In Far Rockaway, Queens lies a bouillabaisse of Cape Cod bungalows, Victorians, resort hotels, and Mitchell-Lama towers, whose slablike masses rise out of the sandy peninsula like the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In downtown Far Rockaway, Beach Green Dunes III, a new residential building by Bernheimer Architecture, shimmers in the sun next to an elevated subway track that connects the historic beach community with the rest of New York City. The fully electric building delivers 146 affordable units and denotes the third phase in a masterplan led by L+M Development Partners, Bluestone Group, and Triangle Equities to build a net-zero neighborhood in Far Rockaway. Local Office Landscape and Urban Design, a Brooklyn firm cofounded by Walter Meyer and Jennifer Bolstad, was the landscape architect and Steven Winter Associates the sustainability consultant.
In 2012, downtown Far Rockaway was decimated by Superstorm Sandy. The next year, AIA New York hosted “For a Resilient Rockaway,” a competition to reimagine Arverne East, a section of the area that had been particularly hard hit. City officials were scratching their heads over what to do, asking: Was new construction in a flood-prone area a good investment? If so, how could rising sea levels be mitigated architecturally?
Will Sheridan, a principal at Bernheimer Architecture, told AN: “Everyone was faced with the question of what is resiliency in this context? Is this a place where we should be building at all?” Planners opted to leverage the peninsula, and downtown Far Rockaway was rezoned in 2017, allowing for higher-density buildings like Beach Green Dunes III, which would be located near the Beach 36th Street MTA Station.
Bernheimer Architecture joined the Beach Green Dunes III project team in 2018, after Curtis + Ginsberg Architects designed the two other projects in the masterplan. “We were given this sort of rhombus-shaped site underneath a subway line that included a transit plaza set aside for public space, a no-go zone for development,” said Andrew Bernheimer, founding principal. “The development team’s goal was to build a building that was much less burdensome on public infrastructure. So, it has a significant array of PV panels, and the building runs on geothermal heating and cooling. It takes advantage of the local subsurface conditions to help run the building on a lot less energy than a typical building. It’s going to be Passive House certified.”
In anticipation of another natural disaster, Bernheimer Architecture and Local Office also implemented flood-proof designs like storm swales, porous paving, rain gardens, and green roofs. The first floor is lifted 6 feet above street level, and mechanical equipment and other essential services are raised above the flood elevation, Bernheimer elaborated. Every facade is public facing, a rarity in New York City. Bernheimer Architecture took this into account and conceived a well-insulated, tightly sealed thermal envelope with high-performance windows, doors, and storefronts. The wings are expressed in stucco that ranges from dark charcoal to light gray. Two distinct rainscreen systems were employed: Corrugated, perforated anodized aluminum paneling shields the parking garage and service spaces, and fiber-cement panels cling to the first floor.
Sheridan called the parti a “jackknife plan” that responds to the irregular, triangular plot. Two angled wings meet at the site’s northeast corner, where the main core and lobby are located. “Once this general plan configuration was set,” Sheridan continued, “we calibrated the massing and designed a double-loaded corridor wing that rises 8 stories. This bulk of the massing has views south of Jamaica Bay. The wing on Beach Channel Drive is lower, at 4 stories. This wing addresses and relates to the adjacent one- and two-family buildings across the street, connecting it to the neighborhood.”
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