No doubt, more housing for collegetown here as Ithacating noted last week: the Fontana Apartments building (Club Sudz, former Tung Fong, and Pixel bar in back) may be demolished to make way for a stepped-foundation 6-story mixed-use building to contain 28 apartments on the upper floors and probably retail commercial on the ground floors (plus core space for utilities and stairwells/elevator). The sketch plan submission images are below, done by Architect Jagat Sharma.
I can’t help but be reminded of the Old Town/Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland, where some of the earliest-recorded skyscrapers were built to a height up to 14-stories high, aided by stepped foundations along the steep hillside of the ridge below the castle, so many of the floors were partially supported by solid ground, then stepped-down further up or down. Still, in the days before modern concrete and steel framing techniques, it must have been quite a feat, since they were built entirely out of stone for foundations and facades, and wood framing (a fire in 1700 forced many of these down, however, a large amount of great buildings remain in excellent condition, part of the reason it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site).
This parcel shows a lot of 52 x 119 feet, so if we back-out rear-yard setback and the courtyard areas, six stories times ~5,000 SF per floor gets to a rough total of ~30,000 SF. Minus ground floor commercial (5,000 including some mechanical space) and circulation (say around 12% for the remaining floors), average unit size may be around 800 SF.
