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CO Adaptive is a full service architecture and building practice. We are an experimental testing ground for new construction technologies, material assemblies, and creative solutions to our clients’ challenges. Based in Brooklyn, New York at the historic Navy Yard, our growing team of 18 architecture and construction professionals supports our efforts to improve the built environment through smart and resilient processes. CO Adaptive has a range of projects across a variety of types—from passive house residences to adaptively reused industrial spaces, community art spaces and theaters. To us, each is a unique opportunity to create something beautiful and functional while having a lighter impact on our planet.
As the home for CO Adaptive’s founders, the renovation was driven both by their professional desire to build a project that was aligned with their goals around energy efficiency and reuse, and met the personal needs of their growing family.
This project was CO Adaptive’s first Passive House retrofit of an old Brooklyn townhouse. Conceived as a two-family house, it allows Bobby and Ruth to share the Passive House living experience with out-of-towners, alongside the flexibility to have additional space for family and friends when needed.
The upper duplex has three bedrooms on the second floor, with their kitchen and living room on the parlor level, alongside a new stair that gives access to the rear yard from the kitchen and dining area. A new powder room and laundry closet was added into existing interstitial closet space on the parlor level, and the sole heating and cooling system for the duplex is housed above those utility spaces.
Upstairs, in addition to the two bedrooms, there are two clean wet rooms and a separate powder room; a very Austrian way to conceive of bathroom spaces that is informed by Ruth’s history of growing up in Vienna.
The garden level unit has two bedrooms and one bathroom, and a hatch door into the cellar that allows the unit entry to feel generous and spacious.
The design contrasts the reuse of many original elements of the house with clean maple-ply details at doors and windows throughout, and a bright color palette which brings a contemporary feeling to the old house.
