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70 Mulberry Reconstruction

New York, USA

º£½ÇÊÓƵ is providing multidisciplinary engineering services for the restoration of 70 Mulberry. Originally constructed as a school in 1893, 70 Mulberry developed into a vital cultural and community hub for Chinatown and Lower Manhattan.

The building came to house five community-based and cultural organizations before a major fire in January 2020 severely damaged the structure. Working with architect Grimshaw and the NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC), º£½ÇÊÓƵ is part of a team of experts sensitively restoring this much-loved historic building.

70 Mulberry, a historic building in New York City’s Chinatown, was devastated by fire in 2020.

º£½ÇÊÓƵ is providing multidisciplinary engineering services for the restoration of this beloved building.

The new building will be its own free-standing structure and will brace the surviving historic facades.

As a public project, it is required to meet LEED Gold standards, but it is exceeding this and tracking to meet LEED Platinum certification.

Challenge

We were engaged to deliver design and advisory insight around building services engineering (MEP), fire protection, structural engineering, facade engineering, and analytics, as well as vertical transportation.

As a result of the fire damage, the top three floors had to be demolished, while the two lower floors were retained. The adaptive reuse and restoration project comes with a range of challenges, not least the requirement to preserve the surviving parts of the 100-year-old unreinforced street-facing masonry facade and incorporate it successfully with the new structure.

The stair tower, at the corner of the building, is a distinctive local landmark, and will need to be carefully and sympathetically integrated with the reconstructed building. This element, with its spiral staircase, survived the fire relatively unscathed. However, it will need considered adaptation to ensure the staircase meets modern fire safety regulations and codes.

The client also has aspirations for the new building to deliver a sustainable and low carbon working environment for the charity and community organization tenants.

Solution

Once complete, a restored 70 Mulberry will return 51,000ft² to the five non-profits that operated in the building before the fire broke out, including the research and collections department of the Museum of Chinese in America. An additional 16,500ft² of community space will also be included in the program. The building will house spaces to support each tenant and the additional community use, including a lobby, community rooms, a multi-purpose gym-auditorium for sports, exhibits and events, a roof terrace, storage, and restrooms.

A key design consideration for this project is the need to create modernized spaces for contemporary and future needs while celebrating the building’s history as a source of pride for the local community. To that end, the restored design will include all new building systems as well as enhanced accessibility with three new elevators, three egress stairs, and numerous accessibility ramps. The new design will also preserve and restore portions of the existing historic facade, including the two-story street facades and the six-story stair tower facade at the corner of the building.

Our structural engineers initially conducted a detailed assessment of the surviving fabric, to establish what could be retained and incorporated into the new design. The new building will be its own free-standing structure, and will brace the historic facades, helping to stabilise the retained fabric

The exterior of the new building will feature a rain-screen system, which will mount a series of building-integrated photovoltaic solar panels, to maximize onsite renewable energy generation. This will help to meet the strict energy goals for public projects in New York City – which dictate a 50% energy reduction on a traditional baseline. Our team has conducted comprehensive digital energy analysis, to show that the design will meet these requirements.

An entirely new, highly efficient building services system will also play a key role in helping to lower the operational carbon footprint of the building.

The stair tower will be carefully retained and restored, with a new building code compliant staircase installed. Our experts helped to develop a design and scheduling of works that will allow reinforcing steel plates to be installed, before the load-bearing spiral staircase is removed and the new feature staircase is delivered.

Value

Our broad, multidisciplinary team of experts is helping to deliver the sympathetic restoration and recreation of this landmark building, with low carbon infrastructure and sustainability considerations at its heart.

As a public project, it is required to meet LEED Gold standards, but it is tracking to meet LEED Platinum certification.