Archinect - News

PAU-designed The Refinery at Domino reopens Brooklyn's most iconic building to the modern workplace

2023-09-27T15:25:00-04:00

A landmark era of high-profile additions and architectural changes to the historic Brooklyn waterfront has ushered in a new chapter with today’s official public unveiling of the PAU-designed The Refinery at Domino office component at the 11-acre former Domino Sugar Factory site in Williamsburg.

The new, 15-story glass commercial space was constructed inside the building’s old brick masonry shell, offering tenants 460,000 square feet of Class A office space enhanced by carefully-inserted biophilic elements and marked by the firm’s attenuation to ascendant health and wellness considerations typical in modern workplace design.

Photo: Max Touhey

A 12-foot gap left between the new and old structures provides space for Field Operations’s 17-count in-house arboretum while standardizing a misalignment with the floors and helping to flood the bonetti/kozerski-designed office interiors with natural light and expanded access to vegetation throughout the day.

Photo: Max Touhey

A vaulted 27,000-s...

First look at Domino Sugar Factory’s 11-acre park and waterfront esplanade

2017-04-20T18:17:00-04:00

James Corner Field Operations will preserve 21 Raw Sugar Warehouse columns, nearly 600 feet of crane tracks, and 30 industrial artifacts, including 36-foot-tall syrup tanks that were used in the refining process, mooring bollards, and bucket elevators–not dissimilar from their efforts at the High Line.

Two Trees Management has revealed new details and renderings of the 11-acre park that will anchor their Williamsburg mega-development at the Domino Sugar Factory site. Domino Park, which will open in the summer of 2018, will have a new waterfront esplanade, six acres of parkland, and a wealth of preserved artifact.

Revealed: $1.7B Streetcar Proposal Connecting the Brooklyn-Queens Waterfront

2016-01-06T10:58:00-05:00

The dream of a Brooklyn-Queens light rail is quickly moving into the realm of reality. A non-profit advocacy group called Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector has officially formed to address the need for a more robust transportation system that could connect underserved, and now booming, areas of Brooklyn and Queens. They’ve just released a detailed proposal revealing the route and the potential design the modern streetcars could take on.

Planning the Unplanned

2014-11-18T14:33:00-05:00

Daniel Campo, an urban planner and professor of planning at Morgan State University, is particularly interested in those recreational spaces that aren’t planned or designed, but are appropriated by residents for their own purposes. [...] Dylan Gauthier, a public artist, educator, and writer based in North Brooklyn, walked around these parks with Campo to discuss the benefits of unplanned spaces for recreation [...].

NYC chief city planner Amanda Burden on public space and densification

2014-04-21T13:07:00-04:00

If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner, it is that public spaces have power. It's not just the number of people using them, it's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there. Public space can change how you live in a city, how you feel about a city, whether you choose one city over another, and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city.

Amanda Burden served as New York City's chief planner under Mayor Bloomberg, leading such revitalization projects as the High Line and Brooklyn's waterfront. You can watch the full TED talk below, or read the complete transcript here.