Architect Snyder presents 289 Kent Avenue design and massing approach

Hello, I'm Toby Snyder, Principal and Design Director at FX Collaborative Architects.

Yeah, the massing we're seeking here is transitional.

As Council Member Ressler mentioned, there's, of course, tall towers on the west side of Kent Avenue and then smaller grain fabric on the eastern side.

And we seek for our site here, the white building in the center here, to be sort of part of, help this transition.

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And here is an illustrative rendered view of what it could look like.

What we're trying to do here is break the massing down into smaller pieces, scaled at the size of many of the existing buildings in the neighborhood, and sort of take on some of that material masonry and textural quality.

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This is a view from Kent Avenue and South 2nd Street.

This would be the southwestern corner of the project.

And as we noted, one of the things we can do here along Kent Avenue is pull the building back from the property line and effectively widen the sidewalk, which is something we've been carrying through

throughout our application and are intending to do when the project hopefully moves forward.

We think this is really a great way to expand the public realm, relieving congestion, creating more space for planters.

For sidewalk, for ground floor articulation, interaction, folks on bikes, messengers, you know, the bus route that's running along here.

It's just, it really deserves to be a wider street.

Next slide, please.

We're sort of articulating the building here with smaller pieces, but you can see, given the flexibility of the zoning envelope and the limited amount of FAR that can fit within that envelope, we're able to pull back at certain points here.

You can see we can crown the building, the rooftop with a solar canopy, with vegetation, with amenities, all of these different things that activate.

The building for the tenants moving in here and also really contribute to the sustainability of the project overall.

Next slide, please.

Here's another view.

You can see ghosted on the right-hand side is the west side of Kent Avenue, which, of course, there's construction going up right now.

But to the left half of the screen is our project proposed.

You can see, again, the massing pulled back from the street, broken down into smaller pieces, ample space to have significant...

Tree pits for the soil growth of the trees that could be along there.

So it's all about being crafted, articulated, and really a finer-grained human scale, which we think, you know, it's a

larger building than what is there right now, but having that human smaller fine-grained scale is a really important way to transition from the upland neighborhood into the towers across the street.

You can see the windows.

have depth, there's subtle material changes, and we sort of want to have a recall of some of the other great historic masonry buildings in the neighborhood, but executed in a contemporary way.

Next slide, please.

And finally, here's a view on South 2nd Street looking east.

We're actually sort of standing on a lower elevation.

The site does rise slope pretty significantly from Kent as you're going up to White Street.

The residential entrance would be off of the side streets here, not off of Kent Avenue.

But it is all about integrating mixed income, integrating a mix of uses, integrating a mix of scales harmoniously.

And now I'll turn it back to Jeremy to close.