This 3950 SF home on Sullivan’s Island SC was renovated in 2020. The owner wanted to update the exterior to bring it to life as a tropical oasis. In addition to integrating lush local foliage to help reduce the apparent height of the 14’ elevated home, a buffer in both the front and rear was planted to protect the home from the street and neighbors.

Completed in 2014, this loft renovation maximizes the openness of the kitchen while taken advantage of its higher positioning compared to the rest of the apartment. A bridge-way above both frames the views onto the living room and provides access to the mezzanine library.

Project by Babak Bryan and Henry Grosman at BanG studio

Photos by Bjorg Magnea

Completed in 2013, this apartment renovation maximizes on storage. The double-height interior space was transformed into a large walk-in closet, above which an in-door "tree-house" was built as a child play area. Access to this loft play area is from a concealed ladder in the cabinet as well as from the hall above.

Project by Babak Bryan and Henry Grosman at BanG studio

Interior Design by AbbyElle Design

Photos by Bjorg Magnea

The client relocated their offices to consolidate their operations into two floors of a Historic loft office building. This project operated under a tight budget and a strict time-line while still providing a complete design solution. Taking advantage of the volumes of books in their library, the walls to the corridors outside each editors small enclosed office were built around ordinary library shelves. Additionally, instead of expensive light fixtures a linear cove light was incorporated into the thick wall to throw indirect light off the restored terracotta vaulted ceiling.

Photos by Brian Rose

As the US Headquarters for an international clothing company, the clients requested their office to literally be a blank slate. Situated in the heart of Manhattan, this expansive commercial loft keeps all the raw building elements exposed. The only color is their corporate red rhythmically breaking up corridors and the wooden receptionist’s kiosk. All the other coloring comes from the changing seasonal advertising graphics and clothing displays.

Photos by Brian Rose

The West 17th Street Clinic is a multi-story HIV/AIDS clinic with a new, integrated approach to health care. Patients are treated by teams of doctors and nurses working from a centralized command station. The rooms are bright and clean, and the coloring is calming while maintaining a sophisticated aesthetic.

Project by Babak Bryan at TEK Architects

Photos by Brian Rose

In conjunction with Cook+Fox and SLCE, BanG studio designed the layouts and finishes for all interior common spaces including the lobby, conference rooms, gym, lounge and corridors as well as all apartment finishes for this 270 mixed income building anchoring the City Point Development off Flatbush Avenue Extension right off the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, New York

Project by Babak Bryan and Henry Grosman at BanG studio

Photos by Bjorg Magnea

A renovation to a 170 unit multi-family residence in lower Manhattan, including new lobby, common spaces, and exterior courtyards. Originally constructed as housing for the New York Society for the Deaf, it now provides additional housing for seniors and low-income tenants, and one floor is occupied exclusively by United Cerebral Palsy.

A proposal for the training facilities to a Major League Soccer franchise, this project consists of two buildings and five fields. The main Training Center Building houses all the team offices for coaches and staffs and has two separate locker rooms each with their own rehabilitation centers. The separate Field House includes locker rooms and a concession area for visitors and fans.

This project combines two floors of an existing class-A office high-rise overlooking Central Park in New York City. The goal was to create a suite of conference rooms that would be easily accessible to visitors and workers alike while maintaining a sophisticated style and accentuating the spectacular views

Completed in 2015, this renovation to a historic Brooklyn townhouse opens the garden level through to the rear yard. A folding glass wall was installed, allowing for a seamless transition between inside and out. Interior load-bearing walls were removed by restructuring the floor and ceiling allowing for an uninterupted open space.

Project by Babak Bryan and Henry Grosman at BanG studio

Photos by Bjorg Magnea

For this San Francisco regional office, a playful design folded a ribbon wall through the seismic reinforcements of a historic structure. The wall bent and twisted around to define the lobby, conference rooms and office corridors

In this winning competition entry submitted to the Design Trust for Public Space, Grand Army Plaza is untangled by succinctly layering and expanding conflicting modes of travel. A new transportation hub is created by simultaneously submerging Flatbush Avenue and elevating the park above. The entrance to Prospect Park is expanded to now flow up and through the Union Memorial Arch, allowing pedestrians to finally move from Flatbush Avenue through the Plaza and into the park unimpeded. 

Project by Babak Bryan and Jake LaChapelle

bioPLURB is a speculative project about the future of the Gowanus Canal, envisioning a future where the water is cleaned by bio-robotic plants. It has been displayed at the SET Gallery in Brooklyn and Westwood Gallery in Manhattan.

Project by Babak Bryan, Jake LaChapelle, Newton Kershner and Henry Grosman at COA

teraPLURB is a speculative project that re-imagines the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis, MO. Rather than rebuilding additional housing for a city with too many vacant lots or proposing new entertainment or sports complexes fos a city that with ample existing stadiums, teraPLURB proposes to create a vast complex of data farms and build thermal pools from the waste-heat of the cooling systems.

Project by Babak Bryan, Jake LaChapelle, Newton Kershner and Henry Grosman at COA

The urbanization of the area surrounding Long Island Railroad’s Montauk Cutoff has taken a toll on the ecological communities once present in Long Island City. The natural landscapes, once prevalent in the area are now few in number, and they are not ecologically productive enough to sustain diversity for either plant or animal life. Our proposal, the Wild Line, integrates nature into our everyday surroundings, so that ecological communities can build life in safety by creating space in which natural cycles can occur.

The Wild Line will transform the Long Island City community by injecting a new sense of life: creating new kinds of habitat for animals, humans, birds, insects, and microorganisms. It will create a unique ecological and cultural space for the neighborhood connecting people with their natural surroundings. In the following pages, we outline how the project would affect this positive change in the community.

The project engages a range of biological/ecological processes. Beginning on a microscopic level, the “Wild Line” will be a place of intense microbial activity. Microbes are at the root of all healthy soils and the greening of the Montauk Cutoff will allow for the conversion of the former industrial site into a new natural environment. Healthy soil conditions will allow for the reintroduction of native plant species. The plants will be carefully chosen to provide sustenance for wildlife. Their seeds will act as nourishment for bird species that will make the Wild

Line their home. Their flowers will be pollinated by insects that will flourish in the newly created habitat. Lastly, the Wild Line will play host to a variety of animals seeking refuge from the city.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Wild Line is that it will provide a place where community members will engage with their surroundings. It will be a sanctuary for urban dwellers across the city, and it will create a space for new educational, conversational, and social opportunities.

Project by Babak Bryan and Henry Grosman at BanG studio

In 2008, four years before Hurricane Sandy hit, New York’s Office of Emergency Management realized the city’s vulnerability and its shortcomings in providing temporary emergency housing. It issued a request for proposals for new designs that would better work for cities addressing the simultaneous dichotomy of being more populated and having less open space. The resulting designs have yet to be built or tested.

Rather than design, test construct, and implement a new concept, the Trailer Tower inserts readily deployable FEMA trailers into mid and high-rise buildings that are in mid-construction throughout the city. Three bays of a floor plan would be used to hold one household, two for a trailer and one for a private yard. The remaining space would be used as communal gathering and circulation space. While each potential site differs, the inherent flexibility of the components allows for adaptation. The visible occupation of the construction site signals the vitality of the impacted neighborhood.

At one time The Freedom Tower presented itself as an obvious opportunity. Midway through construction, the building is replete with multiple cranes for hoisting the trailers in to place, elevators, and utilities.

Project by Babak Bryan and Jake LaChapelle

BanG studio was founded with the desire to explore the limits of temporary structures. The core purpose of the studio was to speculate on how the exploratory skills of the architecture studio and the production skills of the fabrication studio could be synthesized. These projects are snip-bits of the years of work that came from that partnership.