A New American Project for Focchi Group: 1508 Coney Island, New York

The Italian group opened a second building site in New York, for the curtain wall of a 10-floor high-rise building in the Midwood district in Brooklyn

by Roberto Guccione

After the successful project of Solar Carve Tower – 40 Tenth Avenue, Focchi Group has been commissioned to design the curtain wall of a mixed-use project intended to become the largest building in Midwood, Brooklyn. Brooklyn is the up-and-coming borough of NYC, featuring neighborhoods as unique and diverse as the people who live in them. Midwood is going to change deeply thanks to this project of SHop Architects. 1508 Coney Island Avenue will be a 10-story high-rise. This 182-foot tall structure will hold 180,270 total square feet, with 63,340 square feet dedicated to commercial office use, and 84,000 square feet of community facility space occupied by a medical treatment center.
The community space will operate from floors seven through ten, with a lobby in the cellar and another first-floor lobby including a two-story atrium. Offices will populate the remaining floors below, except for the fourth, which will be entirely designed as a lounge area. Lastly, a parking lot will be created below ground, with capacity for 267 vehicles.
Focchi’s systems for this project are: unitised structurally silicone glazed system, unitised spandrel and glazed unit with external double skin with perforated and openable aluminium sheet and ceramic frit glazed decorative fins. “This is the second project we are working at in New York”, Maurizio Focchi, Managing Director of the Focchi group. “The historical United Kingdom market, which accounts for 85% of our 2018 production, is now joined by the US market which, for the first time, surpasses the Italian one”. In Italy the Focchi group, a family-owned business founded in Rimini in 1914 and specialized in the design and construction of building envelopes for large architectural projects, is working at the creation of the envelope of the Liberskind Tower in Milan, in the CityLife district, having already completed the Allianz-Isozaki tower.