Commercial
SPARC Kips Bay
Client
Skanska
Project Owner
New York City Economic Development Corporation
Location
New York, New York
Project Value
$3,600,000,000
Industry
Commercial
Account Executive(s)
Joshua Harden, Trey Wilson
Services Provided
Construction Logistics Animations |
Renderings & Animations |
Still Renderings |
Commercial
SPARC Kips Bay
Client
Skanska
Project Owner
New York City Economic Development Corporation
Location
New York, New York
Project Value
$3,600,000,000
Industry
Commercial
Account Executive(s)
Joshua Harden, Trey Wilson
Services Provided
Construction Logistics Animations |
Renderings & Animations |
Still Renderings |
Project Overview
SPARC Kips Bay represented one of the most complex mixed-use development pursuits in New York City history: a $3.6 billion, 2,000,000 SF campus on the East Side of Manhattan procured by the city. The masterplan organized education, research, public health, and civic functions around a central half-acre public plaza, bringing together Hunter College, BMCC, the CUNY School of Public Health, a DOE/SCA high school, two commercial life sciences towers, and podium facilities for NYC Health + Hospitals and the Office of Chief Medical Examiner. Coastal flood protection, major circulation improvements, and connections to adjacent open spaces were woven into the site strategy. The client engaged PRESWERX to produce renderings and animations that could communicate the full scale and vision of the campus to evaluators.
Client Challenges
A campus of this density and programmatic complexity presented visualization challenges that went well beyond a typical building pursuit. The client had to address several at once:
Communicating how six distinct program types, spanning education, research, healthcare, and civic use, could coexist and reinforce one another on a constrained urban site.
Conveying the public character of the campus, particularly the role of SPARC Square and the ground-level activation in making the development feel like a civic asset rather than an institutional block.
Differentiating the team in a high-profile competition where the city owner expected imagery and storytelling at the scale of the project's ambition.
The pursuit required visuals capable of holding together a multi-institution, multi-building story without losing clarity or impact.
Scope of Work
PRESWERX produced architectural renderings and animations tailored to the layered complexity of the SPARC Kips Bay campus. Renderings captured the site at multiple scales: from aerial views showing how the campus fit into the surrounding East Side context, to ground-level perspectives of SPARC Square and the activated building edges facing 25th Street and First Avenue. Specific program elements, including the life sciences towers, podium entrances, and the public plaza with its visual connections to Bellevue Park and the FDR pedestrian bridge, were depicted with enough specificity to give evaluators confidence in the site plan. Animations provided a sequential tour of the campus, guiding viewers through the public space and into the buildings to convey how the program would function day-to-day.
PRESWERX Approach
PRESWERX approached the SPARC pursuit as a civic storytelling challenge, knowing that evaluators needed to see both the urban vision and the operational detail before forming a judgment. The strategy centered on three priorities:
Rendered the campus at scales that served the evaluator's eye, moving from site context down to street-level activation so the full vision could be absorbed without cognitive overload.
Foregrounded the public realm, treating SPARC Square and the ground-level program as the visual anchor of the campus rather than a backdrop for the towers.
Structured the animations to move through the campus the way a person would experience it, building familiarity and confidence in the layout before zooming out to the broader site.
The result was a visual package that made the project's complexity feel resolved rather than overwhelming.
Results Delivered
PRESWERX delivered a pursuit-ready visual package calibrated to one of the most demanding civic development competitions in the city. Each deliverable served a specific function in building evaluator trust:
Renderings gave evaluators a legible, credible picture of how six distinct program types could occupy a single urban campus without sacrificing public access or visual coherence.
Animations translated the site plan into a spatial experience, letting evaluators walk the campus before it existed and understand how the public realm would function alongside the institutional program.
Together, the visuals positioned the client's submission at the level of clarity and ambition the city owner expected from a development of this scale.
The client entered the selection process with imagery that matched the scope of their vision and the sophistication of their evaluators.
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