As part of the Made in Brownsville studio, we had the exciting opportunity to visit the New York Public Design Commission (PDC) at City Hall. There we had the privilege to speak with Justin Garrett Moore, an urban designer and Executive Director of the PDC. His work is largely focused on prioritizing the quality and excellence of the public realm, and fostering accessibility, diversity and inclusion in the city’s public buildings.
At the meeting, each of the three teams, drawing, modeling and film, had the opportunity to speak to him about our projects for which we received valuable feedback. The feedback received would help us improve our projects before the Community Engagement Day.
Justin also spoke to us about some of the ground-breaking public housing projects implemented throughout the city. He shared with us PDC’s latest guidelines on Designing New York: Quality Affordable Housing. Affordable housing is the cornerstone of New York’s diversity and vitality, and the PDC is playing a key role in these efforts with is bold advocacy for excellence in urban design. The key principles for creating these guidelines are place, detail, equity and comfort. Creating quality affordable housing for all follows the process of organizing, learning, creating, finalizing followed by implementation. When designing, it is important to include community engagement as part of the process and transparency at all levels of implementation to create trust within the communities in which these projects are built.
There are 8 main guidelines for creating affordable housing. The guidelines are not meant to be prescriptive but rather they offer areas for evaluation and enhancement. These guidelines include site planning, massing, materiality, façade windows and doors, ground floor conditions, circulation, open space design. Several of the newly implemented affordable housing projects include these guidelines and illustrate creative and successful design approaches to challenging sites, tight budgets, and ambitious programs. Examples of case study projects he mentioned were The Schermerhorn in Brooklyn, Hunter’s Point South Commons and Crossing in Long Island City as well as a pilot project, The Peninsula in Brooklyn. Some of the key guiding concepts for some of these projects were; “How can a building embody the concept of development without development?”, “How can a building include arts and culture?”, “How can it help to bring dignity to its often stigmatized residents, while enhancing its block or neighborhood?” and “How might the project help to foster social equity?”
Hearing about these projects helped us to think about the possibilities of what an Affordable Housing Project could be and how might to promote values of accessibility, resilience, active design, aging in place, and energy efficiency to create a better New York for all.
