The Atrium At Sumner, Brooklyn, New York
In 2015, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) started a 10-year initiative, called NextGeneration, to expand and improve affordable housing options in the city, including senior housing.
A proposal for The Atrium at Sumner, an affordable, 190-unit, independent living senior community, was selected into the program after a competitive bid process. Construction on the $132 million project started in 2021, and the community opened in May in the Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy) neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y.
The proposal was submitted by joint venture Sumner Senior Partners, made up of New York-based architecture and design firm Studio Libeskind; owner and developer Urban Builders Collaborative (UBC; New York), the development affiliate of Lettire Construction Corp.; co-developer Selfhelp Realty Group (New York); and senior services operator RiseBoro Community Partnership (Brooklyn). RiseBoro also partnered with a Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) Center provider to bring urgent care services to the community.
Exterior design for The Atrium at Sumner
The exterior of the new community features a white, cast-in-place stucco-like façade with a geometric shape that juts and bends at unconventional angles.
The façade material, color and shape were chosen to create visual interest by breaking up the massing, so that there isn’t a continuous elevation along the street edge, and to contrast with the more traditional, red-brick buildings in the neighborhood, says Carla Swickerath, lead designer at Studio Libeskind.
“It gives the feeling of it being more of a sculpture in the round than just another extruded box,” she says.
Atrium brings natural light into 11-story community
Inside, a defining feature of the community is the glass-ceiling, 10-story atrium at its center, which Studio Liebskind put into the proposal to set it apart from the other submissions being considered by NYCHA.
Swickerath says the focus on the atrium was to emphasize natural light in an 11-story building and to create “the heart of the community,” where residents can connect with each other as well as with nature.
Starting on the second floor, the atrium rises up through the building. Interior corridors connecting the residences feature windows that offer views into the atrium and allow natural light to spread throughout the community.
“The atrium is also bringing in the weather,” Swickerath says. “As residents step out of their apartments, they’re going to see if it’s cloudy or sunny or raining. That sense of lightness and illuminating the experience within the building was critical for us.”
Creating a gathering space for senior residents
Matthew Gross, managing director and partner at Urban Builders Collaborative, says the atrium was likely a big part of the decision by NYCHA to accept the proposal in the Next Generation program, which aims not just to expand affordable housing, but also to make it more attractive to residents and communities.
The Atrium at Sumner design offered more than “just another big, red-brick box,” he says. The atrium itself, with its access to greenery, oxygen, and light, “is a sort of Shangri-La in the middle of Bed-Stuy,” he says.
A group that does the landscaping is creating a program for the senior residents to help maintain and work on the greenery and garden in the atrium, Swickerath says.
“Those kinds of ideas really enhance some of our initial instincts,” she says, noting that even in the corridors on every level, there are benches where residents can gather and chat while looking out into the atrium.
“Hopefully it really helps to animate the lives of the residents and the building itself and to provide opportunities for those moments of repose and meetings to happen,” she says.
Robert McCune is senior editor at Healthcare Design magazine and can be reached at [email protected].
