Building: Studio 322

322 Hicks Street is a new building on one of the last open sites in the Landmarked District of Brooklyn Heights. For this reason, the project represents a special design challenge in an historic urban fabric. The insertion of a five story multiple dwelling, with luxurious full floor single apartments on floors 2-5 and two generous duplex units with walk-out garden access on the ground floor and basement level, introduces a typology foreign to the neighborhood of single family residences. It was our goal to produce a design that was both contemporary, yet very sensitive to the district, both in the scale of its massing and in its details. For that reason LSGS, working in conjunction with facade consultant Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects, developed a proposal to link typologically the building’s design to familiar neighborhood structures. The two predominant Brooklyn typologies: the Brownstone and the Warehouse, provided various design cues. From these precedents came the inspiration for the “bay” or oriel window, the size and scale of building, the relationship of building skin to openings, the mitigation of the scale of the building through canopy, and provision of a street scaled space at sidewalk level by the articulation of the ground floor. The resulting design with its front facade inflection serves to unify the entire block, while giving it new focus. This project uses building materials of the highest quality: a Norman size brick with a “historic Brooklyn Heights” orange hue, a shot-peaned stainless steel canopy, steel-section oriel windows, and an extensive glass curtain wall system on the rear facade to take advantage of spectacular New York Harbor views.