Imagining a New Crown in Brooklyn
A former Bjarke Ingels architect and émigré from Russia on his design for a Crown Heights site.
Anton Bashkaev, Founder, Bashkaev Studio. Image courtesy of Anton Bashkaev
The pandemic and its aftermath have shifted the focus of traditional architectural programs, resulting in a more flexible and diverse approach. Office, retail and residential components seem to intertwine more often nowadays, as mixed-use development gains popularity.
Architect Anton Bashkaev has been living in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights since 2019. Ever since he moved to the neighborhood, he started contemplating the potential of an empty infill site in the area, piecing together a project that would connect not only the three local communities in the neighborhood, but would also work as a multi-generational and multi-functional building.
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The community-driven concept, which he named Crown House, is all about education, collaboration and flexibility. Maximizing the potential of the spaces within, his vision would improve neighborhood life, while also serving as an important educational hub, he told Multi-Housing News.
A former lead designer at Bjarke Ingels Group, Bashkaev has collaborated with clients such as Google, Hyperloop and Tishman Speyer. Last year, he founded his own design company, Bashkaev Studio. And although he is currently working on several different projects—such as a yoga retreat upstate and a jazz club in the city—he is always on the lookout for more mixed-use urban projects like Crown House. Here’s what he told Multi-Housing News about his vision for 285 Kingston Ave.
What inspired Crown House and why did you choose this particular site?
Bashkaev: The start of the war against Ukraine made my family and friends flee from Russia. It made me look at New York with different eyes and feel anew incredible gratitude for the opportunities it gave me since I arrived here as an architectural intern eight years ago.
Living in Crown Heights and being a part of this community for five years, I wanted to imagine what could become a love note to this place, expressed in my professional language of architecture. That’s when I stumbled upon a vacant site in the very heart of the neighborhood and realized it could be it.
Crown House is a proposal designed for an educational organization of one of the local communities that owns the site. Its future will be defined by its members and stakeholders. As far as I know, there are no other proposals at the moment, so we are happy to open the conversation for this unique site.
What are the pillars of your community-driven concept and how would it benefit the neighborhood?
Bashkaev: As a member of the Crown Heights community, I see both challenges and promises. There are three major groups: Hasidic Jews and Afro Caribbean Americans—who have some historical tensions since the 90s—as well as young professionals from all over the world, adding another layer of social complexity. Being connected to all three groups shows me how much potential for friendship and successful collaborations they have.
The main focuses of Crown House are educational and recreational. The ground floor is thematically divided into three parts, inspired by the three communities: a Jamaican café, a Hasidic education center and an international-style bookstore in between. All of the spaces can be entered separately and have lateral passages connecting them.
How do the different uses blend together and how much room for flexibility is there at Crown House?
Bashkaev: It is crucial to turn a building from a rigid function into a flexible environment that can create rules for interconnected spaces and allow the community to use them according to their needs. For example, levels 2 and 3 of the education center can be used as a Yeshiva school during the day and classrooms for the wider community to book after hours. These spaces can be used for foreign language study groups, musical instrument learning sessions, diabetes prevention classes, along with many other live educational interactions for groups of all ages.
The backyard can also be used by all the ground-floor programs as an extra seating area for Café, a book reading club for Bookshop, or an outdoor classroom for the Education Center. Moreover, these three different programs can be open to each other, creating a unique synergy to encourage people to communicate and interact with one another.
What does the residential component of this community-driven concept consist of?
Bashkaev: Crown House has three levels of residential units, providing temporary units for overseas students and studio apartments for visiting lecturers. They belong to the Education Center and can be accessed separately after hours.
The top floor is the student lounge, which can also be used for external symposiums and community events on the weekend. This allows Crown House to be economically viable for the owners 24/7 and sustain dynamics that are beneficial to the wider community.
How has your experience with Bjarke Ingels Group, one of the most innovative architecture firms in the world, shaped your architectural vision and implicitly, this concept?
Bashkaev: I love BIG and Bigsters to the point that I have married one. But to be serious, Bjarke Ingels is a pioneer in humanizing modern architecture, allowing people to step into the play with their environment.
User experience has become more important than abstract ideas that have so often possessed the masters of the 20th century, leaving the residents and neighbors to deal with the gloomy consequences of their genius.
BIG made buildings feel like quirky friends, rather than straight-face strangers. Another side that inspired me in their approach and influenced the Crown House design is the rigorous methodology of the form-giving process. The geometry has to be impeccable and tell the story of the project without an external narrator.
In the case of Crown House, it is the unifying language of Brooklyn Bay windows that identifies the underlying program through the push and pull movements of the façade. Using this common grammar, the commercial, educational, residential and lounge spaces of Crown House each has their unique voice.
What trends are you seeing in U.S. design at the moment? Can you predict how they will evolve?
Bashkaev: I can only give a very limited outlook into this area. It seems like people start to pay much more attention to their immediate environments—social, cultural and natural—as their economic ties become more digital.
The understanding of well-being now is completer and more nuanced, while some long-overlooked factors are stepping back into the equation.
The pandemic has tested relationships of the large-scale companies with their employees. Smaller companies, operating fully online, attract a new generation of professionals, who sense the lack of individuality and humanity in conventional workspaces. To retain them, companies will have to work on their spatial environment and make sure they can provide a salutary sense of community that could not be achieved online. Flexibility, humanity and connectivity are the future rules of this design game.
