Safety
New York City Displays Updated Sidewalk Sheds
Meant to offer a more open, well-lit experience than standard sheds, the designs will be available to contractors when the city rolls out new scaffolding rules
Two of six pending New York City scaffolding redesigns are on display in front of the Dept. of Buildings headquarters for the next few weeks.
Two new sidewalk shed designs that New York City officials say will be available for use in the coming months were errected in lower Manhattan last week.
The models are a product of an RFP issued by the Dept. of Buildings in 2023, as the then-Adams Administration looked to move away from the “BSA sheds,” or the typical dark green, tunnel-like plywood structures. The Mamdani Administration has continued the program and plans to introduce the new shed options as part of a package of new rules around scaffolding and facade inspections as soon as this summer.
On display were designs made by a team including Arup and KNE studio. One version, the yellow rigid shed, is intended for construction and other heavy-duty applications, with solid sheeting or a steel grid as a protective deck. The blue flex shed is meant for less intense street protection, such as facade care. Its roof is largely plexiglass. A third version from the design group that bolts into the accompanying building and offers the most minimal wasn’t built for demonstration, but will still be available for contractors, says Seth Wolfe, a principal at Arup.
Prefabricated nodes at the edges of each shed design can hold beams of various lengths, no matter how high the protection needs to be or how far away from the building it needs to extend. Photo courtesy of the New York City Dept. of Buildings Caption The new scaffolding swaps the aluminum pipes of BSA sheds for a heavier-weight steel, which is part of why the structures don’t have extra reinforcements running parallel to the sidewalk, says Suchi Reddy, founder of Reddymade, an architecture and design firm that was part of the project. Neither the design team or the city has an estimate of what these new scaffolding options will cost. The equipment will be more expensive compared to the standard BSA models for which there’s already a large supply. “There are stockyards full of that material,” points out Ahmed Tigani, commissioner of the. NYCDOB. But as stock components grow, the cost of newer designs should come down, Tigani says.
Further production and implementation of the new shed pieces should lower costs because components are reusable. The prefabricated steel nodes, or junctions that allow pillars and roof beams to meet, join with industry-standard equipment, Wolfe says. Scaffolding contractors can swap out different lengths of connector beams to match the dimensions needed for a given site.
Whether the BSA sheds will be banned depends on market adoption of the new options, Tigani says. The DOB has pre-approved the intellectual property of the designs to ease them through the permitting process. Scaffolding plans for a project can either be approved “pro cert,” where the Engineer of Record takes full responsibility for the design being up to code, or the drawings can go through standard filing, which is a longer, more in-depth review from a DOB examiner, says Willy Pilku, CEO of Core Scaffolding, which worked on the designs currently on display. Typically, custom scaffolding goes through the latter, longer review, while the BSA sheds get the pro cert treatment.
Links to the new designs—including a trio of options from a team led by the architecture firm PAU—will also be included in new scaffolding rules the DOB plans to issue. The city plans to lengthen the amount of time between facade inspections and keep the maximum distance scaffolding has to extend off the side of a building down to 40 ft. There will also be new penalties introduced for sheds kept up longer than 180 days. To that end, the city has also been making progress on the capital work needed on some of its own properties, like the $650 million in NYCHA facade repairs the mayor announced in March.
