Navy Yard developing as the booming city by the sea

Imagine you're in charge of an old postindustrial city with little open land and a perennially anemic economy. Then a vast district you never knew existed is discovered. It's like a scene from an experimental Czech novel: Pass through a secret door and there's a ghost street grid, handsome buildings from a grand era just out of reach, empty warehouses as big as tankers, and ships as grand as castles. Most of all, a broad waterfront, as close to the sea as your city is likely to get.

If your city is Philadelphia, and quite a bit more real than surreal, you've merely walked down South Broad Street, under I-95, and into the Navy Yard. This hidden world just might be the key to the city's future.

"Clearly you're in a different place," says Mark Sanderson, whose architecture firm DIGSAU is busy on two Navy Yard projects.

Indeed, it's the one place in Philadelphia that's a boomtown of commercial real estate. Rents are up, cranes are flying, and technological innovation, high design, and progressive urbanism are combining to lift our expectations of what this city might be.

The pace of development, and its increasing quality, is raising the stakes for architecture and design and heightening the likelihood that both residential development and a Broad Street subway extension will one day be approved.

Almost everyone at work here is using the place as a living laboratory for building technology, workplace design, and sustainability. "You can see that this place could be a model," says James Freihaut, technology and operations director for the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster, the U.S. Department of Energy co-laboratory based at the Navy Yard. The goal of GPIC is no less than to reinvent the building industry using an integrated systems approach demonstrated on Navy Yard structures.

The first active demonstration, to be built next year, will transform a former Navy recreation center into the GPIC headquarters. The Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake architects, which designed the American embassy in London, will design it and a second demonstration building across the street.

This year, Liberty Property Trust and Synterra Partners will complete the Philadelphia headquarters for GlaxoSmithKline, designed by Robert A.M. Stern; a Marriott hotel, designed by Erdy McHenry Architecture; and a headquarters for the emergent pharmaceutical firm Iroko.