ESKW/Architects

ESKW/Architects, formally Edelman Sultan Knox Wood / Architects, is a roughly 40-person New York City architecture practice founded in 1960 by Harold and Judith Edelman with Stanley Salzman. The firm works almost entirely within the five boroughs and has built a long record in affordable and supportive housing, civic and institutional buildings, historic preservation and adaptive reuse. Current work includes River Avenue Apartments II, a 292-unit all-affordable building at 1185 River Avenue in the Bronx where 173 apartments are supportive units for veterans with disabilities, people living with mental illness and formerly homeless New Yorkers. Other completed projects include Ocean Wonders: Sharks! at the Bronx Zoo, the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball High School, and the New Settlement Community Campus.

The practice states its position plainly on its About page: design for all, meaning community-focused projects that provide access to shelter, education and culture, with particular attention to the most vulnerable populations. That is a narrower brief than most firms of comparable size take on, and it shows in how the office describes its process.

Work almost always opens with a zoning review. ESKW treats that review as more than a code check, using it to study the legal, infrastructural, historical, climatic and geographical context of a site and to surface restrictions and likely obstacles before design begins. Feasibility studies follow when a development team knows it wants to build but has not yet fixed scope. Deliverables at that stage typically include a zoning analysis, a programming breakdown, test fit options and cost analyses.

Architectural programming is handled as its own discipline. The office involves multiple stakeholders, asks how an organisation actually operates, and probes what the community being served needs, on the view that a client’s physical and social requirements are inseparable. Site visits to comparable buildings are part of that stage.

Beyond architecture itself, the firm offers interior design and historic preservation. The preservation practice is tied directly to the client types it seeks out, nonprofits, schools and churches, whose buildings frequently carry historic fabric, and the firm frames half a century of New York work as the reason preservation sits so close to the centre of what it does.

The office is at 52 Duane Street, Suite 501, in Tribeca. The firm’s legal name, carried on its own copyright line, is Edelman Sultan Knox Wood / Architects.