Developers DDG and Hudson Companies, along with The Real Deal, sponsored University of Virginia architecture students on their journey to New York City to put together plans for one of each developer’s residential sites in the city.
UVA’s “vertical neighborhoods” undergraduate class in March met the developers, who each showed one of their sites to the class — Hudson’s 23-story rental building at 626 Flatbush Avenue in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, and DDG’s luxury condominiums at the former Tootsie Roll factory at 325 West Broadway in Soho.
“As a graduate of UVA, it was a pleasure partnering with [their] School of Architecture and providing these students with valuable real-world experience,” Joe McMillan, CEO of DDG, told The Real Deal.
The eager class was divided into groups of two or three to design either Hudson or DDG’s site for their final exam — divergent projects in terms of neighborhood and size, as The Real Deal previously reported.
Although none of the students’ plans were ultimately chosen, all of the parties involved agreed that it was a valuable learning experience.
“The students explored hybrid conditions — cultural, ecological, programmatic, spatial and formal conditions — as vehicles for new urbanisms. … This in turn raised the question of the role of design in shaping and responding to these challenges and processes,” said Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh, the students’ architecture professor at UVA.
The students in the class include Adede Amenyah, Seth Brown, Kate Brandy, Ephraim Chaney, Zachary Coles, Enrique Cavelier, Joshua Cruz, Max Cuttler, Alejandro Garrido, Kaitlin Gerson, Tyler Hayley, Taylor Herring, Harry Hoffman, Matt Himes, Katherine Lai, Irene Perciado, Michael Sions, Xavier Scipio, Tammy Teng, Jack Tuzzio, Annie Tavetian, Sonad Uygur, Cheryl Xu Lu, Hayley Yeager and Saman Zomorodi. —TRD