05 Sep Architecture’s Second Looks, and Second Acts
Domino Refinery Featured in NY Times Culture’s Fall Preview 2023:
“The most consequential kind of double take in architecture, especially when it comes to grappling with the climate crisis, is adaptive reuse: the reconfiguration of existing buildings to give them new lives without wasting the embodied carbon of their original construction.
New York’s Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), the landscape firm James Corner Field Operations and the developer Two Trees Management have stretched the definition a bit, retaining only the original outer shell of the 1884 Domino Sugar Refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront, once central to the Havemeyer sugar empire.
Inside that historic wrapper, PAU has inserted essentially an entirely new office building, covering 425,000 square feet and sheathed in glass, with a barrel-vaulted form that echoes the silhouette of the original window openings. Along its perimeter runs a 12-foot gap between new architecture and old, open to the sky, into which are slotted walkways and trees.”