Greenbelt, 361 Manhattan Avenue.
Photo: Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

I screwed up – in yesterday’s post on the Building Brooklyn awards, I completely missed Greenbelt in the list of award winners. So there was a north Brooklyn project worthy of being the best of Brooklyn architecture. Greenbelt is a fantastic mixed-use project on Manhattan Avenue between Jackson and Withers. It is billed as Brooklyn’s first LEED-rated residential project, and includes arts and cultural space on the ground floor with residences above. The building incorporates much of the single-story building that was formerly on the site (not preservation, but not throwing the entire building into the dumpster certainly has a positive environmental impact). As the project’s website says, “Greenbelt aims for sustainability in relation to multiple ‘environments’ – natural, cultural and visual – by building green, providing space for the arts and community, and launching bold architectural ideas scaled to the surrounding neighborhood.”

All in all, a very interesting and worthy project. Which only goes to reinforce the point I was trying to make in yesterday’s post – given the huge wave of building we are seeing Greenpoint and Williamsburg, why are there so few projects that can be singled out as enriching our neighborhoods? Yes, there are some projects such as Greenbelt that are worthy of accolades, but they are few and far between. Take a look at the list of projects that won awards last night – I think you’d be hard pressed to find too many local projects that rise to the level of these projects.