Like fashion designers, architects go in and out of vogue — but a building has a much longer life span than a pair of jeans.
“Arguably, architecture is an art form; however, unlike most art, you have to live in it,” said Izak Senbahar, the president of Alexico Group, which developed 56 Leonard and 165 Charles Street in Manhattan, among other luxury condominium projects.
When developers devote millions of dollars to and spend years of planning and construction on a project, the importance of picking an architect can’t be overstated. Selection strategies vary, from organizing a rigorous interview process and taking obsessive site walks to hiring a verified historian or external consultants. And the finished product can spell disaster or seal the deal for a best-selling building, especially when it comes to attracting potential condo buyers or apartment renters.
During the development boom, New York City saw an influx of both condo and rental projects. From Jan. 1, 2012, to Jan. 31, 2018, the city’s top 30 most active architects worked on roughly 78.8 million square feet of residential projects across the five boroughs, according to public filings analyzed by The Real Deal.
But, alas, there’s no hard-and-fast rule about how to determine good taste. TRD interviewed three veteran residential developers — one known for making Leonard Street synonymous with luxury, another acclaimed for affordable housing and a third who often takes on historic renovations — to see how they choose their comrades in arms.
Jonathan Rose
President, Jonathan Rose Companies
How do you select an architect? We always try to hire an architect who is deeply experienced in designing the project content. It’s important that they be from the city we’re building in. We work all over the country, and we will not bring a New York architect to Atlanta or an Atlanta architect to New York. We want people who really understand the needs of and how local agencies work.
How do you choose between design proposals for your buildings?I’m not such a big fan of the idea that an architect presents three proposals and then you pick one. If there really are three or four different concepts, that’s great, but I often find that they’re contrived. I’d rather we start with an idea and then stabilize the design fairly early, because what drives everybody nuts is when you make a lot of changes to a building.
Do you work with external consultants, sometimes known as building committees, to help you judge your taste in architecture?We do two kinds of work: We work for ourselves, and we also have an owners’ representative group that works with not-for-profits to help them build buildings. Internally, we don’t have a building committee, but when we work with not-for-profits, they almost always have a committee.
What is that process like? Can you see their contributions? I started my own company in 1989 and from early on, working with great architects was important to me. But the big transformation came in 2003, when our company became the owners’ representative for Cooper Union, which wanted to build a new academic building. They had a fantastic building committee and an independent architecture selection committee, which included art patron Agnes Gund and Harry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. Our job was to help this committee winnow through a list of 150 architects, and it exposed me to the broadest range of architecture I’d ever seen.
Do you think architecture contributes to the success of your buildings? The design is essential. Our work is building affordable and mixed-income housing, and our underlying goal is to create communities and opportunities. So that’s a really important part of the programming and it has to do with how supportive it is of the health and well-being and future of our residents. What we’ve also found is that when a building is externally beautiful, it gives pride to the residents. You see that in Via Verde in the Bronx. The attractiveness of the design is not because we spent more money; it’s because we had great architects.