North Brooklyn Is Going Vertical

Looking down Broadway with the Williamsburghotel in the foreground and Manhattan in the background. (all images via morfae.com)

If you thought the recession stopped the architectural boomtown that is North Brooklyn, then you’ll have to think again. If Bushwick is getting all the buzz because of the art-borhood that is sprouting up further east, the experiments in architectural verticality are happening a little west in Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

A rendering of the hotel from the street. (click to enlarge)

Miami-based Oppenheim Architects have won an international design competition to design a new luxury hotel in South Williamsburg called Williamsburghotel. Located adjacent to the new bank-cum-banquet hall and the Williamsburg Bridge and across the street from steak lover paradise Peter Luger’s, the three-building complex is planned to rise 440 feet into the air.

Architect Chad Oppenheim has a familial connection to the area but his design is more ultra-internationale than the area has ever seen before. This sleek deck of towers is a neighborhood game-charger, as they say.

Breathtaking views of Brooklyn and Manhattan are going to make Williamsburghotel pretty special. (via morfae.com) (click to enlarge)

“We did not want the hotel’s form to be in constant battle with the adjacent historic bank. We tried to accomplish more with less, opting for a timeless solution that delivers grace, and drama through powerful manipulations of scale, proportion and materiality. The primal notion of tower and basilica is a typology more often associated with the Renaissance, which is extremely appropriate for an area in the midst of its own full-blown renaissance. I am incredibly excited to do our first project in New York, and especially in Brooklyn. This was where my family first established roots when my great grandparents arrived from Europe. I was born here, and it is a wonderful home coming that will help us establish more of a presence in the area,” the architect is quoted as saying in the press release.

Further north in Greenpoint, East Village-based Park architects have drawn up plans for an ambitious major development that, if it gets the green light, could mean 4,000 units in 10 luxury condos — are there any other kind? — on the coast of the Polish/hipster neighborhood.

If all this building makes you sad, then at least be thankful that the man who invented the “ugly Brooklyn condo” aesthetic (if you can call it that), architect Robert Scarano, is not involved in the latest wave of architecture. In fact, the ugly-tect may be banned for life from building in New York. Why? Because according to judge Joan R. Salzma, he was “deliberately overbuilding” and some of his filings were “so deceptive that they call to mind out-and-out fraud.”