121st Police Precinct Station House | Rafael Viñoly Architects PC

Rafael Viñoly Architects is proud to announce that the 121st Police Precinct Stationhouse, a project of the Department of Design and Construction and the New York Police Department, at 970 Richmond Avenue on Staten Island opened on November 18, 2013. The 121st Police Precinct Station house is Staten Island’s first new precinct headquarters in decades, and the first police facility in New York City to seek LEED Silver certification. The building is designed to achieve an energy cost reduction of 25%, and site work includes high-albedo recycled asphalt pavement in driving lanes, permeable surfacing in low-traffic parking spots, and five bio-retention cells that capture almost all of the rain that falls within this property, in order to reduce the amount of water that enters the sewer system. The harvested water infiltrates the soil, and once filtered of pollutants by the local plant life, is used to sustain these same plants, all of which are native and adaptive to the local climate. The design solution responds to the challenges of an irregular site with two distinct building volumes: a two-story linear bar, gently arcing in plan and gradually increasing in height as it approaches the commercial district of Richmond Avenue, and a separate one-story volume where the site extends outward to the south. The second floor cantilevers toward Richmond Avenue in a symbolic gesture of community engagement that defines the main entrance and creates a visual link between the main lobby and the street. The two building masses are distinguished by varied heights, differing surface treatments—horizontal stainless-steel cladding on the long bar, and gray brick on the one-story volume—and a skylight over the interstitial space between them, which brings natural light into the ground-floor lobby. The long bar structure also shields the residential neighborhood to the north from the police parking lot to the south. Outdoor mechanical services are concealed within the building form and integrated into an enclosure clad in the same stainless steel. As the community face of the NYPD in Staten Island, the 121st Police Precinct Station House will not only serve as a model for sustainable design, but will expand law enforcement presence – cutting response times and relieve the workload of the existing precincts – in the fastest-growing borough of New York City.