Bjarke Ingels Tapped for Harlem Residential Building

Harlem is getting 200 units of housing designed by the Danish architecture firm that designed the West 57 pyramid by the West Side Highway.

According to the New York Post, Long Island-based Blumenfeld Development has hired Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) for the project on East 125th Street. They are currently looking at preliminary sketches but have no final renderings to release yet.

The project is expected to be over 200,000 square feet and 20 percent of the units will be affordable. The site is opposite the Gotham Plaza where the Department of Motor Vehicles resides, between Lexington and Third Avenues.

Blumenfeld Development Group specializes in big-box retail and office space, and has constructed the East River Plaza in East Harlem with Forest City Ratner; a retail, industrial, and grocery store space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the Bulova Retail Plaza in East Elmhurst.

Copenhagen and New York based BIG took office space in Chelsea in 2011. 

BIG’s unique 600-unit pyramid design for the Durst Organization was approved late last year after the developer’s plans for a high-tech data center, school, and hotel had fallen through. 

The Durst Organization is hoping to finance the block-long pyramid project through the EB-5 visa program which grants green cards to foreign citizens investing $500,000 per family to certain projects in the United States.