Archinect - News

Take a look inside HWKN’s new 351 Marin tower in New Jersey

2022-08-10T18:36:00-04:00

HWKN has shared photos of its latest addition to the skyline of Jersey City, New Jersey, called 351 Marin. The building, designed in partnership with executive architect HLW, topped out last fall and has recently achieved full tenancy, something developers KRE Group shares is a bellwether for increased demands for an “elevated lifestyle experience” in the city’s luxury real estate market post-Covid.

Image: Here and Now Agency

Located in the burgeoning Powerhouse Arts District and featuring an angled base with a reinforced concrete superstructure, the 38-story residential tower begins as an anchor to a disused plot of land by extending its lobby into the 4,500-square-foot plaza area now redefined as a “sociable space” by its designers.

Image: Here and Now Agency

This creates a geometrically-dynamic public area that features a cafe, stepped concrete seating, and vertical sightlines framed by the darkness of the protruding rhombus-shap...

OMA Releases Images for the New Pompidou x Jersey City

2021-06-07T13:41:00-04:00

The Pompidou Centre is opening a new venue in New Jersey. Known for its high-tech Paris building with an eye-catching exoskeleton, exterior pipes, and externalized stairs, the museum is planning a new location to be housed in a renovated brick building. Just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, the new site is in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City.

While the Pompidou already has multiple locations in cities across Europe—and as far away as Shanghai—this will be the center’s first American venture, one which it has apparently been planning for years.

OMA released a rendering, which was published in the New York Times on Friday, June 5. According to a Jersey City Redevelopment Agency and OMA/AMO request for proposal, the 58,000-square-foot, historic Pathside Building is one of the city’s “most distinguished.” Constructed in 1912 to service public trolleys, it was later refurbished to house a community college. The city purchased it in 2018.

The Times reports that the r...

70-story residential tower headed to Jersey City

2019-10-11T13:00:00-04:00

Renderings have been unveiled for Avalon Tower, a proposed 70-story residential skyscraper slated for Jersey City. The 722-foot tower will contain 950 residences, including 505 studio apartments, 265 one-bedroom units, 160 two-bedroom units, and 20 three-bedroom units.

The tower complex is designed by Gerner Kronick + Valcarcel Architects, New York YIMBY reports. Sculpted as an L-shaped tower, the design for the skyscraper features a lower section that rises 575-feet high. This portion of the tower is topped with an outdoor terrace and swimming pool. The entire complex will sit beside a new six-story parking structure containing 382 parking stalls and 17,192 square feet of retail spaces. A pair of mid-rise residential towers currently occupying an adjacent site owned by the same developer, Tower Cove Jersey City Urban Renewal, will remain.

The towers feature gridded glass, steel, and aluminum facades.

The tower is set to become one of the tallest skyscrapers in Jersey City, falli...

Tallest skyscraper in New Jersey nears completion

2019-08-30T15:30:00-04:00

99 Hudson Street, a 900-foot tower residential tower designed by architects Perkins Eastman for developers China Overseas America in Jersey City, New Jersey, is nearing completion.

The tower topped out as New Jersey's tallest skyscraper in late 2018. In recent weeks, according to New York YIMBY, Plaza Construction, the builders for the project, and Vidaris, exterior envelope consultants, have made extensive progress installing the tower's glass and Jura limestone facades.

Rendering of 99 Hudson Street and the surrounding towers. Image courtesy of Perkins Eastman.

The 79-story tower's facades are marked by alternating vertical bands of stone and glass panels, while the extruded tower's sheer exposures culminate in a stepped glass and stone crown.

The hexagonal tower is set to include 781-apartments and 16,000 square feet of commercial spaces. The tower-and-podium-style complex is marked by a series of plazas and an eight-story base containing 609 parking stalls. According to a pro...

How Jared Kushner — and other developers — get money meant for low-income areas to build luxury developments

2017-06-01T12:11:00-04:00

Jared Kushner and his real estate partners wanted to take advantage of a federal program in 2015 that would save them millions of dollars as they built an opulent, 50-story residential tower in this city’s booming waterfront district, just across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan. There was just one problem: The program was designed to benefit projects in poor, job-starved areas. So the project’s consultants got creative, records show.

Basically, the tactic is gerrymandering for real estate. Kushner and co. worked with state officials to demarcate the area around the site, 65 Bay Street in Jersey City, as including some of the city's poorest neighborhoods rather than the wealthy neighborhoods just blocks away. So the project looked like it was being built in an area of "extraordinarily high unemployment", reports the Washington Post, in order to get some $50M in low-cost financing via the EB-5 visa program.

The article notes that the move is perfectly legal and has been used by other developers. "But it illustrates how Kushner, who ran his family’s real estate company before he became a senior adviser to President Trump, and his partners exploited a loophole in a federal program that prominent members of both parties say has been plagued by fraud and abuse."

World's first permanent Street Art Museum is coming to Jersey City

2014-06-03T13:48:00-04:00

Jersey City-based art center Mana Contemporary—the exhibition branch of the Mana Fine Arts art storage, shipping, and packing empire—is building a street art museum in a former ice factory in Jersey City [...]. In addition to a rotating program of special exhibitions inside the institution, MMUA will boast specially-commissioned murals on its exterior walls, a large billboard where artists will create new works, and a full range of educational and community outreach programs.

From drab to fab, Jersey City's alluring architecture is making "Chilltown" hot

2014-03-07T18:36:00-05:00

As Jersey City has cast off its stigma as a back-office-and-apartment haven of cheap rents and cheaper-looking buildings, more and more professionals and families are calling “Chilltown” and “JC” home. They’re ditching the suburbs of their parents, but also the stratospheric prices and stuffy attitudes of Manhattan and, increasingly, Brooklyn. The so-called sixth borough has finally become a destination in its own right [...].

Richard Meier Goes Home, to Recall and to Work

2014-01-27T11:53:00-05:00

Richard Meier is returning to his roots with two new developments in New Jersey, where he grew up.

499.SUMMIT - Jersey City Prison Design

2012-04-06T20:35:00-04:00

499.SUMMIT is a conceptual proposal for a futuristic high-rise urban penitentiary in Jersey City which seeks to challenge the conventions of traditional prison design. The project, a collaborative effort by grad students Andreas Tjeldflaat and Gregory Knobloch, was part of the PennDesign studio FUTURE PRISON DESIGN.