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Architects: JBAD
- Area: 100000 ft²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Brad Feinknopf
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Manufacturers: Gallina USA, James Hardie, Masterwall
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Lead Architect: Jonathan Barnes
Text description provided by the architects. As a prime example of a growing trend of urban infill and adaptive reuse projects, 150 North Third Street saves a 120-year-old warehouse structure and repurposes the building and surrounding parking lots as a mixed-use residential project. The historic, 5 story masonry and heavy timber structure was converted to apartments and expanded with a 5 story addition, configured in a “L”-shape, for a total of 79 apartments and 100,000 square feet. The addition and an amenity deck are raised above a concrete podium which provides limited on-grade parking for 27 cars. Retail space is located on the ground floor of the existing building and in a new 3,000 square foot, 1 story building on Third St.
The building addition is conceived as a parabuilding, an alteration or addition that transforms the character of an existing building, creating a brand-new identity while maintaining, and preserving, the building’s historic architecture. In this interpretation, the parabuilding was created as a ghost copy of the host building, mimicking the original structure in size, proportion, and fenestration but with high contrast in its exterior expression. The generous void between the old and new structures is conceived as a vertical alley, a shared space that provides access to the apartments and tenants' social space, animated with angled views up through floor openings and framed views out to the city.
A second-floor interior amenity space features opposing glass garage doors that extend the room out to the city to the east and to the amenity deck to the west. The amenity deck, framed by the “L” shaped addition, features active and passive uses, a landscape buffer along with the abutting apartments, and an elevated roof terrace on Third St. above the retail building. The space is open to the surrounding urban neighborhood and accessible from the street with terraced seating and steps; it is conceived as an extension of the streetscape, blurring the typical boundary between public space and private space and extending the public realm into the site.
This is an example of POPOS (privately owned public open space) that is helping to shift the conventional attitude about territorial space in cities to be more open, inclusive, and equitable. (architect’s note: the security gate at street level will be removed to create a more inviting public threshold).
The parabuilding copies but reinterprets the historic early 20th C. building with a veiled façade, its fenestration semi-visible behind a thin, translucent polycarbonate plane. A highly chromatic patterned façade also reinterprets the punched window pattern of the historic structure and wraps the perimeter of the new building at the amenity deck and the adjacent alleys. The color blocks are created with an uncharacteristic interpretation of Juliette's balconies: solid doors rather than glass.
