Update: Javits’ end promises new dawn for Manhattan’s West Side

Redeveloping the six-block-long property overlooking the Hudson will give a huge boost to efforts by the government and a growing number of developers to recreate the long-desolate far West Side of Manhattan.

Even Richard Kahan thinks it’s time to demolish the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center—and he built the facility 26 years ago, as head of the Convention Center Development Corp. Mr. Kahan also praises Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to transform the site into a mixed-use development modeled on Battery Park City—a project he also once led as the head of the BPC Authority.

“I don’t like seeing my buildings torn down, but a mixed-use project is the highest and best use for that site,” said Mr. Kahan.

Legions of real estate executives agree with him. They say that redeveloping the six-block-long property overlooking the Hudson will give a huge boost to efforts by the government and a growing number of developers to re-create the long-desolate far West Side of Manhattan. The governor’s vision of a mix of office buildings, apartment houses, museums and parkland for the 18-acre site would close a key gap. To the south below West 33rd Street is a fast-rising area along the hyper successful High Line and the ambitious Hudson Yards redevelopment. To the north across West 41st Street stands a bevy of newly constructed high-rise apartment towers.

“It’s a great location,” said Douglas Durst, chairman of the Durst Organization, a prominent family development firm. “I’m sure my family would be interested in it.”

New York history, however, is littered with big, bold plans that have gone nowhere, including plans for expanding Javits. The governor’s latest plans are particularly complicated. To move the project forward on the West Side, an immense new convention center must first be built in Queens, a task that carries its own challenges. Beyond that, crafting a new neighborhood on the Hudson will require billions of dollars, community consensus and a slew of government studies and approvals. And it comes as a time when financing for big projects has all but evaporated as developers from the neighboring Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards in downtown Brooklyn can attest.

Lots of Upsides

Still, the proposal has significant advantages. The governor has anointed it a top priority, so he will likely use his considerable power to see it through. In addition, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long set developing the far West Side and the city’s waterfront as goals of his administration. Meanwhile, the extension of the No. 7 subway line, slated to open in December 2013, will make it much easier to get there.

“There’s no reason this can’t be done,” said Mitchell Korbey, chair of the land use and environmental practice group at law firm Herrick Feinstein. “But projects like this take maybe 30 or 40 years.”

He said devising a detailed master plan that complements other initiatives in the area will be more important than building quickly. That means considering what Related Cos. and Oxford Properties Group are developing at Hudson Yards, a 26-acre site bounded by West 30th and West 33rd streets, on a platform over the rail yards west of Penn Station. Meanwhile, Brookfield Office Properties plans to build 5.2 million square feet of office space over the yards west of Ninth Avenue from West 31st to West 33rd streets. Hope also springs eternal that long-delayed plans to turn the stately post office across from Penn Station into a grand train depot named after the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan will materialize.

The developer with the most at stake is Related. It has several projects under way there. Late last year, Related and partner Oxford announced they would build the site’s first tower, a 51-story spire at West 30th Street that will be home for luxury leather-goods maker Coach. To build out the rest of the site, however, the developers must first erect a $1.6 billion platform over the tracks.

The timing of the Javits project could be critical for Hudson Yards. If it comes to fruition before Hudson Yards has lined up big tenants, Javits could pose a threat as a cheaper alternative, since it won’t require building a pricey platform. On the other hand, if the project takes too long, it could be an eyesore that drags down Hudson Yards’ value.

“We look forward to reviewing the details of the proposal, which is even further evidence of the potential of Manhattan’s West Side,” said a Related spokeswoman.

Source: Crain’s NY

Focus on NYC – NYU unveils plans for new med building

New 11-story, Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed building will rise on First Avenue to house schools of nursing and dentistry, as well as a new bioengineering program. Work to begin in spring.

New York University unveiled designs Wednesday for the new home of its nursing and dental schools, as well as a new bioengineering program. All will be moving to First Avenue at East 26th Street, along what is known as Manhattan’s health corridor. The new facility is part of the university’s ambitious expansion plans dubbed NYU 2031.

The 11-story, state-of-the-art facility, planned for 433 First Ave., will be 170,000-square-feet large and 183-feet high, according to an NYU spokesman. The previous building on the site, which was used for administrative and academic office for the school’s College of Dentistry, was demolished in September.

“A large portion of the building was not used and the building was deteriorating,” said the spokesman.

Construction of the new property is slated to begin in the spring. Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates is designing the exterior, while EYP Architecture & Engineering is working on the interior design.

When the facility is complete, NYU’s nursing school will move from its current home in Greenwich Village. There will also be space for a new multi-school bioengineering program and an expanded dental school. It is slated to open in 2015. NYU declined to say how much the new building will cost, but published reports pegged it at roughly $140 million.

Plans for NYU’s new health-corridor building have drawn little opposition in contrast to those for the school’s expansion in Greenwich Village. The university released the design a day after announcing that it had officially started the public review process to add 3 million square feet to its campus in Greenwich Village and areas around Washington Square Park.

In order to proceed with much of its growth plans there, NYU needs city zoning approvals. NYU had wanted to begin that process, which takes up to seven months, by the end of last year, but at the request of Community Board 2 it decided to postpone the move until after the New Year.

The university’s 2031 expansion plans have been opposed by preservationists and some local community groups in Greenwich Village, who believe that NYU is overbuilding in the neighborhood. A town hall meeting hosted by Community Board 2, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Community Action Alliance on NYU 2031 and more than 50 local community groups from Greenwich Village, SoHo, Chelsea and Union Square is scheduled for Wednesday evening. There a number of opponents are expected to speak out against NYU.

Source: Crain’s

“Tech” of the town – Cornell’s Roosevelt Island Campus Plan Unveiled in NYC

ISLE STYLE: An Escher-esque visualization of Cornell University’s bold new plan for a high-tech engineering campus on Roosevelt Island.

Proclaiming it a “defining moment” that will revolutionize the city’s economy, Mayor Bloomberg yesterday offered a first look at Cornell University’s gleaming-new graduate school for applied sciences that will be built on Roosevelt Island.

“It will transform our economy,” the mayor declared at a press conference just 72 hours after Stanford University stunned City Hall by announcing it was dropping out of the yearlong competition to attract a premier engineering school that will serve as one of his administration’s enduring legacies.

Bloomberg described the proposal submitted by Cornell and its partner, Israel’s Technion, as “far and away the boldest and most ambitious.”

“Their proposal called for the most students, about 2,000 a year, the most faculty, about 300, and the most building space, over 2 million square feet,” he said.

Cornell announced last week that it had received a $350 million gift, the largest in its history, from an anonymous donor for the project.

That deep-pocketed donor was revealed yesterday as Charles Feeney, a Cornell alum who made billions as the founder of the Duty Free Stores.

Seth Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp., estimated that the number of engineering graduates here will increase by 85 percent once the campus is fully functional in 2037. Operations are scheduled to begin in leased space in September.

In addition to classrooms, labs and dorms, the $2 billion campus will includes “incubator space” for start-up companies and what was described as “spinout space” for commercial applications of research-and-development projects.

Cornell is also immediately establishing a $150 million fund for new tech ventures that agree to stay in the city for at least three years.

“History will write this was a game-changing time in New York City,” the mayor said at Cornell’s Upper East Side medical school.

Officials predicted that Cornell would eventually help generate 30,000 high-tech positions along with 20,000 construction jobs and 8,000 permanent jobs at the school.

The 11-acre school is to be built on land now occupied by Goldwater Hospital, whose patients are to be moved to the former North General Hospital Harlem.

People-powered

Cornell-Technion’s proposed graduate school for applied sciences

* Location: 11 acres on Roosevelt Island now occupied by Goldwater Hospital

* Total square feet: 2 million

* Completion date: 2037

* Permanent jobs: 8,000

* Temporary construction jobs: 20,000

* Jobs created from high-tech spinoffs, licenses and corporate growth: 30,000

SOURCE: NYC Mayor’s Office

Architect Returns to Drawing Board

Last spring, developer Related Cos. became disenchanted with the design of the first phase of Hudson Yards, the gargantuan project on top of a train storage yard along the Hudson River.

The original design of Hudson Yards had three straight boxy towers.

“I could tell that Stephen wasn’t in love with it,” recalls Jay Cross, who oversees the project for Related, referring to the developer’s chairman, Stephen Ross. “He felt he wanted the buildings to be more dramatic. And we found that the marketplace was looking for bigger buildings.”

That made for a busy summer for Related and its architect William Pedersen, one of the name partners at the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. The result, which was recently unveiled, is an improvement in terms of the interactions of the buildings if not in the aesthetics of the buildings themselves.

With 26 acres and more than 12 million square feet of potential developable space overtop Hudson Yards competes with the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site as New York’s current, highest-profile development effort. Related has signed a deal with handbag-maker Coach Inc. to move its headquarters into 600,000 square feet in the south tower.

A new rendering shows two jagged towers

Kohn Pedersen’s original first-phase design called for three boxy steel office towers, the shortest one in the middle, along the east side of the site. Each building had the same square-jawed look of consternation: renderings showed stacks of long, plain blocks of steel and concrete arrayed to look like a cubist abstraction, or a screenshot from Tetris, the old block-stacking video-game. In between was to be four stories of retail space centered around a large glass box with a cyclone-shaped structure.

The design wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t the sort of arresting, statement-making architecture that one would expect a next-big-thing type of project. KPF’s early designs for the buildings were like Buckingham Palace bobbies: standing straight and erect, faces constant, but not saying much of anything at all.

The new plan for phase one, recently unveiled, describes a much different composition. The 30-story middle building is gone. New renderings show two jagged towers—the more northerly one 67 stories and sloping diagonally toward the city, the other, 51 stories and angled towards the Hudson—that slash through the skyline. Connecting the two buildings will be eight stories of retail and trading-floor space.

Hudson Yard’s New look Slideshow

The two office towers are disappointing as stand-alone buildings. Like most modern office towers they are brash and arrogant instead of being noble and poised. Their form is shard-like: all harsh angles with a jaggedness that evokes crystals or canyon rock formations.

But the new design helps make up for this in the way the office buildings interact. The mirror-image slopes of the two buildings, which would regard one another differently from nearly every angle of viewing, give viewers the sensation of two dancers in the midst of a paso doble. The southern building, which would house Coach, is, sensibly, the female of the pair —slightly shorter, with the atrium manifested as a slit in the dancer’s ball gown, giving a glimpse of a flash of leg underneath.

Mr. Pedersen talks frequently of the “responsibility of tall buildings” to interact rationally with the urban context around them. The towers, through their interplay, emphasize the presence of a long, open, park space—set to run east-west from the towers to the river—that will go in between them.

“The buildings have to be able to, by their internal biology, create social connections,” Mr. Pedersen says. “Too many buildings around the world have independent, sculptural shapes. The effect here is to connect the building directly to the city.”

This intent is certainly palpable in the design. And if Related eventually ends up landing another signature tenant for the north tower, the plan will be realized, and the two buildings will go ahead and dance their way around the fabric of the city’s newest cluster of statement-making skyscrapers.

Source: WSJ

U.S. architecture billings index up in October

October ABI up 2.5 pts to 49.4

* New projects index up 3 pts to 57.3

* AIA says demand for architects’ services volatile

* New projects index up 3 pts to 57.3

* AIA says demand for architects’ services volatile

A leading indicator of U.S. construction activity rebounded in October, the AIA said on Wednesday.

The architecture billings index rose 2.5 points last month to 49.4, according the American Institute of Architects. Any reading below 50 indicates an overall decrease in demand for design services, a predictor of construction spending nine to 12 months in the future.

A separate index of inquiries for future projects rose 3 points to 57.3. That measure is more often above 50 as clients reach out to multiple architecture firms.

October’s rebound was encouraging, but demand for designs remains volatile, the group said. Conditions in various regions range from improving to poor and are likely to continue that way in coming months, the AIA said.

Conditions are strongest in the U.S. Northeast and weakest in the West.

A depressed construction market has been a headwind for manufacturers of construction machinery and components that make up buildings’ infrastructure, such as electrical, cooling and security systems.

Analysts who cover industrial stocks have called the billings index as important an economic indicator as the monthly industrial data from the Institute for Supply Management.

Most diversified industrial companies get at least some revenue from the nonresidential construction sector, which includes office buildings, retail and warehouse space, and institutional buildings such as schools and hospitals.

Companies exposed to the sector include Honeywell International Inc , Tyco International Ltd , Ingersoll Rand , Eaton Corp , Caterpillar Inc , Deere & Co and Terex Corp .

European companies such as Siemens AG , Schneider Electric SA and lock maker Assa Abloy are also significant players in the sector.

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After Upturn, Architecture Billings Fall Again

Recession’s toll likely to keep many from returning to the profession, says AIA’s Work-on-the-Boards panel

By Kermit Baker, Hon. AIA
AIA Chief Economist

After an encouraging uptick in August, the AIA’s Architecture Billings Index (ABI) retreated again in September, falling to a score of 46.9. Since any score below 50 indicates a decline in billings at architecture firms, this was the fifth of the past six months in which business conditions have deteriorated. Additionally, backlogs at architecture firms—the amount of project activity in-house at present—dropped to 4.2 months on average in the third quarter, meaning that firms could keep current staff employed for 4.2 months without any new projects. This rate is down from 4.4 months at the end of the second quarter. Lower levels of project backlogs, coupled with less encouraging levels of new project inquiries in September, point to continued concern for architecture firms in the coming months.

Even with the national downturn in billings in September, some regions reported improvement. Regional billings scores are computed as rolling three-month moving averages, and recent numbers showed enough strength to boost scores for firms in the Northeast and Midwest into positive territory. Scores for firms in the South and West continued to show relatively steep declines.

Likewise, commercial/industrial firms reported reasonably healthy improvement in September, while residential firms and institutional firms were showing continued weakness. Commercial/industrial firms reported nine straight months of billings gains from mid-2010 through the first quarter of 2011, so there are grounds for optimism for firms in this sector.

Economy remains in slow gear

The broader economy continues to show only modest growth. Just over 100,000 jobs were added in September, bringing the total added for the first nine months of the year to just over one million. That is well below the number required to generate healthy growth in the economy, and, as such, the national unemployment rate is up from 9.0 percent in January to 9.1 percent in September.  Construction employment saw an increase of 26,000 positions in September, the second strongest number of the year. However, only 53,000 positions in this sector have been added since the beginning of the year, or fewer than 6,000 per month. Architecture firms have added only 1,200 positions since January, to a current workforce of just over 153,000 in August, the most recent figures available.

Many economists feel that one of the key ingredients missing from the economy is greater confidence on the part of consumers and businesses.  With a more positive outlook, consumers would start spending again, and businesses would begin adding employees and increasing their spending. But, unfortunately, business confidence has been falling recently. The third-quarter reading on the Conference Board Measure of CEO Confidence was 42 (anything below 50 is considered negative), the lowest score since early 2009, down 25 points since the first quarter of the year.

Consumer optimism has not fared much better. Consumer sentiment has fallen in four out of the past five months, according to the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. With a preliminary October reading of 57.5 (on an index where Q1 1966 is set at 100), it’s down almost 17 points from its 74.2 reading in January. In spite of consumer concern over the economy, consumer spending is holding up quite well.  In September, retail sales increased almost 9 percent over levels of a year ago, and average monthly gains in 2011 over levels from a year ago have been averaging about 8 percent. By comparison, there had been a 6.5 percent increase in retail sales in 2010, and a 7.2 percent decline in 2009.

Permanent losses to the profession

Employment at U.S.architecture firms peaked during the summer of 2008, and exhibited steady declines for the next two years. For the past 12–15 months, employment levels have been bouncing around this bottom rung. This prolonged downturn has meant that many architects who were downsized at the beginning of the economic crash have been waiting a very long time for a recovery. This month, participants in the AIA Work-on-the-Boards panel were asked to comment on the current status of these downsized architectural staff.

Many who lost positions have either returned to their original firms, gone to other firms, or started their own architectural practices. However, those not currently working full-time in the profession are in a diverse set of situations. According to these estimates, about 30 percent of previously full-time staff who lost their positions are still working in the architecture profession, but are underemployed and working on a part-time or contract basis. These are likely the first people who would return to full-time status once design activity shows a more significant rebound. Well over a third of downsized staff is currently out of the profession, but waiting for business to pick up to return to architecture positions. This includes about 18 percent working in other jobs, but waiting for architecture positions to open up, and almost as many who are currently not working and waiting for architecture positions to open up.

However, this leaves a significant number of former employees who are not expected to return to the profession at all. About 9 percent are retired or not looking for work for other reasons. More than 12 percent are working in other jobs and are unlikely to return even when architecture positions open up. Nearly 6 percent are not currently working, but are unlikely to return to architecture even when the economy improves and positions open.

This month, Work-on-the-Boards participants are saying:

• We specialize in residential and have stayed in business doing multifamily, as the single-family residential market is dead. Firms that held on with government work are now slowing down significantly. —7-person firm in the West, residential specialization

• RFPs have dropped to first-quarter levels. Some projects already under contract have been slow to get the owner to agree to finalize and send out to bid. —4-person firm in the Northeast, mixed specialization

• Our office interiors and retail work for large corporate clients are strong, but government, education, etc., are very weak. —60-person firm in the South, commercial/industrial specialization

• Larger companies are going after local work instead of their typical national work, so smaller companies are having a struggle to get work. We typically have been doing 90 percent national work and 10 percent local. It is now 90 percent local and 10 percent national.  —50-person firm in the Midwest, commercial/industrial specialization

Reference:

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About the AIA ArchitectureBillingsIndex

The Architecture Billings Index (ABI), produced by the AIA Economics and Market Research Group, is a leading economic indicator that provides an approximately nine- to 12-month glimpse into the future of nonresidential construction spending activity. The diffusion indexes contained in the full report are derived from a monthly “Work-on-the-Boards” survey that is sent to a panel of AIA member–owned firms. Participants are asked whether their billings increased, decreased, or stayed the same in the month that just ended, as compared to the prior month, and the results are then compiled into the ABI. These monthly results are also seasonally adjusted to allow for comparison to prior months. The monthly ABI index scores are centered near 50, with scores above 50 indicating an aggregate increase in billings, and scores below 50 indicating a decline. The regional and sector data are formulated using a three-month moving average. More information on the ABI and the analysis of its relationship to construction activity can be found in the white paper “Architecture Billings as a Leading Indicator of Construction: Analysis of the Relationship Between a Billings Index and Construction Spending” on AIA.org.

Frank Gehry Turns to Asia for Architecture Projects as U.S. Growth Slows

Frank Gehry, designer of Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, is seeking projects in Asian countries including China and India as slower U.S. growth crimps development in the world’s largest economy.

The architect said he’s competing to plan a museum in one of China’s fast-expanding metropolitan areas, as well as a “very spiritual kind of a building” in India. He declined to give further details. Gehry designed an aquarium as part of the recent redevelopment of the Ocean Park attraction in Hong Kong.

Gehry, 82, is turning to Asia as developers start few projects in the U.S. The Architecture Billings Index, an indicator of American construction, plunged to 46.9 last month from 51.4 in August, reflecting lower demand for design services, according to the American Institute of Architects. Any score less than 50 indicates a decline in billings.

Meanwhile, “there’s an art explosion in China,” Gehry said in an Oct. 25 interview at Bloomberg’s Los Angeles offices. “It’s really great — very exciting.”

He expects to sign a contract within three to four months should an agreement be reached for the Chinese museum. One challenge of designing in a country such as China is the lower pay for projects, Gehry said. Architects get paid a percentage of construction costs, which in China are about a third of what they are in the U.S., he said.

“If you take a percentage and you work with western salaries, you can’t make it work,” Gehry said. “So it almost forces you to open an office in China and work with local people.”

Staying Near Home

Gehry said he would prefer to travel less and focus on projects in California or New York. The lack of development in the U.S. along with employees at Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners LLP who depend on him are forcing him to look elsewhere, the architect said.

“I have over 100 people in my office,” he said. “At my age, I would love only to work in Los Angeles, maybe Santa Monica, maybe Beverly Hills.”

Construction of one of Gehry’s projects abroad, the 450,000-square-foot (42,000-square-meter) Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum, was halted earlier this month by Tourism Development & Investment Co. as the emirate scales back plans made before the 2008 financial crisis.

“The Abu Dhabi building we’ve been working on in the last five to six years has been stopped, and that’s painful,” said Gehry, who also has a contract for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington.

New York Apartments

Gehry, who designed a Manhattan apartment building on Spruce Street that opened earlier this year, also is seeking to win contracts by cutting construction waste, which often accounts for 30 percent of a development budget. His Los Angeles-based Gehry Technologies Inc. employs the same type of computer-aided, paperless, three-dimensional design used to build Boeing Co. (BA)’s 777 airliner.

“With two-dimensional drawings there’s a lot of room for error,” said Gehry, the 1989 winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. “It creates so-called clashes that will result in costly change orders.”

There were few such conflicts at the 76-story Manhattan tower — called New York by Gehry, and developed by Forest City Ratner Cos. — even with its rippled and curved bay windows, according to Gehry. Almost 600 units of the 900-apartment building have been rented, he said.

“You’ve got to respect budgets because people are investing and building and have certain finite resources,” Gehry said. “So it behooves us to respect that.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Nadja Brandt in Los Angeles at [email protected]

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at [email protected]

Boost to real estate and construction 9-12 months away?

Architects, along with land planners and civil engineers, are involved in the beginning stages of a project, so they are among the first to feel a recession — and a recovery.

It’s too early to say whether a recovery is at hand. But the downward spiral could be over, some industry experts say.

“It seems we are pulling out of it,” Farmer said. “We’re seeing increasing revenues, and we’re starting to see a little bit of profit.”

What’s more, the American Institute of Architects, after seeing five consecutive monthly declines in activity, reported a sudden upturn of activity in August in its billings index.

The index provides a nine- to 12-month lag time between architecture billings and construction spending, or a glimpse into the future of commercial construction activity.

“Based on the poor economic conditions over the last several months, this turnaround in demand for design services is a surprise,” said Kermit Baker, chief economist of the architects’ trade organization.

“Many firms are still struggling, and continue to report that clients are having difficulty getting financing for viable projects, but it’s possible we’ve reached the bottom of the down cycle.”

The index is centered on 50, with scores above 50 indicating an aggregate increase in billings and scores below indicating a decline.

In July, the index score was 45.1, the steepest decline in bbillings since February 2010, the trade organization reported. But the index reversed in August, shooting up to 51.4 percent.

Despite the recent upturn, “the extent of the (previous) decline was pretty serious,” Baker said, attributing the low index numbers to nervousness about the U.S. and global economies.

Architectural billings were improving at the end of 2010, showing stability and modest growth in the beginning of 2011, Baker said.

“There was a general sense the economy was improving and then … (the numbers) dropped off the end of the table and turned dramatically.”

Many projects are still on hold, Baker said. “Others are moving slowly and in fits and starts.”

Source: Richmond Times Dispatch

Building 7 at World Trade Center now fully leased

The controversial 52-story skyscraper just north of the World Trade Center has finally been fully leased. Developer Larry Silverstein announced Monday that MSCI, a provider of investment decision support tools, would occupy the remaining floors 47 through 49, the AP.

Bernstein had long had troule attracting tenants in part because Seven World Center came under fire for opening too quickly at the site of the old World Trade Center Building 7 — the last building to collapse in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

But the site was also the focus of many conspiracy theories, all of which pointed out that Building 7 was the first known building to collapse as a result of uncontrolled fires, and some of which claimed that the U.S. government had been behind the attacks.

The building also cost a pretty penny, with tenants paying the highest prices ever paid downtown — several above $70 a square foot.

Source: The Washington Post

NY building costs rise and jobs drop

Rising materials prices and higher wages set by new labor agreements are causing New York construction costs to rise for the second year in a row after a decrease in 2009.