Nycha Red Hook Houses

• 60-acre, 2,873-unit resiliency masterplan
• 14 utility pods replace flooded basements
• 2017 AIA NY Merit Award, Urban Design

Red Hook Houses is a 60-acre, 28-building public housing complex of 2,873 units built across a low-lying, flood-prone site along New York Harbor. When Superstorm Sandy struck in October 2012, floodwaters reached roughly five feet, destroying nearly every basement mechanical room and cutting power, heat, and hot water to thousands of residents for weeks.

Rebuilding basement-by-basement in the same configuration would have left the complex exposed to the next major storm, so KPF and landscape architect OLIN developed the "Lily Pad" concept: raising mounded earth at the center of each courtyard to act as a permanent flood barrier, then distributing building systems across fourteen smaller utility pods and two above-ground energy plants rather than concentrating them below grade.

Coordinating that level of decentralized, campus-wide infrastructure across 28 existing buildings, multiple engineering consultants (including Arup and other specialty firms), and an active resident community made integrated BIM/VDC modeling, of the kind GENx Design & Technology provided, a practical necessity rather than a preference.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 flooded the basement mechanical rooms across the Red Hook Houses' 28 buildings, destroying boilers, electrical switchgear, and other critical infrastructure and leaving thousands of residents without heat, hot water, and power for weeks. The original centralized basement mechanical systems left the entire 60-acre, 2,873-unit campus vulnerable to a single flood event, since one flooded basement could knock out heat and power for an entire building or cluster of buildings.

NYCHA needed to coordinate resiliency design across the campus with multiple engineering consultants and city and federal funding and permitting requirements, while keeping the buildings occupied throughout construction. Replacing basement equipment with elevated, flood-resistant utility infrastructure required extensive site and building-by-building coordination to fit new above-grade utility pods without disrupting existing circulation and open space.

Like most mid-century NYCHA developments, Red Hook Houses originally centralized each building's boilers and mechanical equipment in basement plant rooms, a standard public-housing design approach at the time the complex was built. That configuration left critical heat, hot water, and electrical infrastructure directly exposed to storm surge. When Superstorm Sandy hit in October 2012, floodwaters of roughly five feet destroyed nearly all of these basement systems at once, cutting off power and heat to thousands of residents for weeks with no redundancy to fall back on.

The Lily Pad plan translated the lessons of Hurricane Sandy into a system-wide resiliency strategy for one of NYCHA's largest developments. By consolidating critical utility infrastructure, including boilers, electrical switchgear, and emergency generators, into elevated, flood-protected utility pods distributed across the 60-acre campus, the plan removed the dependence of all 2,873 units across 28 buildings on individual, flood-prone basement mechanical rooms.

The coordinated, campus-wide design and documentation work that GENx contributed as part of the KPF project team helped translate a complex, multi-building resiliency concept into a buildable masterplan that could be reviewed and funded by NYCHA and its city and federal partners.

The Lily Pad concept was recognized with a 2017 AIA New York Chapter Merit Award for Urban Design and has since been cited as a model approach for post-Sandy public housing resiliency planning in New York City. As GENx's own project materials note, this work reflects practical, on-the-job BIM and VDC coordination experience gained while employed at KPF, and the resulting Lily Pad design remains the property of KPF.