New York University, which last week announced an agreement with locally elected officials and community groups on principles for a planned expansion of 6 million square feet over the next 25 years, is considering filling in much of the open spaces of two major and famous "tower-in-the-park" housing complexes it owns south of Washington Square Park.

The agreement stated that it will pursue re-use of existing buildings before developing new facilities as well as creating academic and residential centers outside of the Washington Square Park area where it is based and where it has been expanding significantly in recent years.

In a 30-page document presented at an "open house" about its expansion plans last week, the university noted that "in the heart of Greenwich Village, the University should make historic preservation a priority." The document maintained that feedback from the community indicated that "the University must achieve a balance between adding density within its current property footprint and expanding beyond that footprint."

The university's document said that it "will seek to utilize and renovate existing buildings prior to seeking development sites for new buildings." It stated that "the South Blocks between Houston and West 3rd Street could accommodate up to approximately 2.5 million additional gross square feet above and below grade," adding that "This is the greatest future opportunity for additional space on NYU-owned property."

One of the two major sites is a superblock created in the 1960s on which Washington Square Village, two very long slab apartment buildings with colorful facades and sculptural roof elements designed by Paul Lester Weiner in association with S. J. Kessler & Sons in 1960, stands.

"To compromise for the superscale of the slabs and their comparative anonymonity, Weiner and the landscape architects, Sasaki, Walker & Associates, attempted to humanize the open spaces with lavish plantings as well as fountains and ingeniously designed street furniture," Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman noted in their book, "New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial."

The university document discussed "filling in the superblock" and noted that "one approach to adding space to the site would be to demolish the existing buildings and to restore the original blocks, or variations of those blocks, with greater public access and a building scale representative of the surrounding area."

It also showed three "concepts" for "block infill" that would insert new academic and residential buildings between the two Washington Square Village buildings and "attempts to utilize them as a 'buffer' between the new development and the surrounding area."

A third approach shown in the document was called "plinth and tower infill" and three concepts were shown, including the one shown at the left, that would keep new development between the two slab buildings "very low in the middle...to minimize the impact on existing buildings."

"In 1963 NYU took title to the vacant five-and-a-half-acre parcel that was to have the site of the last of ...[three Washington Square Village superslabs and set out to develop a middle-income housing project, ultimately called University Village," the authors continued. The university retained I. M. Pei as the project's architect and the authors maintained that Pei "pursued a counterbalancing impulse toward dynamic asymmetry based on a pinwheel-plan composition of the towers, juxtaposing the window grids with concrete sheer walls to create an animated, sculpturally vigorous yet human-scaled design."

In 2001, the university acquired the low-rise grocery store building on West Broadway adjacent to University Village and the document showed three "concepts" of erecting a tower or mid-rise structures on the site that would significantly alter the open space environment of University Village.