Sheepshead Bay, NY

MASTER PLAN

Originally developed in the 1920s as summer cottages on marshy infill, the bungalow courts of Sheepshead Bay are organized around internal mews that stand at 4 feet below the current street level. The mews were damaged by Sandy and continued to flood with every heavy rainfall. Working with the Pratt Center, Gans & Co. helped this long-standing community work together to replace their fragile homes and underperforming infrastructure with a collective plan that addressed their environmental safety and economic wellbeing for years to come.

The plan for Stanton Court preferred by the community had a universally accessible boardwalk connecting net-zero, elevated row houses. This row house alternative to the bungalow frees up property for collective water management gardens and solar arrays. For funding reasons, the executed reconstruction by the City of New York, has individual bungalows but implements a shared water management infrastructure.

A larger master plan across multiple mews leverages the water management potential of the courts as a collective landscape. Shared gardens on the upland mews absorb rain before delivering the residual runoff to the Bay. A living breakwater disperses wave action and mitigates shore inundation. A by-product is an increase in community parkland, which is now scarce. The State of New York earmarked funds to further develop the plan, but it has not been implemented.

Project Team:

Gans and Company: Rosamund Palmer, Cristina Zubillaga, Sean Gold

Master Plan Civil Engineer: Sherwood Design Engineers, Jason Loiselle

Community Based Organizing: The Pratt Center

HOUSES AT STANTON COURT

This reconstruction of Stanton Court after Superstorm Sandy is a prototype for resilient design at the scale of a neighborhood – a scale that is largely missing from current policy and government funding. Indeed, to implement this project required that we challenge the standards of the City’s Build-it-Back program foster unusual collaborations among city agencies. It produced an urban mews united in its architectural character, social space, and shared hard and soft water management infrastructures.

Federal Emergency Management Agency guidelines called for the single-story cottages to be raised ten feet above the ground; and current zoning required them to be replaced by narrower, two-story buildings. To preserve the scale and character of the original mews, we developed a new typology that places the two-story massing of the new house behind a living room with a lower bungalow profile. This typology was then developed with variation by a team of architects: Gans and Co, DCAP and H2M. On the inside, that living room is in fact double height, which expands the sense of space. Balconies, in lieu of the original porches, connect the neighbors, who can often be found there, chatting across the mews. The residents also favor the breezy and shady space beneath the house as an outdoor summer room that connects to the court.

Client:

The Mayor’s Office, The City of New York, Department of Design and Construction, and LiRo

Project Team:

Gans and Company: Cristina Zubilaga, Alan Gillers, Adam Achrati, Micha Stroup

Construction Management: LiRo CM

David Cunningham Architects and Planners

H2M Architects and Engineers

Community Based Organizing: The Pratt Center

Structural Engineers: Dunne and Markis Consulting Engineers

Selected Awards and Publications:

Commendation for Resilience Brooklyn AIA 2022

Public Design Commission: Designing New York Quality Affordable Housing Database

Urban Omnibus: It Takes a Village Collaborators:

“Stanton Court, Sheepshead Bay”, Jane’s Walk, Municipal Arts Society

“Sheepshead Rising”, Waterproofing New York, Denise Hoffman Brandt ed., UR Terreform Press, NY

Ground Rules for Humanitarian Design: ed Alice Min Soo Chun Wiley Academy

Boundaries 10: Architecture for Emergencies vol

Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures for Inclusion, ed Routledge

“When Bottom Up Meets Top Down”, Oculus, AIA, NYC Spring 2015

“Beyond Temporary”, Housing as Intervention, Karen Kubey ed., Wiley/AD London

“Sheepshead Goes Public”, Matthew Schuerman, WNYC