INDUSTRY CITY. BROOKLYN

CLIENT: Jamestown Properties SCOPE OF WORK: Master Planning, Architecture, Interior Design SIZE: Existing 6.5 M SF, Proposed 1.5 M SF LOCATION: Brooklyn, NY STATUS: Built PROGRAM: Office, Retail, Mixed Use

S9 Architecture led the conversion of a former distribution facility along the Brooklyn waterfront into Industry City, a hotbed for innovation, collaboration, and community that’s reinventing urban manufacturing for the 21st century. Developer Jamestown Properties envisioned Industry City as an ecosystem of innovation, a synergistic space where New York City’s makers, artisans, small businesses and digital enterprises could create and collaborate. S9 Architecture masterplanned the 30-acre, 6.5 million-sf campus in partnership with Perkins Eastman, and adapted its 16 industrial buildings for contemporary reuse. Industry City is now home to over 400 local businesses, anchor-scale retail tenants, an Innovation Lab providing job training in emerging industries, a 40,000-sf Food Hall, office space, and a training facility for the Brooklyn Nets.

Versatile light manufacturing space was created from the existing industrial-scale floor plates on the buildings’ upper floors, with retail and public amenities at street level. Innovation Alley, an experiential passageway framed with industrial ‘wickets’, connects the site’s primary finger-like buildings, and creates public courtyards and event spaces from the loading bays between them. Raised sidewalks along loading docks, safer crossings on busy Third Avenue, and an enhanced Second Avenue streetscape are human-scale, pedestrian-friendly modifications that improve circulation, link with public transportation, and leverage proximity to nearby Piers Park and the waterfront. The Food Hall provides a communal site for interaction among tenants, and a gourmet destination for area residents. Bold way-finding graphics evoke the complex’s neo-industrial ethos and create a strong sense of place, while connecting the disparate structures within the massive campus.

Industry City is the largest of several innovation hubs along Brooklyn’s re-developed waterfront. Its prime industrial infrastructure and diverse network of creators and entrepreneurs have generated 6,000 local jobs, with a long-term goal of bringing 20,000 manufacturing and tech jobs back to New York City by 2025.