STUDIO V Architecture is an award-winning architecture and urban design firm that seeks to reimagine the 21stcentury urban condition. We specialize in transit-oriented developments and waterfront urban design at all scales, and adaptive reuse projects that repurpose historic structures for public use.
We believe cities are the greatest artifacts of man, containers of collective myths and desires. STUDIO V explores and renews cities by creating contemporary architecture that incorporates and enriches history while expressing the ideals of our time.
Our designs combine old and new, integrate modern architecture with historic structures, and contrast craft and digital fabrication. Our research reveals historic layers of sites and structures while our architecture incorporates the radical recycling of industrial and historic artifacts including bridges, tanks, warehouses, buildings, former secret laboratories, and grain silos into surprising new uses and successful public spaces.
Our architecture addresses the forgotten spaces of cities, to support entrepreneurs, reconnect neighborhoods, and promote equity. Our expertise in resiliency, affordable housing, waterfront design, public parks, brownfield remediation, reinventing infrastructure, and cultural spaces is transforming former edges into the new centers of urban life.
Our architectural designs incorporate expressive lattice shells, cable-nets, state of the art sustainable materials, and innovative solutions to save endangered historic structures. Our innovative approaches to digital fabrication are transforming public spaces, from an award winning underground street in Japan, to the longest bar in North America, to a pedestrian passage on a bridge over Niagara Falls.
Located on a 1.5-acre lot one block from the Coney Island boardwalk, 1515 Surf Ave. is slated to open in 2024 and was hailed as the largest geothermal residential development when it was awarded the NYSERDA grant in 2021, a title that has since been passed to 1 Java St. Still, it was the first project of its kind in NYC’s history to begin using geothermal technology—and has led to the wave of development employing the similar systems.
Planting native trees, shrubs, and other fauna in a low-lying part of your property helps soak up rainwater, filter pollutants, and provide habitat for local polinators.
“There’s a beauty about native plantings, because they belong to a place, and part of the reason they belong to a place is that they are used to working within the environmental conditions of the place,” explains Jay Valgora, founder and principal at STUDIO V Architecture, which has experience with rain gardens and other environmental resiliency projects. He adds that native plantings are often more “appropriate because they’re more sustainable.”
A hundred years ago, the burgeoning Hunts Point neighborhood in the southeast Bronx had its own train stop, designed by Woolworth Building architect Cass Gilbert, on a new electric commuter railroad, the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway. After the railroad went bankrupt in the 1930s, the Hunts Point station was abandoned, and the area became increasingly industrial.
Casino gambling, a potent engine of wealth redistribution from the hopeful to the fortunate, is moving from a handful of dedicated sites into America's larger cities. With more states legalizing more forms of gambling and the casino sector responding robustly to competition from online betting, this type of entertainment has outgrown its traditional localized base culturally, economically, and physically. As New York joins Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other cities as sites of urban casinos, residents will soon discover how much the industry can change a neighborhood and perhaps how urban settings can change the industry.
The clarion call to fight climate change has rung far and wide since before the turn of the millenium, and enironmentally conscious architects and designers have answered. Rethinking the ways in which we design and construct buildings to be cleaner, more energy efficient and sustainable has resulted in measurable impascts in turning the global warming tide.