The Manhattanville Factory District is a master-planned neighborhood of more than one million square feet in West Harlem, developed by Janus from underutilized industrial buildings and vacant land from West 125th to West 128th Streets. A major focus has been to build an active street life integrated into the existing West Harlem fabric, including a new life science cluster. Design strategies preserve the existing architecture and spirit of the neighborhood while adding new state-of-the-art lab facilities. The District creates a collaborative corridor anchored by Columbia University, Columbia Medical Center, City College and the New York Structural Biology Center, and brings much needed publicly accessible open space to this re-imagined industrial neighborhood.

The Mink Building, Malt House and Sweets Building honor the history of an energetic industrial neighborhood in the early twentieth century, bursting with breweries and factories. To renovate and expand the warehouse block for mixed-use development, the scheme preserves the original cast-iron, steel and brick buildings and places new construction above it, clearly demarcating the old from the new. A new glass facade completes and 'recreates' the street wall, knitting together the old and new through its treatment of scale, texture and color in the curtain wall glazing. Set back behind, five new stories of 'Class A' commercial office space rise above with a more reserved presence from the street. After completing over 400,000 rsf in the Mink Building, Malt House and Sweets Building, Janus is currently constructing the 11-story, 350,000 rsf Taystee Lab Building, a ground-up purpose-built life science building on the site of the former Taystee bread bakery that showcases expansive floor-to-ceiling glass, 360-degree views and landscaped plazas while still aligning with the area's industrial aesthetic.

A sequence of new landscapes creates vital pedestrian connections that link the district together.  A mid-block connection is made from W 125th Street to the Taystee Lab on W 126th Street, through the Malt House entrance on W 127th Street and to the courtyard on W 128th Street.  Taken together these publicly accessible landscapes provide a new civic forum for an array of activities while revealing Manhattanville's unique industrial and geological history.

The District is currently home to Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem Biospace, community arts incubator SoHarlem and a range of innovative tech and life science firms including Quentis Therapeutics, Quicksilver Therapeutics and Infinite Corridor Technologies.

Join us for a special panel event on the architectural future of the emergent Manhattanville Factory District co-sponsored by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and Columbia University’s Real Estate Development Program, including moderator and Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger; Patrice Derrington, Director of the Center for Urban Real Estate and the M.S. in Real Estate Development Program at Columbia University; Elsia Vasquez, Founder and Executive Director of PA’LANTE Harlem; Larry English, former Community Board 9 chair and Chairman of AirRail; and the team behind the development including Scott Metzner and Jerry Salama of the Janus Property Company, Stella Betts and David Leven of LEVENBETTS, Thomas Gluck of GLUCK+ and Theodore Hoerr of TERRAIN WORK.