The designers for the redevelopment of properties on South Elmwood and West Tupper Street got to meet the neighbors Friday night and talk about some preliminary ideas for a ground-up mix used development there.
The project would see existing structures – a two-story commercial building, the garage from the former Sammy’s Auto Repair, and several houses – demolished and replaced with an ensemble of three-story buildings with 40 residential units and 12,000 square feet of ground floor retail and restaurant space.
The presentation of design concepts was led by Jay Valgora, principal of Studio V of New York City, whose team is partnering with local firms Silvestri Architects PC and Kulback’s Inc. construction on behalf of developer 147 w.Tupper LLC.
Valgora emphasized that what he presented was “not a finished design” and the meeting was “the beginning of the process.” But the design ideas he offered were distinctive and seemed to win favor with a crowd of about forty meeting at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
Some of the highlights:
- An intention not to fill the full zoning envelope but to create a building massing that produces an articulated structure “tectonically” – through the shape of the walls – rather than through applications to the building surface.
- An idea to break the building mass in half and create a walk-through from South Elmwood to interior space on the west side of the property.
- A stated preference for quality historic materials like Roman brick and terra cotta to express contemporary designs.
- Smaller retail spaces – less than 2,400 square feet each – to accommodate locally-owned shops and restaurants.
- Forty-two parking spaces underneath the buildings and 32 more in a surface parking lot on the southwest corner of the property with trees for shade and bio-swales for groundwater recharge.
The development and design team has yet to begin the approval process with the City of Buffalo. Owner Chris Wan, President of 147 w.Tupper LLC, expects the project will be largely self-financed.
“After lots of advance testing etc etc; we have already gotten NYSDEC approval to ‘enter the Brownfield Cleanup Program’ and have begun the process of remediation,” the development team noted. “It is a complicated process.”
Valgora has important local connections. He grew up in Hamburg and has been back in town working with Rick Smith on master planning and design for Silo City. He studied architecture at Cornell and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Yang owns a number of residential properties in the neighborhood including on Trinity and Tracy Streets, South Elmwood, and Johnson Park.
The give and take with the neighbors was low-key including concerns about parking, noisy HVAC equipment, difficult traffic patterns on Tupper Street (which was the scene of a recent house-ramming), advice on snow removal, and the fate of mature trees on the Trinity Place side of the property.
It was also suggested that a creamy gray brick shown on one of the early sketches was perhaps too much like the Buffalo winter sky. But nobody got defensive.
Lead image: Jay Valgora with preliminary sketch of massing concept for the project.