BVN spin-off Re-ply is transforming Manhattan’s streetscape
New-York based Australian architects have used a by-product of the city’s recent protests to bring new life to some of the Big Apple’s favourite restaurants.
Living in New York during the early months of the pandemic in 2020 was a surreal experience for Bill Dowzer, Nikita Notowidigdo and Nick Flutter. The three Australian architects saw the bustling city turn into a setting for a dystopian movie. Trucks outside hospitals taking the dead away, the streets deserted; the fear was palpable, and then the protests came and the city was boarded up.
“Have you seen I Am Legend with Will Smith?” Flutter asks me over Zoom. “There is a scene where he is driving his car under the scaffolding and through a deserted Manhattan. I rode my bike down Fifth Avenue one day all the way from the park down to the bottom and I did not see one car.”
“It was a like a dead city,” adds Notowidigdo. “And the George Floyd protests happened. They were really peaceful 99 per cent of the time but there was a lot of fear, so the whole city ended up being boarded up, for every block, as far as you could see. Home Depot even sold out of plywood.”
It was at this time that Dowzer, who had been in New York since 2015 to set up a US office for Australian architectural firm BVN, was regularly running around the city and also conducting walking meetings with his staff, Notowidigdo and Flutter. They began to wonder what would happen to all the plywood after it was removed and realised it was just going to end up in landfill.
“We started thinking, how can we do something positive out of this?” says Flutter. “We were in this terrible situation and there was so much awful stuff happening and everything you read was negative, and we just wanted to do something good. We really did not want all that plywood going to landfill.”
BVN has always had a focus on sustainability when it comes to architecture and design, so the trio started racking their brains. At the same time the City of New York and then-mayor Bill de Blasio announced that restaurants – which had been shut since March – could reopen as long as they offered outdoor dining on either the sidewalk or the parking spot in front of their premises. It was considered a more Covid-safe option than eating while crammed indoors.
This is when a plan began to form, and the innovative start-up known as re-ply was born. BVN had already dabbled in constructing pop-up furniture when it transformed a parking space outside its Brisbane premises into a temporary office a few years ago, so why not do it for restaurants?
“We had these two ideas about kit-of-parts furniture, and recycling, sustainability and circularity of plywood that we were trying to weave together,” Flutter explains. “It seemed like a cool thing to do and a good experiment to do something here to see if we could push it a bit further.”
When the trio, who all lived downtown around West Village, began seeing the plywood suddenly being taken down it forced them into action. “I remember thinking, if we want to do something with the plywood we need to move fast and do it now,” Notowidigdo says. “So we started calling people to see if we could take the plywood. I don’t think any of us have cold-called that many people in our lives. We called friends, shop managers, shop owners, building owners.”
They hit pay dirt with the city’s famous Rockefeller Center, which includes 19 commercial buildings (including stunning Art Deco examples) that stretch from 48th Street to 51st Street in mid-town. They were offered 300 sheets of plywood. “It was a very interesting experience because the whole thing happened so fast and we didn’t have time to plan or even think about things,” says Notowidigdo. “So when we got the call, we were like, okay, how do we pick up plywood, and so we hired a U-Haul and got some strong friends to turn up to the Rockefeller Centre.”
“It was a really good lesson in logistics because plywood is actually very heavy,” adds Dowzer, laughing. “We didn’t realise that until we started collecting 300 sheets of it, and then we had to put it somewhere so we found a storage facility in Brooklyn. But it was on the second floor so we had to carry it all the way up. When you come from a big architectural firm you are used to having a serviced environment and you have a different idea of procurement that is not so hands-on.”
The architects then got their first client, a restaurant called Wayan just a bit further downtown in Nolita. With a French take on Indonesian cuisine, Wayan is run by chef Cedric Vongerichten (his father. Jean-Georges Vongerichten, is a famous French chef with a US restaurant empire). It was a favourite of Notowidigdo, who was born in Indonesia and moved to Sydney to study and work. Flutter and Notowidigdo started designing furniture for Wayan to set up outdoor dining. They contacted joinery workshops with machines that could cut their designs out of the recycled plywood. “We would give them our computer files and they would cut the wood into various pieces that could be assembled together, kind of like Lego, for our kits,” explains Flutter. “Our original kit had a planter, tables, stools, and those little Plexiglas barriers that could go between tables.”
Unlike architectural projects they were used to working on in which feedback took months if not years, here it was immediate. The restaurant came back wanting stools that could be stacked, smaller tables and different barriers/planter boxes. The City of New York, which kicked off the whole outdoor dining initiative by cutting red tape and granting permits within a day (it was notoriously difficult to score a permit before the pandemic), also kept changing the safety requirements as everyone was learning as they went when it came to Covid and its spread.
“It was a really good collaboration with the restaurants, especially the first ones we did like Wayan, because it was a new situation for everyone,” explains Notowidigdo. “We are still working with them now a year later and they gave us a lot of good feedback.”
Re-ply, which is a separate company but owned by BVN, has now embarked on 25 projects across New York. It is on its third iteration of the outdoor dining kit, which also includes protective structures that can handle the extreme heat and cold weather on the island.
Outdoor dining took off in a big way and according to the city’s Department of Transport more than 12,000 restaurants have taken it up across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It has also transformed neighbourhoods and bought people together after lockdown.
“The streets feel extremely vibrant and I think outdoor dining has given the city this new vibe it didn’t have before,” Flutter says. “The streets are now full of these semi-permanent structures that can be something as simple as some planter boxes and tables and chairs, which is what you may see in Sydney. But they can also be as complex as fully air-conditioned buildings with double glazing.”
Flutter experienced it first hand when he helped the café at the bottom of his building in the West Village. Called the 11th Street Café, iy did not have any money so started a GoFundMe campaign to raise the funds for a re-ply kit, which the trio delivered to the restaurant at a cost price.
“We had all the materials delivered and then all the patrons came on one day and had this working bee to set it up,” he tells WISH. “It has now become like a living room for people in the street and now everyone knows each other. You can come home late from work on a Thursday night and everyone’s drinking in the street in the outdoor dining and they are like, come on, just have one drink. It is impossible to get in and out now without doing that.”
Not everyone has been a fan of the rise in outdoor dining in New York. There are currently a number of lawsuits to try to shut it down against the City of New York, from residents citing noise problems, sanitation, safety issues and even problems with rats. The local government under new mayor Eric Adams has announced it will be made permanent and it is passing a raft of new legislation required to do so, with plans to have it up and running by 2023 (restaurants can apply in 2022). Proponents also hail outdoor dining as saving at least 100,000 jobs in hospitality.
“There are issues with traffic management and sanitation,” says Flutter of the downsides. “They can’t resurface the road because there are all these permanent structures built there and they can’t access the manholes under them. Emergency vehicles are also getting stuck.”
The City is trying to address these issues over the next 12 months, as is re-ply by evolving the design of its outdoor dining kits, including a manhole in any flooring it provides and the ability to clean below the platforms.
The trio have also been expanding their offerings beyond restaurants and set up a temporary working/meeting space for NeueHouse in Madison Square, a co-working space for creatives and the location of BVN’s New York offices.
Called the NeueHouse LongHouse, the pop-up structure was outside for a few months before being taken down and rebuilt inside the building for an event for the NYC X Design Festival. Flutter and Notowidigdo spoke about their experiences with re-ply and the broader outdoor dining movement in the context of what is known as tactical urbanism, whereby community-led design and innovation tackles a problem – in this instance, the Covid-pandemic and helping restaurants stay open.
They have also started working with New Stand, a very cool next-generation pop-up convenience store, designing furniture for its kiosks in lobbies around the city. Re-ply did its first installation outside New York in Miami recently and is in the process of designing a kit-of-parts for a cabin that anyone can put together anywhere. The first one will be built in Joshua Tree, California.
And then there is the art side. During the protests when the city was boarded up, many artists painted on or graffitied the plywood and created incredible work that the re-ply team has picked up along the way. Some made it onto outdoor dining furniture the team built while others have become part of exhibitions. Re-ply is now doing an artist outreach program of sorts, trying to connect the art with the artist so it can be put on display at The Smithsonian in 2022.
When it comes to the future of re-ply, the trio is keen to expand the business to use other recyclable materials as well as expanding its use. They are also streamlining their design and digital fabrication abilities. Dowzer, who is now back in Sydney, sees the potential for re-ply as limitless.
“I think there are two parts to it when you are talking about the future of re-ply, and that is the reuse of materials and then fabrication locally,” he tells WISH. “Thanks to Covod, importing things from overseas is actually really tough, but the idea of getting it made locally by local people means you can take the design of something and have it created anywhere in the world. That is a fundamental shift in terms of logistics as well as reducing the environmental footprint of products.”
Dowzer can’t quite believe he is chatting to WISH about what he thought would be a seize-the-moment project that has now taken on a life of its own. “We expected this to last for three to four weeks,” he says, “and now it’s a real business than has been going for well over 18 months.”
Re-ply may have started because a few architects wanted to help New York at its lowest, but the project ended up helping Dowzer, Notowidigdo and Flutter get through the pandemic themselves. “Just to see the smiles on everyone’s faces and knowing we were doing something good for the city by recycling the plywood boards,” says Notowidigdo of the positives of the experience. “It was a really good feeling – and still is – to know we were able turn something bad into something good.”
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