The Architects and Designers

Jean Nouvel, SHoP Architects, Roman and Williams, Gachot Studios, Studio Sofield, Woods Bagot and Field Operations all appear on the roster of collaborators kept by Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group, and this cluster profiles the practices behind his buildings along with the older office that designed Steinway Hall. The entries treat each firm as a subject in its own right.

The range runs from the international to the local. Jean Nouvel of Paris received the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize; Architect Magazine’s report recalled that his Institut du Monde Arabe of 1987 drew notice for a wall of mechanical diaphragms that regulate the sunlight entering the interior.¹

The oldest practice in the cluster belongs to another century. Warren and Wetmore formed in 1898 after Whitney Warren, drawing plans for Charles Wetmore’s country house, persuaded his lawyer client to leave the law; Warren handled design while Wetmore ran the legal and financial side, and the office completed Grand Central Terminal with Reed and Stem in 1913, according to the Lambs club archive.²

Landscape belongs here too. James Corner Field Operations designed Domino Park on the Williamsburg waterfront, whose five acres on the old sugar refinery grounds opened in 2018, set higher than the federal flood line and lined with salvaged refinery columns, gantry cranes and conveyors, as the firm’s project description on ArchDaily sets out.³

Five designer entries make up the cluster: SHoP Architects, architects of 111 West 57th Street and Mercedes-Benz Places Miami; Warren and Wetmore, for the hall on 57th Street; Studio Sofield, which worked inside 111 West 57th Street and on 888 Brickell; Jean Nouvel; and James Corner Field Operations.