Empire Stores

For the last half century, seven magnificent and abandoned warehouses lay empty on the transforming Brooklyn waterfront. Originally known as “Fortress Brooklyn” this massive, continuous wall of buildings originally separated a residential community from the dangerous working waterfront and provided warehousing for ship’s “stores.” These seven massive buildings held coffee beans, rising in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge from just after the Civil War, and were named for their function combined with the rapidly expanding city’s aspirations: The Empire Stores. The redesign of the Empire Stores began when the City of New York held a competition to request innovative designs to rejuvenate and reinvent the structures for new uses to support Brooklyn Bridge Park. The building’s users would activate the new park space and its proceeds would support its public programming. Our aspirational designs won this competition and created over 443,000 square feet of renovated space with a modern rooftop addition. The design combines public spaces with private enterprise and contemporary architecture with historic restoration. The new Empire Stores reflects the creative ethos of Brooklyn and the history of the neighborhood. Our competition design was fully realized including a waterfront museum, public rooftop park, and open courtyard slicing through the building, combined with restaurants, a marketplace, and creative businesses. The building is the face of “New Brooklyn” featuring food, culture, entrepreneurship, sustainable parks, innovative tech, and creative social spaces. Multiple sources inspired the design concept combining contemporary and historic architecture. The “anarchitecture” of radical artist Gordon Matta-Clark inspired the “slices” of public space through the historic warehouses, revealing their interior surfaces and materials. The abandoned masonry walls reminiscent of Piranesi’s “Carcieri” drawings inspired a spiraling sequence of stairs, bridges, and terraces, encouraging movement from darkness into light leading to the rooftop park. The dramatic slicing of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges through the DUMBO neighborhood inspired the diagonal passage framing views of the city and the river. Creative architecture was combined with technical innovation to realize our design vision. Contemporary steel additions rest on 19th century timber; a massive concrete matte foundation was slid under huge stone walls to replace decayed timber piles. The lack of any fenestration (only cast-iron shutters) inspired a design that sets windows at the interior of the masonry walls, eliminating mullions and revealing the depth of the arches. Fire testing and energy modeling permitted exposing the timber columns and joists and allowed massive masonry walls to be fully exposed. A revolutionary deployable “aqua-fence” was fabricated to protect the structure from climate change and future storm events. The rich relationship between public and private space, views, and program is the design’s salient feature. The vertical courtyard, or “Creative Commons,” slices through the building, re-connecting Brooklyn Bridge Park with the neighborhood, leading to the new public rooftop park. Voyeuristic sequences cut through offices and conference areas, combining public spaces with creative enterprise. What was once the dividing wall of “Fortress Brooklyn” offers public passage, unifying the community and re-engaging the neighborhood with its new public park, and extends it up onto a public rooftop park overlooking the Manhattan skyline.