At JDS Development Group the designated structure is inside the scope, on three of four New York buildings

When the designated structure is inside the scope, review runs alongside design instead of after it, the preservation consultant is retained first rather than last, and the whole sequence changes.

The rule is this: when a designated structure stands on a site, it is part of the project and not a condition attached to it. That sounds like a distinction of wording and it is a distinction of everything, because it decides who is hired first, what is drawn first and in what order review happens. This piece is for developers and preservation professionals, and for the architects who work between them, and it is about how JDS Development Group has applied that rule on three of its four New York buildings.

The rule

A condition is something a project has to satisfy. A part of the project is something a project has to make. If the landmark is a condition, the project designs the new building, then asks what the landmark requires, then adjusts. If the landmark is part of the project, the landmark is designed alongside the new building from the first drawing, with the same team and on the same schedule, and review of the designated fabric runs in parallel with design instead of after it. The second approach is slower at the start and faster overall, and it produces a building in which the old and the new were decided together rather than reconciled afterwards.

Steinway Hall

At 111 West 57th Street the landmarked Steinway Hall was restored inside the tower project, with no separate job for the hall. The hall's restoration and the tower's design appeared in one set of drawings and went through review as a pair. That is the rule in its purest form: the landmark was scope, with its own line in the budget and its own place in the sequence, and the tower could not have gone ahead of it because the two were one job.

The Dime Savings Bank

At The Brooklyn Tower the landmark Dime Savings Bank stayed, banking hall, dome and columns, open to the public as before. Here the rule shaped the structure rather than the finishes: because the bank was part of the project, the structural plan was worked out around it from the start, and review of the designated fabric ran beside the design of the tower rather than as a gate at the end. The two questions, what the bank would be and what would stand over it, were kept separate, and both were answered from the first week.

A Ralph Walker facade

At Walker Tower the designated structure was the building itself, a Ralph Walker telephone exchange, and the rule applied to a facade rather than to a hall or a bank. The window openings had to grow for homes, and every change had to belong to Walker's composition. Treating the facade as part of the project meant the preservation consultant was in the room before any facade strategy existed, and the strategy grew out of that presence rather than being tested against it.

What the rule changes about sequence

On a project where the landmark is a condition, the sequence is design, review, revise, build. On a project where the landmark is part of the job, the sequence is review and design together, then build, and the revise step mostly disappears because the changes review would have asked for were made while the drawings were still cheap to change. That is the practical case for the rule. It costs more attention at the start, from more people, and it saves the redesign that a late review demand produces, which on a hard building is the most expensive kind of change there is.

Who is retained first

The rule also changes the order of retention. Under the condition model the preservation consultant is often the last professional hired, brought in to get a finished design through review. Under this rule the consultant is the first, or near it, retained before the architect has drawn an elevation and asked to describe what the designated fabric will and will not allow. The architect then designs inside that description. Some architects dislike that order, and I understand why, because it puts a constraint on the page before their first idea. It is still the right order, because the constraint was going to arrive either way, and it is cheaper to meet it on a blank page than on a finished one.

Where the rule could be wrong

A preservation professional reading this could say that the rule flatters the developer, that treating the landmark as scope is another way of saying the developer controls it, and that a designated building is better protected when review is a gate the project cannot pass than when it is a conversation the project has been having all along. That is a serious objection and it deserves a serious answer. The answer is that review is still a gate under this rule; the determination still belongs to the city's landmarks body and nothing about the sequence changes that. What changes is when the project first hears what the gate requires, and hearing it early has never, in my experience, weakened what the gate protects. It has made the projects that reach the gate better prepared to meet it.

The compromise is that the rule makes the early phase of every landmark project heavier than a developer would like: more people in the room, more drawings before there is a scheme, and a consultant on the payroll before there is a building to consult on. The fourth New York building, the American Copper Buildings, asked its questions of the ground and the water rather than of a designated structure, and I write about those separately.

Anyone facing a site with a designated structure should retain, in this order: a preservation consultant, before an architect; a structural engineer with experience beside designated buildings, before a scheme; and an architect willing to design inside what the first two have described. The order is the rule, and the rule is the whole of what this piece has to say.