All photos © Max Touhey
Design and Description by PAU
edited by Ron Bernthal
Like the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Industry City, the Domino Sugar Refinery has returned to life as the nerve center of a new working waterfront. An industrial urban landmark originally constructed by Henry Havemeyer, the building has long dominated both Brooklyn’s skyline and economy. The structure was built to consolidate three functions inside three conjoined buildings—the filtering, panning, and finishing of sugar—that required the use of enormous equipment housed in cavernous, multistory spaces purposefully obscured by the repetitive punched arch windows in the masonry.
Although these windows were misaligned across the four facades, together they give the entire structure a singular, monumental appearance, crowned by the muscular smokestack on the west elevation built out of radial brick.
In 2017 PAU started the design for an adaptive-reuse of the original Refinery building, intended to be the crown jewel of the new mixed-use neighborhood, according to the master plan conceived by the PAU architectural firm founder Vishaan Chakrabarti, complete with an activated mix of creative office space, market-rate and affordable housing, neighborhood retail space, and community facilities.
PAU was tasked with creating open architecture that seamlessly connects the existing neighborhood to the recaptured waterfront a quarter-mile long. The result is a $2.5 billion mixed-use redevelopment of an 11-acre abandoned sugar-processing complex on Brooklyn’s East River shoreline, with 425,000 square-feet of workspace housed within a beautiful, idiosyncratic urban artifact that is unique to post-industrial Williamsburg, offering a singular experience for its inhabitants and the larger community alike.
Rather than navigating the misaligned floors and window sills across the combined masonry shell, PAU adopted a different approach: nesting a brand-new building into the existing envelope, with a 10- to 12-foot gap between the new and the old.
By pulling back from the original walls, ideal and standardized floor heights can be achieved, creating best-in-class office space that is designed to meet the needs of new tenants.
The array of historic windows, uninterrupted by interior partitions, reveal expansive views of Manhattan while allowing the extant structure to be appreciated in an unobstructed form. The light and airy perimeter provides a unique experience and enhances natural light penetration into the core. Rising above and in celebration of the historic structure will be a new glass barrel vault, echoing the American Round Arch Style and singular muscular form in which the original Refinery was rendered.
At the ground floor, the windows will be transformed into doors to create a porous enfilade, allowing pedestrians to pass through the Refinery from Kent Avenue into a public foyer to Domino Park.
