Writes Justin Davidson, in "Light-Drenched Offices Fill the Shell of Domino Sugar/A refinery with a dirty past, spotlessly reimagined" (NY Magazine).
September 30, 2023
Architect Vishaan Chakrabarti saw that "[t]he way to revamp the refinery... was to drop a freestanding building with desirable ceiling heights into the perimeter and use the old as a screen."
"The floors would align irregularly with the arched windows, but that unpredictability would be an asset, making each floor distinctive. At first glance, the result looks like a magic trick, a ship in a bottle — or rather a bottle in a ship — with a thick-walled headquarters of sugar production demoted to decorative sleeve.... What has been lost in this exercise of rationalism is the Gothic weirdness of the plant’s former guts, the platforms and voids and catwalks that characterized a place designed around inanimate objects and the transformation of a product from goo to granules. The result is plainer and more conventional, but preserving that interior drama would have come at the cost of clarity and usability...."
Writes Justin Davidson, in "Light-Drenched Offices Fill the Shell of Domino Sugar/A refinery with a dirty past, spotlessly reimagined" (NY Magazine).
Writes Justin Davidson, in "Light-Drenched Offices Fill the Shell of Domino Sugar/A refinery with a dirty past, spotlessly reimagined" (NY Magazine).
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28 comments:
It's attractive, but unless you're up in the vault on top, you don't really have a view from the windows. You can see sunlight (or whatever weather) and out through the holes in the surrounding wall (the old windows), but from the photos, it doesn't look like look out and see the river.
The author claims NY was “built on sugar.”
I always thought of the huge chimney as a giant middle finger saying FUCK YOU! To Manhattan.
They are leaving g that up, right?
John Henry
Looks decently executed.
While Europe has an (excess) of old buildings, the US has started a collection of dilapidated but sturdy buildings, which, perhaps this similar action could be used to revitalize.
I want to like it but…my architecture for accountants prof had a word- responsible? The interiors are unique and not unpleasant. Outside it still looks abandoned…
…and who needs nine floors of office space in that area? Certainly not the productive economy and government is having a hard time absorbing the current vacancies. Maybe for the meth heads?
Sackcloth and ashes.
Great story/photos. Thanks!
A new soul w/in an old body.
I love it.
I think it’s beautiful, and a great solution to the problem of wanting to preserve the old while bringing in the comforts of the new. It kind of reminds me of the Brooklyn Museum, which took a classical building and dropped a space-age donut at the entrance. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
https://architizer.com/projects/brooklyn-museum-entry-and-plaza/
Let's see that glass house at the age of the Domino structure.
Bad America! Bad! Bad!
It's symbol of the decline of the west. Offices for managers and electron pushers replace a facility for actually making something.
But the managers want to hide in the hollowed-out shell behind the facade of genuine production. Like America itself, a hollow nation, a glass house pretending to be made of brick, infested with busy bug men doing nothing but greedily devouring any remaining muscle and sinew and reproducing their own kind.
But on the bright side...
Amazing and beautiful.
New building inside the skin of historic shells are pretty common in Ireland.
>"Domino has a lot of terrible history to wrestle with, much of it legible but not obvious in PAU’s design. The Havemeyer family, like New York as a whole, was built on sugar, which depended on slavery and then sharecropping. It’s a taut chain that runs back from today’s workplace cool to lethal conditions on the Brooklyn waterfront, forced labor in the Caribbean, and systematized kidnappings in West Africa."<
Really? This 'New York/Curbed' architecture critic was doing so well with a lovely architectural analysis of this lovely new building - in his article about architecture. But that was insufficient -- he just had to mar it with a whole long paragraph about this irrelevant shit. New York Magazine -- but of course...
Well. It was their money, and that's how they spent it.
I've been in some churches converted to multifloor condos. The lovely stained glass windows were interrupted by the floors, leaving some rooms with a nice floor to arch window, and others with a window starting halfway up the wall and disappearing into the ceiling.
There were two problems with this. First, some windows were not childproof. I guess they were code compliant 25 years ago when I saw them, but today the windows would have to be sealed, blocked from opening, or verboten! by building code. Second, some rooms ended up feeling like they were cut in half vertically, which of course they were.
The condos sold, though, so yay for that developer who saw and did things well beyond my puny imagination.
I'm glad they saved the grand old structure, but they have nothing to atone for. If the architects are pretending to have discovered equity and justice with their design, well..... let them think what they want. As for the middle finger, if that's what it is, who wouldn't? It's New York.
Is there anything with a clean past?
Novartis acquired the old NECCO (wafer) manufacturing plant in Cambridge MA, converting it into an R&D center for drug discovery. Before modernization could begin, they had to steam-wash the walls to remove all the embedded sugar from the candy-making process. Never like NECCO (New England Candy Co), but old shoes with new feet...
That building looks beautiful but that article looks like dreck, a dipshit lib bitching the typical progressive complaints about Domino sugar corporation.
A ‘dirty past’ today is less to do with a warning not to repeat, if it was wouldn’t be trying to implement a lot thing that look like a’dirty past’. Spotting a ‘dirty past’ everywhere is more about an easy score in the attempt to acquire authority to do things you thought you could not do otherwise.
Sorry I’ve gone on a tangent here. But I had to put this down while it’s fresh in my mind. If I leave it for a cafe I might forget.
Yummm, sugar.
I'm drawn to the notion that European/Western global dominance was in large part a giant sugar rush beginning in the 17th C.
This article made me look up the Tennessee Brewery, which was renovated and converted about 30 years ago. One and two BR apartments. I was in the building after it was gutted and reinforced, but before the conversion--it was a bit Escheresque at that time.
One of the more interesting conversions here was the long-abandoned Central Station, the Amtrack stop between Nahwleens and Chicargo. It was a location for ICRR offices and a hotel for train crews, now a Hilton property capitalizing on Memphis music and food (and more power to them).
Lem writes, "Is there anything with a clean past?"
No. Nothing.
Except Justin Davidson. You know the type.
Great blend of styles and construction and reuse with an unabrasive atmosphere.
I like the lack of direct sunlight. I think it's highly overrated. Perhaps from having locations on the south side of buildings too often.
There's no brick like old brick.
A farmer here in Iowa started a small farm implement manufacturing plant. Good products, then hit gold when he cloned John Deere planting meters. He kept expanding his plant size. Buying up ground when he needed more space. One farmer had his house where Kinze wanted to build. He refused to sell. So Kinze just built all the way around him. Access in and out, that was it. Final the farmer surrendered and sold. Kinze put a roof over the hole, and the 3 bedroom brick home sits in the middle of the plant, still there the last time I was in the plant.
This 'building in a building' isn't new in Brooklyn. A local private school (Packer Collegiate) bought an abandoned but historic mid-19th century church on Clinton Street (the original St. Ann's Church) and constructed a new school building inside the husk of the old church. A twist on the 'ship in a bottle' idea. But it's a very expensive way to build.
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