Queens Residential Complex
Re-imagine a vacant waterfront site in Queens, New York. The mix-used complex includes various affordable housing units, a community wellness facility, and public access to the waterfront. The site faces west onto Roosevelt Island and the skyline of the Upper East Side, and sandwiched between Queensbridge Public Housing (largest public housing complex in America), Queensbridge Park (nearly century-old history of the neighborhood's living, construction, and landscape conditions), East River, and Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. The significance of the historical neighborhood drives the design to identify as its own complex while allowing views and access to the surrounding landmarks.
The community wellness facility follows the radial order of the designed housing towers. An open weight/cardio open is on the third floor with a cantilevering observation deck that looks through the two residential towers and out to the East River. The second floor consists of three large classrooms with floor-to-ceiling windows for group fitness, and restrooms pulled away from the exterior walls to maintain privacy while allowing natural light to fill the radial hallway. The first floor is where visitors enter and place their belongings into hall lockers with more restrooms opposite of the staff and administration desk. Underground are two swimming pools, one Olympic sized pool and another smaller one for families and children.
The mid-rise building consists of two towers that allow access to each other on the first, seventh, and eleventh floors. Residents can access the two large ellipse decks on the eighth and twelfth floors and enjoy views of both the East River and large postmodern neighboring complex of Queensbridge Public Housing.
The residential towers are a combination of micro-units, one-bedroom, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom apartments with two communal spaces on each residential floor. The apartments wrap around each floor, with varying views of the site from each unit. The microunits are on the seventh and eleventh floors (underneath the two ellipse deck) and either has direct views of the East River or the wellness facility. Two radial staircase, that spans the height of each tower, creates a central negative hollow open-core.
