BKSK Architects

BKSK Architects was founded in 1985 and works out of the Garment District at 230 West 38th Street, having moved from its longtime 28 West 25th Street address. The practice handles new construction and preservation work across residential, commercial, civic, library and cultural projects, much of it inside New York City historic districts where Landmarks Preservation Commission approval is required. BKSK designed the domed addition atop Tammany Hall at 44 Union Square, completed in 2021. Recent work includes the $40.2 million Douglaston-Little Neck branch for Queens Public Library, which broke ground in July 2026, and an approved commercial building at 144 Spring Street in SoHo. The firm employs roughly 60 people.

The numbers BKSK posts on its own practice page: 41 years, three partners, 50 architects and interior designers, more than 200 built projects, 17 LEED or Passive House certifications, and more than 80 Landmarks Preservation Commission approvals. That last figure is the one that separates the office from most of its peers. Getting new construction approved inside a New York historic district is a specialist skill with its own procedural rhythm, and BKSK has cleared it repeatedly.

The firm calls the approach Preservation+, meaning research and restoration paired with new interpretation rather than replication. The work covers new buildings in landmark districts, adaptive reuse and restoration, historic resource analysis, feasibility studies, and sustainable design applied to historic fabric. When the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved 44 Ninth Avenue, a commissioner remarked on the record that the application involved more moving parts than almost anything the body had handled during his fifteen years of service. Services span conceptual studies through post-occupancy evaluation, and interiors are carried as a portfolio of their own alongside architecture.

Environmental performance is the other half of the practice. BKSK designed the first civic building in New York City to earn LEED Platinum and the first new Passive House project approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. Its process leads with passive strategies, uses iterative design modeling in early stages to simulate and test options, and treats rating systems as benchmarking tools rather than end goals. The office also frames adaptive reuse as a carbon argument, keeping the embodied energy of an existing structure in place instead of rebuilding it. Expertise on the site is grouped under four headings, Sustainability, Preservation+, Community and Planning, and long client relationships back that up: the Queens Botanical Garden has worked with the firm on multiple projects across more than twenty years.