East Village Affordable Housing

Organization Name: Shakespeare Gordon Studio

Project Title: East Village Affordable Housing

Project Location: East Village, Manhattan

Project Description:
This project consists of two sites in the heart of the East Village whose redevelopment will expand affordable housing ownership and access in the neighborhood. Two condemned structures — one on East 12th Street and another around the corner on Avenue A — were demolished, making way for new buildings that meet as-of-right zoning and yield 21 total units, ten of which will be owned by the tenants of the original buildings through the Affordable Neighborhood Cooperative Program. These mid-block buildings are designed as contemporary expressions of the neighborhood’s historic architectural vernacular. The six-story, eleven-unit East 12th Street building features a mixture of corbeling and brick bond patterns on its terracotta-colored facade, referencing traditional masonry details. It also honors the East Village’s tradition of community gardens with large windows opening on to green spaces next to and across the street from the building. The seven-story, ten-unit Avenue A building features similar brickwork, but its location on a busier commercial thoroughfare inspired bold blue accents to animate its façade. East 12th Street is now occupied, and Avenue A will finish construction by the end of the year.

Community Impact:
New York City’s housing crisis calls for the creation of abundant housing that can meet the diverse needs of the city’s residents with different unit typologies and tenures. One of the most common anxieties around the construction of new housing is that current residents will be pushed out of the neighborhoods where they have lived for decades; this project addresses that problem by both creating a pathway to home ownership for the sites’ original families and simultaneously adding new rent-controlled units for the next generation of residents. SGS and SMJ Development worked closely with the original residents throughout the design process to ensure that their new apartments will meet their needs, and Avenue A creates space for a third kind of tenant that is also essential to the health of the neighborhood with a commercial storefront on its ground floor. The architectural design of both buildings strengthens the existing character of the neighborhood in their scale, street wall articulation, and materiality while dramatically improving upon the comfort and functionality of the sites’ previous structures.

Organization Description:
Shakespeare Gordon Studio Architects is an award-winning, New York City-based, women-owned business that pursues inventive and thoughtful solutions to architectural design challenges at all scales, for a wide variety of clients and project types.

Team Members:

Nicole Vlado Torres, Sean Kennedy, Ashima Chitre, Jae Choi, Zhangzheng Yang, Amy Shakespeare