204: Ten new floors, zero new floor area with Brian McFarland, Principal, CetraRuddy Architecture

How do you add 10 stories to a building without adding a single square foot of floor area?

Brian McFarland and his team did exactly that at Soma at 25 Water in New York. Brian is a Principal at CetraRuddy Architecture, and he calls Soma the largest completed office-to-residential conversion in the U.S. to date.

The building was a late-1960s back office for a bank, built for computers, not people. Brick, very little glass, and a floor plate about 150 by 275 feet. In New York, every habitable room has to be within 30 feet of a window.

So the team cut two inner courts into the building for light and air. Then they used the zoning rules to move floor area that no longer counted up to the roof.

Soma started as a 22-story, 1.1 million square foot building. After 10 new stories, it is still 1.1 million square feet. In Brian’s words, it’s “all about the textual definition of floor area in the zoning resolution. It has nothing to do with the real world.”

In this episode, Brian and Rens dig into:

• How Soma at 25 Water added 10 stories with zero new floor area, and why the zoning text, not a tape measure, sets the number.

• How small deductions add up, from the extra 8 inches of a 44-inch stair to the recreation space a conversion has to provide.

• The “Malkovich floor” at Lirio: a 3-foot-tall space that keeps a building’s plumbing out of an MTA rail control center below.

• How the 467-m tax abatement and City of Yes pushed New York’s development market into conversions.

• Why most of CetraRuddy’s work is as of right, and how New York differs from cities that run on entitlements.

• Brian’s path from project architect to partner, four years leading VOA’s New York building practice, and his picks: The Search for Form in Art and Architecture by Eliel Saarinen and the Thomistic Institute podcast.

The lesson underneath the episode is bigger than conversions:

Know the rules better than anyone else at the table.

Brian’s team didn’t find 10 stories by making the building bigger on paper. They found them by reading how the zoning resolution defines floor area. That reading turned a 22-story building into a 32-story one with the same floor area.

Sometimes the space you need is already written into the rules.

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