GLUCK+

“The New York Junior Tennis & Learning’s new facility isn’t just a state-of-the-art venue for players, it’s also a valuable resource for the community.”

“Tennis lovers of all backgrounds converge at this socially conscious Bronx complex, comprising 22 courts and a glass-and-steel clubhouse. Terraced into the earth, the center operates as the flagship for New York Junior Tennis & Learning—a nonprofit offering free lessons and tutoring to underserved youth. On any given day, these kids can be found practicing their backhand or perfecting their footwork alongside other members of the local community. In the center’s first year alone, some 7,000 children and 1,000 adults used the facility, with 6,000 hours of court time provided to youth in need. Now that’s what we call a strong serve.”

“Engaging contractors early in a design process can resolve apparent mismatches between budget and programme and even enrich the design. But there are further benefits when this cooperation is followed through, with architects overseeing construction from a fully informed perspective -- solving rather than creating problems for builders. Stacie Wong, a principal at New York design-build practice GLUCK+, explains.”

“One of the city’s best new works of public architecture sounds like a perk for the country club set. And it is. Partly. Tucked into Crotona Park in the Bronx, the Cary Leeds Center for Tennis & Learning is anchored by a modest two-story concrete-and-steel clubhouse, all sleek surfaces and sharp angles, overlooking a competition-worthy pair of exhibition courts.”

“Bridge, which is nearing completion at Second and Race Streets in Old City, is the first of the recent crop of high-rise apartments to beat the odds. The $65 million design exudes something rarely seen in Philadelphia: a bit of design swagger. Its four-story podium shimmies down Race Street. The tower twists and shouts before kicking up its heels at the corner of Second Street. This building has rhythm.”

“’GLUCK+ is a very specific model,’ Kaplan says. […] ‘We have separate entities, but there are no divisions in terms of the creative process. The same team members work as developers, architects and construction managers.’”

“Nomadic Newark school gets a lesson in offsite construction. Not for profit developer Build With Purpose turned to New York firm GLUCK+ to conceive a design solution that could beat the clock within a constrained budget.”

“Fact or fiction, it is a common perception that the design and construction process is plagued with problems: cost and schedule overruns, under-detailed design drawings, shoddy workmanship, disputes, and litigation. Some architects have been pursuing a remedy for this fraught situation--the project delivery method known as design-build. Until recently, most practitioners were reluctant to be too involved in construction. But that may be changing, with new approaches that make design-build a more viable alternative--one that gives the architect more control over the building process and the completed project.”

“GLUCK+ for taking control of the entire building process. With Architect Led Design Build, Peter Gluck and his team ensure quality and efficiency from idea to execution by seeing a building through the entire process of design and construction.”

“Sometimes we talk about architect-led design-build as a strategy to regain control over the building process, but ‘control’ can conjure up a desire for complete power. The control we’re interested in is instead the ability to follow the clients’ interests and the conceptual underpinnings of a project through to completion.”

“This is why single-source responsibility can be advantageous to all parties involved. We hold both contracts: we’re the architect and the builder, with two distinct legal entities under one roof. We take all the design and construction information. There is still the potential, however, that even in one firm you could have designers that are just designing and contractors that are just building. Indeed that doesn’t address the real problem when designers still lack the knowledge of how things go together. The key in architect-led design-build is continuity of the players.

At our firm the people who design and conceive the architecture are the same people who have had experience in the field, and they will be there to see it all the way through. For us, the knowledge sets have to be not just in the same team but within each individual.”

“When architect Peter Gluck built his first prefabricated project, it was for a small cluster of vacation condos in Vermont. Nearly four decades later, he’s returned to the technique with a highly urban application--and a place in New York architectural history. The Stack, a seven-story, mid-cost apartment tower in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood, is the first prefabricated residential project ever undertaken in the city.”

15th Edition

“Those who have a better working knowledge of how buildings are actually built will have greater control of their product and their profits, and will be able to deliver a better quality product.”

“A clutch of city commissioners joined architects, among them Peter L. Gluck, Ted Smith, Deborah Gans, Rafi Segal and Mr. Kirschenfeld, who proposed new housing models. Their brief was to ignore existing codes and regulations that got in the way of innovative design but to stay real: to focus on what could actually happen in terms of safe, economical construction given a few tweaks to existing laws and putting aside intractable obstacles like rent control and rent stabilization.”

“We like to partner with our clients. We become their total advocate.” Here, the partnership—which was less a perfect duet than a system of checks and balances—produced that rare thing in inner cities: architecture with humanity.”

“Gluck’s method made it possible. By cutting out the waste and the various compromises of traditional construction, design-build allowed for clarity of vision in a sector that desperately needs it.”

“[…] Essentially an analogue version of BIM, in that each staff architect is expected to understand the impact of every component of the design, including all structural and mechanical elements.”

“This architect-as-contractor model, called design-build, had already been gaining new traction at the highest echelons of the housing market, as clients seek ways to execute cutting-edge designs without the headaches often associated with such construction.”

“Beyond homeowners, Mr. Gluck says the architect-as-contractor model goes a long way towards making architecture affordable for nonprofits and schools, which make up about half of his portfolio.”

Monograph

“Architect Peter Gluck is redesigning the business of building by cutting out the middleman, and saving clients money in the process.”

“Gluck & Partners represents the quiet continuation of a modernist tradition that’s sometimes lost beneath contemporary architecture’s ongoing cult of personality.”

“’I felt it was desirable to subvert the obvious impulse of giving the house over entirely to the pond, in order to reveal other aspects of the landscape,’ the architect says. ‘I want the whole site to unfold via the house’ Gluck designed the house to interpret the land.”