Adding Cachet and Kool to the Skyline

Originally appeared in NJBIZ on 3/26/2007

The building will have a distinctive and unconventional look.
Architect Koolhaas unveils an unorthodox design for old warehouse site

Evelyn Lee BIZ SPOTLIGHT - Construction/Architecture

Jersey City, already home to the state’s tallest building, the 42-story, Cesar Pelli-designed Goldman Sachs office tower at 30 Hudson St., is no stranger to distinctive architecture. Now a proposed 52-story high-rise designed by acclaimed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is poised to raise the profile of the state’s second-largest city to another level.

The project is for a mixed-use 1.2 million-square-foot development to go up at 111 First Street in the Powerhouse Arts District, the neighborhood known for the community of artists who live in its former warehouses. The design plan calls for 415,000 square feet of condominiums, 210,000 square feet of hotel and amenities, 160,000 square feet of artists’ work/live studios, a 19,000-square-foot gallery, 87,000 square feet of retail space and 240,000 square feet of parking.

The building, which could be completed in about four years, will have more than 300 market-rate condos and 40 market-rate artists’ lofts, with rents ranging between $600 to $800 a square foot at today’s prices, as well as 120 discounted artists’ lofts.

The building will have an unusual shape and silhouette: Three individual blocks stacked perpendicular to each other on top of a plinth, or a base. The blocks are composed of a cube of artists’ studios and galleries, a rectangular slab with hotel rooms and condominium units, and another, wider slab that will also house condos, while the plinth will accommodate a mix of retail space, lobbies and parking. A central core holds the three blocks together and provides stability to the structure.

“The time has come to perhaps try to do a building which is a little beyond typical,” says Koolhaas, who was the recipient of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2000 and is a professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Koolhaas and his Rotterdam, Netherlands-based firm, The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), have designed such projects as the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin; the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto, Portugal; the headquarters for China Central Television in Beijing; and the Seattle Public Library in Seattle.

“This building is the one that I feel people will come to Jersey City to see,” says Robert Cotter, director of planning in Jersey City. “People will come from around the world to see this piece of architecture.”

Orienting the three blocks of the building in different directions will create several open rooftop spaces, including a public terrace on the fifth floor, terraces for the hotel restaurant and spa on the 17th floor, and two residential terraces on the 36th floor.

“This building lets people discover a different look from different angles,” says Shohei Shigematsu, director of OMA’s New York office, of the building’s unconventional design.

New York City developers BLDG Management Co. Inc. and The Athena Group LLC commissioned OMA to design the project last year as part of an agreement with Jersey City, says John Smallwood, vice president of development of BLDG.

“The city made an obligation that we hire a renowned, world-class architect,” says Smallwood. “They wanted to establish the Powerhouse Arts District, so it was important they had an architect that didn’t have a cookie-cutter design.”

BLDG and Athena chose OMA after considering three or four top architects, according to Smallwood. “A lot of people are familiar with the Rem Koolhaas name,” he says. “He’s got that design cachet.”

The 111 First Street development is OMA’s first large-scale residential U.S. project. It is also the largest building and the first high-rise OMA has done in the country, according to Koolhaas. “It’s actually rare in our situation to have an opportunity to do large-scale residential buildings,” he says. “We hope this will be the first of some others.”

The project appealed to Koolhaas in other ways. “We had tried to do buildings in Manhattan, but it was infinitely complicated,” he says. In Jersey City, by contrast, “there was an environment here where we could do ambitious work with fewer obstacles.”

But Koolhaas says the avant-garde design of the building is not solely meant to “create a spectacle.” He says, “Although the shape is different from what is happening in New Jersey, we think that the façade will not be so distinctive and will have an element of merging with the environment.”

The building will rise on the two-acre site of a former tobacco factory and faces the historic Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Powerhouse building that gives the neighborhood its name. The warehouse, which is currently being demolished, was home to 70 to 90 artists who were evicted two years ago when the landlord said the building was structurally unsound. BLDG acquired it in 1991 after taking over New Gold Equities Corp., the previous owner of 111 First Street.

The project would take about four years to complete, according to Smallwood. Finalizing building plans and getting the necessary permits and approvals would require 12 to14 months, while construction would take approximately three years, he says.