This new single-family residence includes an artist studio and pool and is situated within a south-facing hill in Dutchess County, New York. The house is surrounded by lush, forested hills and woodlands creating the opportunity for distinct moments that blend landscape with human habitation.

At the core of this project is a commitment to stewardship of the natural environment, with materials and building systems chosen thoughtfully to meet rigorous sustainability goals. The home includes photovoltaic panels for energy generation and a geothermal heating and cooling system that utilizes the stable temperature of the earth’s subsurface to exchange heat. Primary interior finishes include locally sourced wood for both structure and finishes; concrete, stone, and wood floors; and metal kitchen cabinets. Tiered stone walls step up the hill from the pool to the home, and exposed, board-formed concrete retaining walls extend from the landscape to the interior, integrating the unique terrain and topography of the site with interior spaces.

Following the development of a strategic plan for Urban Dove to expand across all NYC boroughs, Marble Fairbanks designed a team charter school in Brooklyn as a renovation to an existing building. Unique to Urban Dove schools, each student is part of a team with their own coach who offers extra curriculum support and sports and fitness instruction. A gymnasium, training rooms, and extra fitness spaces complement traditional classroom learning, and access to outdoor fields is an important criterion for building sites. Various scenarios were developed within the strategic plan including for the school to be part of a new development project, to be the sole tenant in an existing building, or to be a tenant within a larger renovation project.

As part of our long-standing relationship with Urban Dove, we’ve worked on other design projects including the development of a graphic identity for the school that can be easily replicated in new spaces as Urban Dove expands. The recent renovation for their Brooklyn-based school included repurposing an auditorium into a gymnasium, incorporating the custom graphic identity which has been strategically applied in their Bronx school. The Urban Dove model has proved to be highly successful, and we continue to advise as they expand their services.

The Master Plan for Middlebury College Library envisions future projects and establishes prioritized and phased options for realizing these changes within the Davis Family Library and Armstrong Science Library, the two main libraries on Middlebury College’s campus. With the goal of aligning the library’s master plan goals with Middlebury’s strategic plan, we looked at Middlebury’s libraries as a network of related resources throughout campus.

The planning process included a series of focus groups, drop-in sessions, surveys, and campus-wide presentations to understand the current needs and future goals of each of the libraries and to establish a clear framework and shared principles for guiding the work. The master plan provides alternate future paths and multiple conceptual design options for more collaborative study space, expanded knowledge production spaces, and experimental studio and rich media spaces that support emergent pedagogy. These future paths align the libraries with Middlebury’s strategic framework, while also addressing library services, staff spaces, special collections, and stacks. The goal is for the master plan to be a living document, providing phased options for immediate, near-term, and long-term implementation for the libraries to redirect, reconfigure, and reallocate space as the institutional needs evolve.

The new Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center replaces an existing building with a 15,000sf community hub for environmental awareness, activism and education. The Greenpoint Library doubles the size of the previous building, providing significantly enlarged indoor and outdoor spaces to house expanded activities related to the exploration of the environment as well as everyday library use. The primary program elements are adult, young adult, and children reading rooms and collection spaces, and community spaces for regular library programming as well as for the Environmental Education Center. Lab spaces for interactive projects, a large community event space (which divides into two of the lab spaces), a lounge, small meeting rooms, and staff spaces are distributed on the two main floors.

The new Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center provides street level exterior green space, clear visual connections to interior activities, and two accessible green roofs on the upper floors. The plaza design offers the public an engaging civic space that demonstrates sustainability and reinterprets the environmental history of the region. Primary exterior building materials include custom sandblasted wood panels on the upper level and custom cast concrete on the lower level. The building will exceed required LEED goals, becoming a demonstration project for innovative approaches to sustainable design and a learning tool for the community.

Hunter College Library occupies seven floors plus two basement levels of the 22 story Hunter East building on 68th  Street & Lexington Avenue built in 1968. As with many university and college libraries today, the Hunter Library is being transformed by new information technologies, new storage and retrieval systems and an expanding role to provide a multitude of new services to the college community. This project involves a planning study of the entire library and the design of the top two floors. The general direction of the planning study is to relocate most of the collection to the lower basement levels in compact storage opening up the upper floors for more open, multi-functional uses.

The program for the seventh floor includes writing, math & science learning centers, a pre-professional advising suite, and a fixed seat presentation theater. The sixth floor includes an education library and dedicated space for the Macaulay Honors College. Flexible study, reading and social spaces are dispersed throughout both floors and serve to bring together students & faculty from different academic programs in a more casual and informal environment. A new open stair connects the two floors and also extends to a rooftop reading garden.

The primary design concept developed from an interest in giving a varied and unique sense of scale to different programs and activities. The original building was designed with a steel frame structure with deep beams in many locations resulting in limited floor-to-ceiling heights. In contrast to the uniform ceiling height typical of buildings of the era, our interest was to provide a range of ceiling heights. After a survey of the existing beam locations, we developed a ceiling design that varied in height from 7’-8” under deep beams to create more intimate areas to 12’-6” between beams to create more spacious areas.