Chunky New Williamsburg Apartment Towers Will Transform Brooklyn's Skyline

Renderings via CityRealty

SOUTH WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN — New renderings mysteriously hit the internet Monday of the three chunky apartment towers going up in the vacant lots stretching from 416 to 430 Kent Avenue.

Mysterious, we say, because the folks at ODA Architecture, the firm behind the designs, claimed over the phone that they're not the ones who leaked them. And the pics appear nowhere on their website. They just sort of showed up on CityRealty, an NYC real-estate listings and news website, sometime Monday.

Anyway, however the renderings got out, they're here now, and the magnitude of their effect on the North Brooklyn skyline — and on the view of Manhattan from North Brookyln — is hard to ignore.

Curbed New York is calling the three towers "boxy" and "Jenga-like," while Gothamist is going with "a futuristic nightmare ripped from Blade Runner." Some dude from Gawker thinks they look like "the worst map in a bad FPS."

But ask Eran Chen, the architect to blame, and he'll tell you he was going for "a molded iceberg, sculpted to create the maximum number of views and outdoor spaces.”

The jagged towers at 416 to 430 Kent will be the first big NYC development project of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. They'll eat up three acres of land along the prized Williamsburg waterfront, stretching around 400 feet from Broadway to South 9th Street, according to CityRealty.

"Approved permits filed with the Department of Buildings detail that the plan will comprise 857 rental apartments within three 22-story towers," the real-estate site's news blog, 6ftsq, reported Monday. (Twenty percent of which will reportedly be affordable.) "A publicly accessible park and esplanade will run along the shoreline and connect to the the existing esplanade of the Schaefer Landing development to the south."

For a better understanding of the ODA Architecture firm's heavy (and increasingly heavier) aesthetic imprint on NYC, check out this interactive map from Curbed.