George Ranalli Architect completed Saratoga Avenue Community Center, in 2010, for client-agency NYCHA. The project included renovation of 1,500 square feet of existing ground-floor space, inside the existing 16-story apartment tower, to accommodate youth technology programming and community use, and a new 3,500-square-foot building, including a commercial kitchen, director’s office, bathroom, storage, and other amenities, for year-round, all-purpose community uses, ranging from summer camp to wedding celebrations.

Saratoga Avenue Community Center presented the community an alternative to typical public architecture, built by a municipal agency, which is bland, stark, and alienating to occupants. Saratoga Avenue Community Center transformed a solitary asphalt site, on a residential housing super-block, into a functional and useful place of distinction. The orientation and design of the new building, and the redesign of the the existing high rise tower ground-floor space, and its surrounding landscape architecture, organized and brightened the entire setting.

At the eastern end of the site, a new corridor marks a pedestrian pathway connecting the apartment tower and new community center, unified further by an exterior sheltering street wall, and the smaller of two volumes delineating the new community center, used for the director’s office, anchors the site to the west. The new interior courtyards around the community center now become inviting outdoor green-space – one bordering Hancock Street, and another, at the front of the Community Center’s main entrance. In metrical progression, access to the Center, either from the public sidewalk, or through the corridor adjoining Saratoga Houses, into a compressed entryway which opens into a soaring 23-foot-high main space. Hardwood flooring, and durable buff-white wainscoting, gleams and glimmers, in reflected light, and large mahogany-framed, clerestory windows encourage the view upward.

Saratoga Avenue Community Center is a solid speckled roman brick structure, over a limestone base. It synchronizes well with the tan brick of the Saratoga Houses tower, without resorting to mere replication. but its composition of varied materiality, transparency, and density, much like its interior, offers an intangible sense of luster. The facade is carefully adjusted in certain places, some incised, other more deeply recessed, to engage the dynamics of shade and shadow. All the while, the architecture stays mindful of the cost of construction, utilizing pragmatic construction methods, such as precast technology, no expense to conceptual integrity or beauty.

READ MORE : Brilliant architecture can rescue even Basingstoke George Ranalli’s marvelous work in Brooklyn should be a lesson to Britain’s architects and planners

Empowering Architecture. Saratoga Avenue Community Center. George Ranalli Architect.

Community Building: Saratoga Avenue Community Center by George Ranalli Architect

Harvard Magazine. An Oasis in Limestone and Brick. A Community Center Grows In Brooklyn.

On Violent Ground, a Touch of Beauty

POSTINGS: Bedford-Stuyvesant Community Center; In Brooklyn, A ‘Beacon’ Recalls Wright.

Monograph Publication : Saratoga (Single Building) by George Ranalli

Picture Gallery : Telegraph, UK. Saratoga Avenue Community Center. George Ranalli Architect.

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Saratoga Avenue Community Center

Brooklyn, Kings County, NY, United States

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Saratoga Avenue Community Center

Brooklyn, Kings County, NY, United States

Other Projects by George Ranalli Architect FAIA

22nd STREET LOFT

Flushing Meadows Cafe

Morningside Cafe at Morningside Park

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Saratoga Avenue Community Center

Brooklyn, Kings County, NY, United States

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team