Industrial-to-Office Renovation Appeals to Creative and Tech Tenants

The Brooklyn Navy Yard, a New York City waterfront neighborhood known for its shipbuilding and industrial history, is home to a new adaptive use project that caters to creative tenants, such as photographers, artists and tech entrepreneurs looking for office space with a unique aesthetic.

Through a gut renovation of a former masonry factory built in the 1920s, Brooklyn-based architecture firm Worrell Yeung created 77 Washington, a multi-use and adaptable workspace that celebrates and embraces its historic features.

Anchoring the site is a six-story, 38,000-square-foot building, which can support about 30 occupants per floor. Each floor features an open-plan configuration and includes flexible workspace with shared spaces such as conference rooms, pantries and kitchens.

Four other historic buildings surround the main structure, including three adjacent one-story buildings, one of which houses a private artist studio that is just over 3,000 square feet. The other one is a photography studio that accommodates a staff of five employees.

While the entire building is currently leased, Worrell Yeung initially designed the building without knowing exactly who would rent it.

“Our approach was to design to the maximum allowable occupancy but keep the layouts very open and flexible, while highlighting the rich textures and materials of each floor [that are] unique to this building,” says the firm. “The proportions of the interior spaces were very generous, and we kept them that way, affording more spacious work environments than what you would normally get in the city.”

The main building is fully leased by local entrepreneurial tech hub Newlab, which expanded from another 84,000-square-foot office building across the street at 19 Morris Avenue.

Adaptive reuse projects come with their fair share of challenges, and the team at Worrell Yeung encountered numerous structural hurdles while renovating the space.

“Despite the building being in great shape, there were many portions of the masonry walls that needed to be rebuilt to ensure safety and longevity without them looking like they were replaced or patched,” says the firm.

After demolition started, the team also discovered that the steel supporting the sidewalk vault, which is a partial extension of a building's basement under the adjacent sidewalk, had completely deteriorated. “We were amazed and lucky that it had never collapsed. This [element] was carefully rebuilt, and now can support a fire engine,” says the firm.

The interior finishes of the suites pay homage to the building’s original use with diamond-plate floors, unfinished steel railings and doors, and concrete flooring. Highly textured brick walls with layers of old paint were cleaned, sealed and complemented with clean, uniform concrete floors and white walls.

Worrell Yeung worked with Navy Yard-based woodworker Bien Hecho to salvage and repurpose the wood from the timber floor joists as a custom conference room table and lobby bench.

A repeating motif of gridwork appears throughout the complex, which co-principal Jejon Yeung says is “a nod to the aesthetics of storied factory buildings and Navy Yard warehouses, which historically featured grids in their sash windows, fencing and ship docks.”

In order to add a design element to the elevator bank, which requires elevator shaft openings to be protected by bars or gates for safety, Worrell Yeung applied the same lattice motif seen throughout the project to the steel grids which cover the shaft windows, creating an “elegant reading of the elevator on the building's exterior when observing the structure from the street,” the firm says.

Access to outdoor space is plentiful at the complex. An original garage located to the left of the main factory was removed and the space was transformed into a lush 1,200-square-foot garden, designed by Michael van Valkenburgh Associates, and a bike storage area for all tenants.

Worrell Yeung preserved the garden’s original yellow wood gates, visible from the street and “exterior brick walls were left untouched to reveal a ghost imprint of the previous structure.”

The benches in the garden are made of three solid oak logs, collected from New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire by a shipbuilder after various storms over the past decade.

All of the site’s buildings are connected by a central outdoor courtyard. In order to get the courtyard to open to the sky, the project team had to remove an original roof covering. In the lobby, a large window draws light from the private courtyard.

Even in a dense urban environment, the firm says the building offers plenty of access to daylight, with windows in restrooms and even in the elevator, and views of the Manhattan skyline from the upper floors and roof deck.

To blend with the existing fabric of the historic warehouse neighborhood, careful consideration of the exterior design was paramount to Worrell Yeung in its effort to thoughtfully juxtapose contemporary materials with the streetscape’s rich history, and “highlight found conditions while also updating [the building] to accommodate new uses and new programs,” says co-principal Max Worrell.

Worrell Yeung removed infill masonry walls to restore the original storefront openings of the single-story structures now housing artist and photography studios, “creating a strong visual presence at street level on Park Avenue and filling the interiors with natural light,” the firm says.

The project team created a large glass block clerestory for the corner artist studio to bring in natural light and allow passersby to see the tasks taking place inside the building. The exterior of each building was painted dark blue for a cohesive look.

“The neighborhood is uniquely diverse. On one side you have a low-rise residential neighborhood with historic townhouses. On the other, it is a mixture of light manufacturing, work/live artist studios, and all that's going on in the Brooklyn Navy Yards,” says the firm. “By restoring these old buildings — making them clean, safe and more transparent and inviting — and providing more greenery, we were enhancing what was already there without redefining the neighborhood nor introducing something foreign.”

According to CoStar News, the Brooklyn Navy Yard is a 225-acre former shipbuilding facility that is undergoing a $1 billion multistage redevelopment into a manufacturing and tech center.