Grand Gothic Grace

Faced with the need for a full size gymnasium, Grace Church School, after a six-year search for suitable nearby sites, decided to build underground and adjacent to James Renwick’s 165 year old landmark gothic revival church.

Central to the architect’s design strategy was the replication and relocation of the historic 100 year old “Gothic Wall” fifteen feet to the west. This wall had been originally finished in a faux-stone stucco and was composed of buttresses, blind gothic arches and a cornice. Relocating it west provides space for a new lobby for the stairs and elevator serving the gym 28 feet below. The previously blind gothic arches of this wall are opened up with new windows allowing natural light into the new lobby and gym below via a series of interior windows. An educational natural light feature, a noon-mark in the south wall, beams sunlight down into the lobby and demonstrates the apparent motion of the sun. The structural configuration of the roof accommodates new street trees on 10th Street and allows for the restored garden plantings and playground above. The resulting architecture incorporating the careful use of color and natural, sustainable materials and systems is deliberately asymmetrical and provides a high degree of ambient natural light and orientation to this unique subterranean environment. As an underground building with an intensive green roof, it is probably the greenest gymnasium in NYC.