It’s no surprise that, when New York chose to build a garage for 150 garbage trucks in an upscale residential neighborhood, the community rebelled. But the 425,000-square-foot facility now standing just north of TriBeCa, beside expensive condo buildings, is sheathed in fritted glass and aluminum louvers that pixilate its long facades. And it is accompanied by a one-of-a-kind salt-storage shed—a poured-in-place concrete, 6,300-squarefoot structure worthy of Tadao Ando that draws the eye away from the larger building. Residents who once sued to block the sanitation-department facility now seem happy with the gentle giant.

The project was the result of a decision by the Bloomberg administration not to relegate the garage to a blighted neighborhood, which could have been the path of least resistance. Cities, after all, often place noxious facilities in places where land values and residents’ political influence are low. “But there’s a question of equity,” says Feniosky Peña-Mora, the city’s Commissioner of the Department of Design and Construction, who believes every neighborhood should bear its weight in infrastructure. (A Columbia engineering professor who has written more than 200 scholarly articles, Peña-Mora became commissioner while the building was already under way.)

The success of the garage and salt shed is a tribute to two firms that have a history of choosing public projects over better-paying, and almost certainly less taxing, commissions: Dattner Architects and WXY Architecture + Urban Design. Dattner’s civic improvements include a spectacular new subway station near the Hudson Yards development (2015; see page 112), two sections of the Hudson River Park (2007), and the Bronx Library Center (2006); WXY’s credits include recreation buildings in the Hudson River park (2014), security booths for Brooklyn’s Metrotech Center (2010), and post-Sandy boardwalks in Rockaway (2015). Their experience with the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), and other bureaucratic minefields, prepared them for a decade-long process that would probably have been the undoing of other firms, notes WXY principal Claire Weisz.

That process began when the Department of Sanitation agreed to close an existing garage on the Gansevoort Peninsula in the West Village, slated to become part of the Hudson River Park. It chose a site on the far west edge of Soho for a new garage that would be shared by three sanitation districts (1, 2, and 5), each of which wanted a space to call its own. The building also needed to accommodate 5,000 tons of salt, used for de-icing roadways. In 2005, the department issued a Request For Proposal that emphasized design. Given the size of the project, Dattner and WXY decided to associate as a team to compete for the job.

During design development, the program shifted several times, says Dattner’s principal in charge, Paul Bauer. First, the city agreed to sell part of the ground floor of the planned building to UPS as an industrial condominium. Second, a site just south of the building, large enough for a stand-alone salt shed, became available. And then, during value engineering, the height of the garage was reduced, to 120 feet, prompting redesigns of its facades. As the plans evolved, they were reviewed by the city’s Public Design Commission, whose members, including architect James Stewart Polshek and engineer Guy Nordenson, challenged them to make the salt shed sculptural and to soften the look of the garage.

As built, the garage contains five levels—the first for UPS truck parking and sanitation-department ingress and egress; the second for small-vehicle parking; the third, with 30-foot ceilings, for truck-washing and repair facilities and one garage; and the fourth and fifth, with 24-foot ceilings, for the remaining garages. (“Front-of-house” functions—lobby, meeting rooms, locker rooms, etc., totaling about 55,000 square feet—are grouped at the south end of the building, facing TriBeCa and the salt shed.) The cavernous garages and the 40-foot-wide ramps that serve them are bright, following a lighting plan by Domingo Gonzalez Associates, and odorfree, thanks to a powerful HVAC system. The building was awarded LEED Gold status. 

From the outside, the interior functions are obscured by metal louvers, 30 inches on center and 28 inches deep. As a result, the industrial-scale structure doesn’t look industrial to passing motorists. Indeed, it seems of a piece with Renzo Piano’s Whitney Museum a mile north, and even more so with Piano’s massive Jerome L. Greene Science Center for Columbia University, nearing completion at 125th Street and Broadway, with its glass facades and repeating metal fins. All told, the garage cost the city $250 million and the salt shed $21 million.

Success has 1,000 parents, and this building, seen as a model for future public projects, is no exception. Which ideas came from which firm, and which were suggested by the Public Design Commission, or by the client, may remain a mystery. But that’s the nature of collaboration. What matters is that, as Bauer says, “If either office had worked on it alone, the result would have been very different.”