library in Far Rockaway | Snøhetta
Snøhetta’s sunset-hued, boxy Queens Library building is sure to stand out in downtown Far Rockaway not only because of its angular massing but also because of its distinctive cladding. According to the architects, “the simple form provides a calm contrast to the visual noise of surrounding retail outlets.” The library broke ground in 2018 and construction is expected to wrap up this year.
The Blanton Museum of Art at UT Austin | Snøhetta
Last June, the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas Austin revealed a new central feature of its ongoing, Snøhetta-led campus revamp, first announced in January. A dedicated outdoor sound art gallery will now be the first of its kind for a major American museum when it debuts in late 2022 along with the rest of the redesigned museum grounds.
Dubbed the Butler Sound Gallery, the space will be located to the east of Ellsworth Kelly’s monumental, chapel-like Austin. The project also includes refreshed landscaping, an open-air social space framed by a cluster of towering, petal-shaped shading structures, and the first major public mural installation by Cuban-American visual artist Carmen Herrera.
St. John’s Terminal | COOKFOX Architects
COOKFOX Architects is adding a nine-floor topper to 550 Washington, a low-slung, three-story brick building from 1934. Most of the original facade will be converted into a thin “envelope” that the glassy base will sit recessed inside of. The firm also plans on blowing out the 1.3-million-square-foot office building’s interior walls and creating open floorplates of up to 100,000 square feet, a hot commodity as tech companies continue to snatch up open office space in Manhattan.
The project was revealed in 2018 and according to COOKFOX’s site, it is still in the design phase.
Ronald O. Perelman Center for the Performing Arts | REX
The 90,000-square-foot, 138-foot-tall cube-like Ronald O. Perelman Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan will hold three open and flexible performance spaces that can fit up to 1,200 people. Its bold exterior, which is clad in marble on all four sides, will stand out from the sea of Financial District skyscrapers that surround it. The site will also hold various public meeting spaces and an open plaza.
Registration for Facades+ New York City is now open. Visit the Facades+ website for more information on registration, speakers (including keynotes Marlon Blackwell and Elaine Molinar, managing partner at Snøhetta), panels, and networking events.
Questions about Facades+ New York City? If you can’t find the answer on facadesplus.com, please email Program Director Marty Wood.
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