NEW YORK CITY—A badly needed renovation and expansion was completed recently to a K-12 school in Manhattan that was built in the mid-1800s.

Friends Seminary has been dealing with the need to expand for decades with an increasing number of students attending classes in the tight space of the 19th and 20th century buildings. At present, there are nearly 800 students at the school, which is located in the Stuyvesant Square Historic District in New York.

The new six-story expansion was constructed behind the facades of three historic townhouses, joining seven buildings around a central court. The campus includes a historic meeting house, a 1963 classroom building, Hunter Hall, and three townhouses constructed in 1852.

Kliment Halsband Architects was the architect on this project and AECOM Tishman served as construction manager. Levien & Company was the Owner’s Representative. The cost of the project has not been disclosed.

The historic townhouse facades have been maintained. Inside, the team excavated new basements, built new floors to align with the floors of the adjoining classroom building, and constructed two new floors of classroom space above the townhouses and classroom building. A narrow skylit gallery separates the new building from the historic facades, and exposed steel bracing bridges between old and new.

The project includes a new accessible entrance and lobby, a Great Room opening directly onto the central court, the Archive Room, a Music suite, Dance and Yoga suite, an Upper School Commons opening onto a rooftop terrace and community space, additional classrooms and offices, study and locker spaces.

The team worked with structural engineer Silman to add a play roof and two classroom floors to Hunter Hall, a four-story building that was built in the early 1960s to create a campus quadrant around a rear courtyard.

“We wanted to minimize demolition inside Hunter Hall, so the structure behind the townhouse facades actually contains most of the lateral support systems for both buildings,” said Silman Senior Project Manager Jim Villano, in a statement.

“But we had to build the addition on top of Hunter Hall first—so we also put temporary lateral braces at the front and back of that building.”

While the façade appears as it did 170 years ago, it conceals a new 29,000-square-foot upper-school wing that, like Hunter Hall, tops out at approximately 70 feet, more than five feet below the maximum height for this landmarked area. It rises to six stories and crowned on the roof with a greenhouse instead of a play space.

For the new upper school of nearly 300 students, Kliment Halsband utilized Collaborative for High Performance School (CHPS) criteria, a national program to improve learning environments as a design standpoint.

The school entrance opens to a terrazzo-clad lobby. Floors are organized around a new stairwell and elevator core at the juncture of the old and new wings. The 30-foot-wide by 63-foot-long columnless space is used for school-wide music, dance, and theater classes. An impact-resistant glass wall on the courtyard opens for indoor/outdoor assemblies and events.

To comply with New York City setback requirements, the additions are virtually invisible at street level. The new structure is approximate five feet behind the historic façade and is supported by a series of vertical trusses in the interstitial space. A sloped skylight at the top transmits daylight down through that narrow volume and adjacent interior spaces.

Said Principal Bo Lauder, “At night, it emits a cheerful glow from within the building.”

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NEW YORK CITY— The addition of an 83,500-square-foot building to the Brearley School in Manhattan has been completed.

The Upper East Side K-12 independent school, which, until now, had resided in its original purpose-built building since 1929. The architect was KPMB Architects and EW Howell served as construction manager.

The new facility is located on a 100-by-75-foot lot and contains 12 floors with various activity spaces stacked upon each other – from art and science classrooms to a 600-plus-seat auditorium – with interactive and sustainable elements incorporated throughout the building, including a rooftop garden with a rainwater collection system. The cost of the project has not been disclosed.

The project has been designed from the inside-out, based on programmatic needs, and from the outside-in, resulting in an academically dynamic facility held together architecturally with a masonry wrapper that unifies these disparate program elements while addressing the character of the local neighborhood.

The new facility blends into the design aesthetic of the Upper East Side with exterior brick masonry, yet still defines its own identity with refined, Roman format iron-spot brick for texture. The brick not only responds to the client’s wish to “not be just another all-glass building,” but also responds to energy improvements required of future buildings.

KPMB strategically located windows to maximize daylight hours of rooms, while still limiting excessive solar gains, with some classrooms achieving as high as 90% daylight autonomy. The school gymnasium incorporates Solera diffusing glass to better light the space while controlling unwanted glares from reaching athletes and spectators.

Elements of the facility are integrated into student education, such as a visible, natural ventilation system that students are involved in engaging and that allows for cooling supply in warmer seasons without the use of mechanical air conditioning. On the rooftop terrace, science students have access to an experimental garden with a storm water collection apparatus that connects with the run-off of higher roofs to benefit the greenery.

A gathering space for performances and events, the school’s auditorium incorporates a flexible floor that converts from raked seating for up to 600, to a flat floor accommodating 222 for school galas – all with the help of four independent floor platforms that automatically move vertically based on preference. For maximum acoustic effect, nine-wood wall and ceiling panels surround the audience while hiding technical theater equipment.

KPMB will also soon be renovating the existing Brearley facility so it’s consistent with this new building.

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NEW YORK—Lutron Electronics has been a leader in the lighting control industry for almost six decades. Now, as the company celebrates its new Commercial Experience Center in Manhattan, it is once again striving to bring fresh ideas to the lighting and design landscape.

“Experience” is the operative word at the flagship center, located just off Fifth Avenue at 3 E. 28th Street in New York’s lively NoMad neighborhood. At the core of the center is the Lutron HXL approach, a broad philosophy of human centric lighting that deftly employs four elements of lighting design—natural light, quality light, connection to the outdoors, and adaptive and personalized control—to help people be, work, and feel their best.

The new center offers architects, designers, contractors, developers, and building owners an inclusive vision of Lutron lighting and control capabilities.

It is “designed with the customer journey in mind,” says Executive Vice President Scott Hanna.

“The new center provides an immersive experience that reveals how lighting and controls can impact different space types and people’s sense of well-being. It gives them opportunities to enhance and foster the human experience.”

The center is designed to inspire and encourage clients and customers to expand the ways they think about lighting design—not just as illumination, but as an amenity for acquiring and retaining talent, attracting guests, and stimulating students and educators.

Customers are invited to experience Lutron’s recent acquisitions: Ketra – dynamic smart lighting that mimics daylight indoors – and Limelight smart exterior lighting control.

In addition, the center showcases the company’s best-in-class solutions, including a Quantum system with integrated Sivoia QS, as well as contract roller shades, Palladiom keypads, and the myRoom guestroom solution.

Lutron Co-President Ramin Mehrganpour observes that the center puts more of Lutron’s growing portfolio of solutions on display. “We can now highlight more of our comprehensive, innovative product offering,” he says.

The center’s footprint is appropriately spacious: at 5,500 square feet, it’s almost twice the size of Lutron’s original Penn Plaza location. Moreover, being in NoMad, just south of Midtown, puts the company squarely in the middle of New York’s most important tech and design-oriented neighborhood, convenient to a number of architecture, design, and Silicon Alley firms.

Other notable aspects of the center include:

Solutions for a wide variety of building types:

Lutron controls offer distinct benefits to workplace environments, hotels, and educational institutions – all of which are specifically addressed at the new center. Indeed, the space incorporates a complete model hotel suite employing Lutron’s myRoom guestroom control system.

Dedicated meeting and training spaces for Lutron clients and customers:

With New York being a destination city and a hub for international specifiers, Hanna expects a high percentage of visitors to come from outside the United States.

A broad landscape of Lutron products:

Lutron solutions on display include Ketra, Limelight, myRoom, T-Series tunable white, the Quantum lighting control and energy management system, EcoSystem technology, and Vive wireless controls.

WELL certification:

The center is designed to meet the WELL Building Standard supporting occupant health and wellness in the built environment. WELL dovetails with Lutron’s approach to human centric lighting, Lutron HXL, which promotes comfort, enables enhanced well-being, and fosters engagement.

The New York Commercial Experience Center is available to visit by appointment. Other Lutron Experience Centers are located in Coopersburg, Pa.; Plantation, Fla.; Irvine, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; Toronto, Canada; and London, UK. A Residential Experience Center is located in Midtown Manhattan.

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BG Consultants predicted that Manhattan’s elementary schools will reach full capacity within the next 10 years, and as a result, has made recommendations for a five-, 10- and 20-year plan for the district — all of which include new facility construction to meet the growing population of the district, said Clint Hibbs, AIA, LEED AP at BG Consultants, according to KMAN Local News in Manhattan. The current recommended five-year plan is to build a new elementary school in Blue Township where the district already owns undeveloped land. Blue Township is one of the fastest-growing communities in the district, according to BG Consultants’ calculations, with the community’s students currently being bused to Woodrow Wilson Elementary in Manhattan.

Additional recommendations from BG Consultants include a middle school expansion to prepare for the incoming elementary students that the increasing population growth will certainly need. Further recommendation from the architectural firm include the demolition of all existing mobile and annex school facilities, expansion of safety measures for each school, the addition of dedicated gym space for each of the smaller elementary schools, and an increase in bus lanes and parking for all district schools. As part of the recommended 10-year plan, BG Consultants has recommended the construction of another elementary school on the west side of Manhattan, and if the population increases as predicted in 20 years time, the addition of a third middle school and second high school will also be needed.

All of these recommendations from BG Consultants are still under consideration by the school district board, and no decisions have yet been made, according to Eric Reid, USD 33 assistant superintendent.

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