Kaufman Development is headed back to the Victorian Village Commission tonight with its proposal for the IBEW site just off of High Street in the Short North.
The project, which was first brought to the commission in August and then revised multiple times, now stands at nine stories, with a maximum height of 115 feet. That’s a small reduction from the original 10-story proposal.
Other changes include a shift of some of that height closer to High Street and away from the neighborhood, moving the buildings facing Price Avenue farther back from the street, and preserving more of the original IBEW building on West Second Avenue.
“We’ve been taking the collective feedback from the commission and the neighborhood and trying to find a scale, and a density, and a massing, that worked and that made sense for everybody,” said founder and CEO Brett Kaufman.
In terms of the overall design, the new proposal features more glass, particularly on the Price Avenue side.
“That’s some of the architectural refinement we’ve been doing,” said Kaufman. “We tried to bring some kind of similarity from the Second Avenue elevation to the Price Avenue elevation in terms of materiality, so that two sides didn’t read as independently as they had in prior iterations.”
The project is up for conditional approval, meaning that Kaufman’s team is asking the commission to sign off on the broad strokes of the development — including the site plan, massing and height — but would have to return at a later date for approval of exterior details and materials.
“We want to make sure that we’re on the right path, and then we can further refine the details,” said Kaufman, adding that if the project is approved, the hope is to move into development right away, with a start date some time later this year.
Renderings via Brian Kent Jones Architects.
