SustaiNYC is a proposal for a 700,000sf mixed use development featuring 100% affordable housing in East Harlem. All the buildings are to have passive house certification and utilize photovoltaic energy.
The program includes over 600 rental apartments, 10,000 sf of retail, a wellness center, senior center, educational facilities totaling 150,000 sf and over 13,000 sf of community gardens.
Architecture Workshop was invited to collaborate with Handel Architects. AWPC initiated a sequence of massing diagrams illustrating the project evolution, and developed preliminary concepts that united massing and landscaping aspirations. Architecture Workshop initiated solar studies to verify the impact on building massing and landscaping.
Architecture Workshop investigated ways to reduce the monolithic character of a potentially overwhelming series of buildings by exploring variety in the façades and articulating different uses through variations in height and depth of the massing.
Several schemes were developed to add variety and modulation to the façade through the use of color and incremental adjustments of the depth of the materials.
AWPC led the design of photovoltaic canopies for the roof surfaces and utilized parametric modeling to study fenestration and sunshades