Project Overview
The New Brunswick Gateway Transit Village is a new and unconventional interpretation of a residential urban center, offering people a place to live, work, and shop in a central locale without relying on automobiles. The new development features a mixed-use, transit-oriented design consisting of a 24-story building with a new pedestrian walkway adjacent to a New Jersey Transit/Amtrak station.
At its core is a 10-story precast concrete parking structure with 697 parking spaces topped by a 14-story, steel-frame and hollow-core residential tower. The tower holds 150 apartments and 42 condos. The structure is surrounded by offices and a series of street-level commercial spaces.
Precast Solution
Initially, the designers considered a thin-brick facade to match other parts of the structure, but later they switched to exposed concrete for the podium, which lent the building an minimalist elegance while also helping to speed construction and reduce costs. The decision to use high-strength, densely reinforced walls reduced field labor by concentrating the load in fewer walls, thereby yielding a more economical design.
The majority of the parking structure was cast in a standard buff architectural mix and finished with a light sandblast. Simple reveals in a rectangular pattern bring scale to the horizontal spandrels and complement the openings between them on the way to the upper stories, creating a light and airy structure that fits easily with the surrounding architecture. |