Prefabrication has long been heralded as a possible way to infill New York’s vacant sites; however, it has only recently become a solid practical solution rather than an experimental concept. Riding the crest of the wave of new prefabricated housing is GLUCK+ (formerly Peter Gluck & Partners), in collaboration with developers Jeffrey Brown and Kimberly Frank. Together they have begun construction on one of New York’s first prefabricated steel and concrete residential buildings.
Dubbed ‘Broadway Stack’, the 38,000 square foot building will contain 28 high quality, moderate income apartments atop 4,000 square feet of ground floor commercial space in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan. At the moment, 5,000 square feet worth of traditional foundations and services exists on-site, awaiting the imminent arrival of fifty-six prefabricated modules from a factory in Pennsylvania. The assembly of these modules into a seven-story building will take four weeks, with an additional three months after for connecting utilities, assembling the facade and adding the finishing touches. Members of the project team will be on-site to provide viewing of the assembly during the week of April 15.
Prefabrication has become popular in recent years due to the efficiency and quality it affords. The result generally leads to lower construction costs, less waste, less energy consumption, less noise and pollution on site, and tighter quality control. It also provides a convenient way to build on some of New York’s smaller sites, which don’t have the space to host traditional construction. Plus the reduction in cost means that high quality housing can be made available to lower income New Yorkers.
New York is going through somewhat of a prefabrication renaissance, although this is first of many. Also in the pipeline is the winning prefabricated apartment building of Bloomberg’s adAPT NYC competition, which is intended to serve as a 21st century model of New York housing. Meanwhile, SHoP Architect’s B2 Bklyn residential residential towers, currently under construction in Brooklyn, plans to be one of the world’s tallest pre-fab buildings, standing at 32 stories upon completion.
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