Website

 

Project Overview

“Fortress Brooklyn” was the name for the continuous warehouses that originally enclosed Brooklyn in the 19th century, cutting off the community from the dangerous working waterfront. Today, the waterfront has been reclaimed and reinvented as one of New York City’s most beautiful public spaces, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and DUMBO is one of the its most dynamic neighborhoods. But the remaining historic coffee warehouses facing the park had decayed and remained empty after half a century.

A design competition was held to determine how to save and restore these remarkable structures, and use their revenue to support the park. This recently completed design for the Empire Stores is the result of this competition, and creates a face for the new Brooklyn skyline facing Manhattan. The design for these seven warehouses, with significant contemporary additions, a dramatic public courtyard, and a rooftop public park brings together the best of the old and new Brooklyn.

The design combines all the amazing qualities that Brooklyn is known for. History, authenticity and creativity are reflected in the radical approach to design and program. Cultural museums, and cutting edge tech and creative firms fit side by side with inventive restaurants and retail surrounded by gardens and green spaces. Inventive new public spaces reconnect the community to the waterfront, including the vertical creative commons courtyard slicing through the building leading to a roof top public park overlooking the Manhattan skyline make the Empire Stores a diverse cultural hub of innovation for Brooklyn.

Project Commissioner

Midtown Equities

Project Creator

STUDIO V Architecture

Team

Studio V Architecture: Architect and Planner
Jay Valgora - Principal
Gianfranco Cerini - Senior Designer
Guido Furlanello - Senior Designer
John MacCallum - Senior Designer
Gordon Wilhelm Senior Designer
Sishir Varghese - Designer
Andy Wu - Designer
Zongye Lee - Designer

Perkins Eastman Architects and S9: Associate Architect / Architect of Record
Mary-Jean Eastman, Managing Principal

MJM Associate Construction: General Contractor
Mike Marino, Principal

Silman Associates: Structural Engineer
Scott Hughes, Principal
Pat Arnett, Associate

Mottola Rini Engineers: M/E/P Engineer
Tony Rini, Principal

Sullivan Group: Civil Engineer
Mark Sullivan, Principal

Tillotson Design Associates
Suzan Tillotson, Principal

Spiezle Architectural Group, Inc: Sustainability/LEED Consultant
Frank Sherman, Director of Sustainability


Higgins & Quasebarth & Partners: Historic Consultant
Elise Quasebarth, Principal
Ward Dennis, Partner

Project Brief

For over 150 years, between the iconic Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges on the Brooklyn waterfront, lay seven beautiful historic brick structures. These Civil-War-era structures were named after their use as coffee “stores” or storage warehouses, and for the epithet of a growing state: the Empire Stores.
The architect’s radical designs inject new life into the structures. The designs combine creative contemporary architecture with exacting historic rehabilitation, and combine overlapping uses with public spaces that reveal the inhabitants and historic structures. On top of the building’s extensive green roofs sit two-story glass and steel additions with gardens and terraces frame stunning views of the surrounding bridges. A glass and steel courtyard and passage slices through the historic structures, reconnecting the community cut off from its waterfront. The public passage reveals original sparkling schist walls, around which a spiraling steel and concrete staircase culminates in a public rooftop park revealing a stunning Manhattan Skyline. The unique design combines tech offices and public spaces with cultural and hospitality amenities to create a unique interface between work and play, public spaces and private commerce, that perfectly expresses the ethos of creative contemporary Brooklyn.

Designing an oxymoron isn’t easy: synthesizing old and new, honoring an industrial structure while reinventing it and preserving history while creating meaningful new designed to be representative of our time and culture. This is the design of Empire Stores: speaking to Brooklyn’s historic past, expressing its vibrant culture today, and pointing the way to its future.

Project Innovation/Need

These magnificent arched structures were not designed for human habitation, and never contained windows, conditioned space, or utilities. The buildings suffered after a half century of neglect from fires, collapsing walls, and a massive flood sweeping through during Superstorm Sandy, wiping out columns and leaving the empty historic buildings endangered. The original foundations of underground tar-soaked timbers had long ago rotted away—leaving massive masonry walls held up only by the soil below compressed by 150 years of supporting mountains of coffee. After over a century of use, the last remnants of coffee beans were still found within the cracks of its heaving wooden floors.

The innovative design of Empire Stores has made the project an enormously successful on multiple levels. From a design perspective, the Empire Stores weaves together contemporary architecture with the beautiful historic fabric of the authentic industrial buildings in surprising and beautiful ways. Its approach to historic preservation and adaptive reuse radically and successfully combines old and new architecture, preserving authentic materials and contrasting them with more open green buildings using the latest sustainable and resiliency technologies.

The project has been an enormous success, breaking every record for rental properties in DUMBO, and the funds from the building support the public programming in Brooklyn Bridge Park. As a public amenity, the buildings are not restricted to private tenants, but feature cultural uses, public passages, and a rooftop public park that reconnects the local community to its historic waterfront.

Design Challenge

Every element of the design of Empire Stores was a tremendous challenge. How could we restore the buildings when the original foundations had rotted away and the walls were slowly collapsing? How can we meet fire codes while preserving and expressing the beautiful “first-growth” timber columns and beams, and replace those that were destroyed by fire and flood? What is the right fenestration design in a masonry building that never had windows but used shutters? How can we expose beautiful brick walls, and still meet stringent energy codes? In a time of climate change, how can we make an historic building resilient that sits in the flood plane, cannot be raised or moved, and was inundated with six feet of water in the last major storm?

The foundation replacement required highly state-of-the-art “structural surgery” including a new matte foundation poured under and toothed into the existing massive masonry walls supported by innovative helical piles. We conducted fire char tests, allowing us to preserve the timber columns, reuse wood from the courtyard to replace missing elements, and expose the beautiful wooden ceilings.

The original 437 great arched windows had deformed in unpredictable ways, so we designed innovative large windows set inside the frame of the arches, eliminating the need for visible mullions that facilitated our historic approvals, saved significant money, and look more beautiful. Our resiliency solution was most dramatic: a state-of-the-art deployable flood barrier that wraps the building in a storm event and helps save the neighborhood too.

Sustainability

The project exceeds conventional standards of sustainability, including LEED Silver. Many green designs are unconventional: recycling bricks from destroyed warehouses to rebuild collapsing walls, and reusing original timbers as structure to support the new courtyard and replace original timbers destroyed by fire and flood. Large green roofs reduce urban heat island and provide beautiful public spaces. Stormwater is diverted to a cistern to irrigate the public park.

While exempt from energy code by the historic designation, the team conducted thermal analyses to exceed energy code requirements. This concluded the colossal brick walls, over seven wythes thick, provided sufficient thermal mass in conjunction with high performance windows, enhanced roof insulation, and green roofs. The design exceeds energy code requirements while exposing beautiful natural materials and obviating the need to cover them with insulation.

Our design for resiliency is one of the building’s unique sustainable features. The architects designed a custom flood barrier: stored off site, unfolded, and deployed in the event of an extreme storm to protect the building and surrounding waterfront neighborhood.

The most sustainable feature of all in the Empire Stores design is the preservation and restoration of these remarkable 19th century historic structures.

Funds generated by the building for the next 99 years support the upkeep of Brooklyn Bridge Park--undeniably the preemptive piece of new green infrastructure in New York. The park is certified as an example of best practices in coastal design by the Waterfront Alliance’s Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines.

Architecture - Commercial - Constructed

This award celebrates the design process and product of planning, designing and constructing form, space and ambience that reflect functional, technical, social, and aesthetic considerations. Consideration given for material selection, technology, light and shadow. 
More Details