Brooklyn Academy of Music

OMA was retained as master planners for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's new Cultural District, an approximately 1.5 million SF mixed-use development on four empty sites immediately adjacent to the BAM center. The development would create performance, exhibition, rehearsal, and office space for smaller cultural institutions and organizations priced out of Manhattan real estate, and combine that with new low and middle-income housing.

The project aimed to provide a vibrant new cultural district outside of Manhattan and give a much-needed focus to an important historic Brooklyn neighborhood in the midst of revival. The plan sought to maximize permeability between the new buildings and the surrounding Fort Greene neighborhood.