One Hancock Square

A kaleidoscope of color and light graces the facade of Erdy McHenry Architecture LLC's mixed-use housing project.

By Christopher Kieran
This is an excerpt of an article from the June 2008 edition of Architectural Record.

Northern Liberties is one of Philadelphia’s hippest, most overpriced, and rapidly developing neighborhoods. An awkward jumble of luxury condos, abandoned factories, boutiques, gastropubs, and vacant lots testifies to its spasmodic past. Once a thriving center for industry, the neighborhood was cut off from the city’s downtown when two merging interstate highways were built in the 1960s. After decades of decline, its recent renaissance has been sparked largely by creative residents who have transformed blighted plots into public green spaces.

Local firm Erdy McHenry Architecture designed Northern Liberties’ new high-profile, mixed-use residential development, One Hancock Square. The famous Schmidt’s Brewery occupied the site for 130 years but was abandoned in 1987 and left to deteriorate. In 2000, Bart Blatstein bought the property and set about leveling
the squalid, 26-building brewery complex to make way for this development. The demolition caused a stir among the neighbors, who are protective of the community’s distinctive character. 

When Erdy McHenry came to the project, zoning for the property was already in place. The developer had devised a plan for the 15-acre site during years of conversation (and struggle) with the neighbors. The first phase of development is this mixed-use, mid-rise, 134,000-square-foot complex running 350 feet along Second Street. Retail and restaurant space occupy the ground floor beneath 104 apartments. Behind the building, the client and the architects envisioned a European-inspired plaza enclosed by two additional apartment buildings and an oval-shaped office tower. The architects were challenged to make the inwardly focused plaza address the public nature of urban space and to integrate the project’s relatively large buildings into a neighborhood that is simultaneously appreciative and wary of revitalization efforts.

Echoes of Philadelphia’s ubiquitous row houses appear in the Modernist One Hancock Square, translated into lines of two-story lofts, which Erdy McHenry assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Employing a skip-stop-elevator arrangement lifted from Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, the architects created L-shaped units with two-story living space and a one-story bedroom sector, so one apartment stacks above another to create a three-story block. The ingenious arrangement enables a single corridor to access three stories of apartments when the bottom unit has a second-floor entry and the top unit has a first-floor entry.

Formal name of project: One Hancock Square

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Gross square footage: 134,068 sq.ft

Completion Date: September 2006

Client: Northern Liberties Development

Architect:
Erdy McHenry Architecture LLC
230 North Second Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19106
tel (215) 925-7000 
fax (215) 925-1990

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