Sir David Adjaye unveils new plans for the new Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Central Brooklyn. This center is the first-ever community development institution in the country, established in 1967. The scheme envisions a space that accelerates wealth creation and closes the racial wealth gap that has affected the United States.
The 840,000 sqft design scheme, situated on the historic Fulton St in central Brooklyn, includes a major expansion of the Cultural Center, the Billie Holiday Theatre, and many more. Both these programs will create access to resources for the next generation of Central Brooklyn’s cultural leaders. The design of the campus in the heart of Brooklyn seeks to centralize all economic and development opportunities for the residents.
This global hub was designed by Sir David Adjaye and derived from a visioning process he created with the community back in 2019. This participatory process, which was led by Adjaye, was a huge success, and the feedback from the community was summed up in four central points. Increasing the visibility of the arts programs; expanding job and educational opportunities; improving the open space; and bringing in mission-aligned retail.
As a result of this engagement process and community focus groups, the campus has been designed to be a mixed-use residential and commercial space. This includes new offices for financial inclusion programs, retail space within the campus, the Billie Holiday Theatre, a new Restoration Cultural Center Hub, a publicly accessible rooftop, and a walkable public plaza that connects these activities. The variety of the program allows for economic mobility, a place to advance skill sets, and the ability to host plenty of resources for more than 60,000 Central Brooklyn residents. The space will also focus on scaling different programs, such as the Restoration Software Engineering Fellowship, together with The Marcy Lab School.
The architect, Sir David Adjaye, was chosen to complete this project by the Restoration Corporation directly because of his work on the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Both the leaders and the residents of this community wanted to ensure that the campus design reflects the values and mission of Restoration. With a similar focus on community building, Adjaye Associates have also designed the Ruby City Contemporary Art Center. In 2020 in a similar case study, Marble Fairbanks Architects recently built the Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center, another one of the core functions and services of the Brooklyn community.
