As a contribution to the public conversation, BIG developed the BQP – turning the BQ-Expressway into a BQ-Park, while still accommodating significant vehicle flows along the route. The BQP provides a platform for adding significant new parkland along an underused corridor, while connecting Brooklyn Heights to Brooklyn Bridge Park with a preserved or re-constructed cliffside – crisscrossed by rampways, greenery, and park amenities. Read more about the proposal
The . mile project area is located within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) -year floodplain and spans from Montgomery Street to East th Street. The ESCR project is designed to protect and improve the resiliency of the large and diverse residential community of more than , New Yorkers, including approximately , NYCHA residents. ESCR will also offer protection to critical infrastructure including a major pump station and an electrical substation that powers much of Lower Manhattan as well as numerous local schools and libraries.
The equilateral triangular footprint creates a building with no ends, only three faces perceived as free standing two-dimensional surfaces. The conference center and lobby is sunken into the landscape, leaving the hotel building in a small oasis of Swedish forest in an airport city of parking lots and infrastructure. In the center of the building a series of executive meeting rooms hang inside a hexagonal atrium, creating a kaleidoscopic view from the lobby to the sky.
The site includes several historic buildings which King Toronto wraps around like a new organic frame. Each building unit is set at the size of a room, rotated degrees from the street grid to increase exposure to light and air. The resulting urban volume is an alternative to the tower and podium typology prevalent in Toronto. It echoes some of Moshe Safdies most revolutionary ideas from Habitat in Montreal, but rather than a utopian experiment on an island, it is nested in the heart of the city.
Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet is a spiral-shaped pavilion, reminiscent of the spring in a timepiece movement, entirely supported by curved glass walls. The contemporary spiral flanks the original workshop where the Audemars Piguet story began in and where an earlier version of the museum was housed from to . The vernacular architecture of the historical building has been fully recovered based on a thorough study of archival materials.