11 Hoyt Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 11 Hoyt Street by Carter Horsley

This stunning, 57-story tower at 11 Hoyt Street at Livingston Street is on the site of a Macy's parking garage in Downtown Brooklyn. 

The developer is Tishman Speyer Properties and the architect is Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects.  Michaelis Boyd of London is the interior designer and landscaping is by Hollander Design Landscape Architects.  

The 591-foot-high building will have 481 condominium residences when it is completed in 2020. 

Tishman Speyer, a major developer in the New York City is also building a mid-rise structure designed by Studio Gang, a mid-rise building known as MIRA at 160 Folsom Street in San Francisco.  It will have a rippling façade that is somewhat reminiscent of Frank O. Gehry's stainless-steel-clad New York by Gehry skyscraper near City Hall in Lower Manhattan.  The MIRA is scheduled for completion in 2020. 

Studio Gang is also the architect of 40 Tenth Avenue, an office building under construction by Aurora Capital and William Gottlieb Real Estate between 13th and 14th Streets next to the High Line Elevated Park.  It is also known as "Solar Carve" that the architectural firm has maintained uses "incident angles of the sun's rays to sculpt  a building's form to prevent it from casting shadows on either the adjacent High Line or the street."  

Another New York City project by Studio Gang is the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History that is scheduled for completion in 2020. 

Studio Gang's most famous building is Aqua, an puffy, 82-story, mixed-use tower developed by Magellan Development Group LLC at 225 North Columbus Drive in Chicago and completed in 2009.  It has irregularly shaped concrete floor slabs that give the façade an undulating, sculptural quality. 

The firm is also developing a 1,191-foot-high mixed-use tower known as the Vista Tower at 375 Wacker Drive in Chicago, also for Magellan.  It is scheduled for completion in 2020. 

This is  Tishman Speyer's first condominium residential building in New York. 

Tishman Speyer is also building with HNA Group, which is based in China, a mid-rise office building across the street that is called the Wheeler and its lower floors will include department store space. 

There are 11 subway lines within a five-minute walk from this building, which will have a 20,000-square-foot- landscaped park private park on top of its two-story park that will have about 40,00 square feet of retail space, half below ground.

Bottom Line

With its deceptively simple but complex scalloped façades, this tall, bold and very distinctive tower will have about 190 different apartment layouts in Downtown Brooklyn.

Description

According to the architect's website, 11 Hoyt, whose tower is trapezoidal in plan, "transforms its full-block site, formerly a parking garage, into an elevated green podium anchored by a tower with scalloped edges rising above it," adding that "Visible from the street yet buffered from its activity, the podium's indoor-outdoor environment acts as the 'fifth façade' of the building, increasing its sustainability while encouraging neighbors to meet and interact among trees, gardens, and other amenities." 

"The building," the website continued, "pushes out in plan to create expanded living spaces with built-in window seats framing eight-foot-tall windows, maximizing views of the neighborhood and waterfront and offering glimpses of the building's sculptural exterior." 

"Migrating across the façade like the cusps of a wave in section, the scallops allow for more than 190 unique floor plans that accommodate a diverse mix of residents.  Built of precast concrete, the scalloped façade units will be prefabricated and installed to identical floor plate and column layouts on-site.  The compact footprint of the tower and the low height of the podium respect the site, privileging sunlight to the green roof and the street." 

The window bays of the tower except for the single bays at its corners are divided into three-story high, cascading in four sections. 

The protruding edges of these "scallops" are slightly curved vertically, 

The building has a two-story retail podium, a motor court and porte-corchere and a valet parking garage. 

According to a September 21, 2018 article in The New York Times by Kaya Laterman, the tower "has a scalloped exterior made of cast concrete that, from a distance, resembles small waves lapping in the sky," adding that the undulating façade also pulls the interior borders outward, providing a little extra space."  

The article said that architect "got the idea for the interior nooks after noticing all the protruding bay windows in brownstone Brooklyn."  

She also said that "the scalloped exterior has an organized, algorithmic pattern," adding that "her inspiration for the patterns came from natural settings, like the growth lines on a shell, or the seed spirals of a sunflower."

Amenities

The building has a fitness center designed by the Wright Fit, a 75-foot-long saltwater pool, a squash court, a children's playroom a dog run, a coffee lounge, a motor court, a 147-car garage, a porte-corchere and, on the 32nd floor, a catering kitchen, a library, a cinema and performance space, a gaming room, card room, a study area, a music studio and storage.

Apartments

Residents can choose between light or dark interior finishes. 

Apartments have 10-foot-ceilings, 7-inch-wide white oak plank floors, washers and dryers, Bosch appliances, Italian stone countertops, and vented range hoods.