Architecture's 'best-kept secret'

Real Estate Weekly, Oct 24, 2001 by Elaine Misonzhnik

Although his firm has not received a great deal of recognition just yet, Joshua Burdick, president of Greenwich Village-based SBLM Architects PC, hopes the oversight won't be long lasting.

"We are really New York's best-kept secret," he assures. "We are a very diverse firm and we've build a niche for ourselves in doing challenging urban projects. In my view, if there ever was a New York firm, this is a New York firm."

Burdick is a soft-spoken, bespectacled men, with a slightly nervous manner. Before founding SBLM with his current partner Ed Shiffer, he used to have his own practice, where he did mostly retail projects. And then a disagreement with a friend brought he and Shiffer together.

"Ed's office was a block south of mine," he explains. "He did a lot of institutional work for the government, and I did retail. And at the time I had a consultant working with me. One night I met a very shrewd client and decided to do some work for him, but I warned the consultant to let me negotiate the contract. Well, I had to go on a business trip and he ended up negotiating and the whole thing ended in us doing the job almost for free. We had a falling out and he moved across the street and joined Ed."

But apparently once in Shiffer's office, the consultant couldn't stop talking about Burdick. Within a few months, he introduced the two and they began to have lunch together on a regular basis. Since both Shiffer and Burdick had office leases that expired that year, they decided to move in the same space at Broadway and Bleecker Street.

"It was over a couple of months that we got to know each other," Burdick explains. "We had very different personalities, but enough of a common basis to go forward. And after we moved in here, we started coming together on projects with increasing frequency and finally decided that there were aspects to both our firms that would be of value to each other."

So far, Burdick, Shiffer, and their team have done projects for a wide range of clients, including the New York School Construction Authority, the New York Times, Sears, Sony Theaters, and New York University. But the project SBLM is most proud of at the moment is the 650,000-SF mixed-use tower on W. 34th Street, a building that Burdick hopes will mark a new era in the firm's development.

"This is our first high-rise project and it's a very complicated building," he explains. "It has different functions -- it serves as an apartment house, a movie theater, and then there are offices on the lower floors and a parking garage. The structure is unique in that it goes from concrete to steel and then back to concrete again. The apartment house is supported over the movie theater, which is basically empty space with very large girdles."

When he talks about the development, Burdick's eyes light up. This, he explains, is what he envisions as SBLM's future -- big, high profile projects that would make his firm's name immediately recognizable. SBLM has already completed the renovation of Fraunces Tavern, a nationally landmarked tavern in the Wall Street area and is currently working on redesigning the renowned Copa Cabana club.

"There are other high quality firms we are using as models," Burdick explains. "We want to do a lot more of high-profile work, we want greater design and engineering challenges. There is going to be a consistent, defined, and distinguished quality that will define SBLM. This is not to say that we are going to embark on a stylistic approach, as far as using the same materials, but in terms of the visual impact people will be able to look at it and say 'This is the work of SBLM."

Burdick is careful to point out, however, that his architects' egos will never get in the way of doing the job that satisfies the client. In a lot of cases, he notes, famous architectural firms care more about making a statement than their do about what is the right design for the building.