A new 28-story office tower, dubbed One Grand, has been pitched to take over an empty lot on Grand Street between Varick Street and Avenue of the Americas.
Taconic Partners and Nuveen Real Estate unveiled updated renderings for its proposed office tower last month. The designs were drawn up by SHoP Architects — the firm behind Brooklyn’s curvilinear weathered steel Barclays Center.
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New York City will use the base of the building for a 444-seat public school. The office portion begins about 100 feet up and it will have plenty of outdoor space for future tenants.
The south side of every other floor will feature double-height loggia terraces — covered outdoor areas ranging from 900 square feet to 4,500 square feet built into the tower’s floor plate — and the views from those floors won’t be anything to scoff at.
From that vantage point, the Hudson River will be visible, and the triangular Duarte Square directly below will give the tower some breathing room.
“I think you’re going to see best-in-class buildings continuing to build on this idea of indoor-outdoor space for offices,” said Gregg Pasquarelli, a founding principal at SHoP. “It was always thought of as just a residential amenity.”
The property occupies a block at the southern edge of Hudson Square at the junction with Tribeca. For that space, SHoP designed a rhomboid building with a lightweight steel façade that maximizes air and light.
“It has texture, and it has verticality,” Pasquarelli said. “It’s metal and glass, but it’s got this feeling of solidity and mass that connects the base where the school is to the slender tower that goes up above.”
The development possibilities of the .75-acre full-block site have been fettered by zoning restrictions for most of the last century. The property was part of the city’s printing press hub in a neighborhood where “nothing connects with anything else, and everything looks as if it might disappear overnight,” as the New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm wrote in 1994.
But Trinity Church Wall Street’s 2013 rezoning of Hudson Square unleashed its potential.
Nuveen and Taconic — who have previously partnered on developments totaling well over 2 million square feet in New York City — entered into contract with Trinity Church in 2019 to purchase the ground lease of One Grand, where the previous building was demolished in 2007 and the lot has been vacant ever since. The land is part of a $6.1 billion Lower Manhattan portfolio Trinity has owned for three centuries.
It’s unclear how much Nuveen and Taconic shelled out for the ground lease.
The firms have filed permits to begin foundation work at the site. Meanwhile, a JLL leasing team led by Peter Riguardi is working to secure an anchor tenant. They hope to fetch top prices.
“We are crafting a green commercial office space and wellness-focused talent draw in the midst of the city’s best culture, dining, entertainment, retail, and transportation,” said Taconic co-CEO Charles Bendit in a statement.
Abigial Nehring can be reached at anehring@commercialobserver.com.
