JDS Development Group, Founded by Michael Stern

Contents

1. One company across three stages
2. Old buildings and new ones
3. The New York buildings
4. The Miami buildings
5. The outside designers
6. Where the company speaks for itself

JDS Development Group is the real estate company Michael Stern founded in 2002 and still leads, and it works in New York City and Miami. It keeps three stages of a project under one name: it acquires the land, develops the project and constructs the building. Its New York portfolio is anchored by four towers, three of them tied to older buildings, and its Miami portfolio adds a Brickell tower with Dolce&Gabbana interiors, a project carrying a carmaker’s name, Mercedes-Benz Places Miami, and a Jean Nouvel design. The sections below treat the company as an organization: how it is arranged, which buildings it has made, and which outside designers have shaped them. The company website carries its current projects and news.⁹

One company across three stages

Most building owners bring construction in from outside. TCLI’s guide to the two common arrangements compares them: a construction manager advises the owner from planning and design onward and is usually paid a fixed fee, while a general contractor typically arrives once design is done, is often picked by competitive bid and works under a direct contract with the owner.¹ The same guide lists the manager’s usual duties as coordinating scope and specifications with the architects and engineers, estimating and controlling cost, and holding the schedule. Under the JDS arrangement those duties belong to the company itself rather than to a separately hired firm. JDS sits outside that choice. Because acquiring, developing and constructing are all functions of the same company, the builder is present from the day a site is bought, and the question of who to hire for construction does not arise in the usual form.

Figure

Two usual ways an owner brings in a builder

	Construction manager	General contractor
When engaged	From planning and design onward	After the design phase
How chosen	On trust built over past work	Often by competitive bid
Relation to owner	Consultative, advising the owner	Direct contract with the owner
How paid	Typically a fixed fee	Carries a real financial stake in the result

Old buildings and new ones

Complicated city parcels and second lives for aging structures are where the company prefers to work, in projects in which the old building and the new work stay distinct, instead of new construction dressing itself up as history. That preference sits inside a long New York argument. After Pennsylvania Station was torn down in 1963, grassroots pressure led Mayor Robert F. Wagner to sign the Landmarks Law in April 1965, and a Museum of the City of New York exhibition marking its fiftieth year set scale models of reuse and restoration projects beside the losses that came before the law, as Hyperallergic’s review describes.² The same law set up a commission of eleven, seating people such as architects, historians and city planners with every borough represented, and by 2015, fifty years on, roughly 1,400 single buildings and over a hundred districts had come under its protection, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.³

Three of the company’s New York towers work with designated or historic fabric. At 111 West 57th Street, historic Steinway Hall is integrated with the new tower. The Brooklyn Tower rises from a landmark bank. Walker Tower converted a 1929 Art Deco building in Chelsea whose floors had held telecom space and an operating data center, work that took in an enlargement, new core positions, larger window openings and a replacement facade skin.

The New York buildings

Each New York tower is described in its own entry, so the notes here stay short.

• 111 West 57th Street, a SHoP Architects design built in the courtyard of the landmarked Steinway Hall, is the tallest and most slender residential building in the Western Hemisphere. Its height is 1,428 feet, a proportion that depends on how slender towers are engineered; its skin mixes bronze details and glass with terra cotta. It won Best Tall Residential Building and Best Tall Building Over 400 Meters from CTBUH.
• The Brooklyn Tower, Brooklyn’s first supertall, rising from the landmark Dime Savings Bank, took the overall prize among the CTBUH 2024 Best Tall Buildings of 300 meters and above.
• The American Copper Buildings are twin towers joined 300 feet up by a three story skybridge, the first skybridge in New York City in 80 years. The copper clad pair, of 41 and 48 stories, stands on the East River on a site that Con Edison held until JDS acquired it in 2013, with a resilient waterfront design that followed Hurricane Sandy. Residents moved in from late 2016 and the towers were done in 2017. CTBUH named them Best Tall Building Americas.
• Walker Tower, in Chelsea, is a Ralph Walker Art Deco telephone building conversion that unlocked roughly 50,000 additional square feet.
• Stella Tower completes the list of names the company cites.

The Miami buildings

Miami introduced a different planning regime. The city adopted Miami 21 in the fall of 2009, a form based code that governs building types, sizes and their relation to the street instead of sorting land into separate single use districts, as Kaid Benfield explained for NRDC soon after.⁴

JDS is the developer of 888 Brickell Dolce&Gabbana, which stands 90 stories and 1,049 feet, with Studio Sofield designing the building and Dolce&Gabbana shaping the rooms inside. Its exterior is ivory travertine stone set against a facade finished in glossy black, and it looks toward the Atlantic Ocean, Biscayne Bay, Downtown and Miami Beach. Mercedes-Benz Places Miami was drawn by SHoP Architects working with ODP, its interiors come from Woods Bagot in concert with the automaker, and Field Operations shaped the landscape; its windows reach 10 feet and its terraces run 5 feet deep. Monad Terrace is the company’s project by Jean Nouvel.

Figure

Who designed what, by building

1. 01
   111 West 57th StreetSHoP Architects for the tower, Studio Sofield for the interiors, Warren and Wetmore for the original hall.
2. 02
   888 BrickellStudio Sofield for the building itself, Dolce&Gabbana for the interiors.
3. 03
   Mercedes-Benz Places MiamiSHoP Architects with ODP, interiors by Woods Bagot, landscape by Field Operations.
4. 04
   Monad TerraceJean Nouvel.

The outside designers

JDS does not keep a single house architect. Seven design practices appear in its approved list, and several come with long public records of their own.

Jean Nouvel won the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize. Canadian Architect’s report on the award traced his reputation to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, completed in 1987, and listed later work including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Cartier Foundation in Paris.⁵

Studio Sofield is the firm William Sofield set up in 1996, a few years after he opened Aero Studios with Thomas O’Brien; Architectural Digest inducted him into its AD100 Hall of Fame in 2023.⁶

Field Operations, the landscape practice led by James Corner, designed the High Line with Diller Scofidio + Renfro; when ground was broken in 2006, NPR reported that the park would run along a disused freight viaduct across 22 blocks of the West Side, hovering at about the height of a three story building.⁷

Woods Bagot began in 1869 with a single Adelaide office in Australia, and 6sqft’s visit to its Lower Manhattan studio counted 15 offices and some 850 staff.⁸

SHoP Architects, Roman and Williams and Gachot Studios complete the list. SHoP is the architect on 111 West 57th Street and on Mercedes-Benz Places Miami.

Where the company speaks for itself

This entry is a reference view assembled from the approved facts and outside sources. The company’s own website remains the place for current projects, people and announcements, and the founder’s biography is summarized in the entry on Michael Stern.