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Adaptive Reuse

Worrell Yeung’s rehabilitation project honours historic site near Brooklyn Navy Yard

The completed renovation and redesign of 77 Washington, draws from the neighbourhood’s rich history and design typologies abundant in early 20th Century NY warehouses

by Georgina Johnston 21 September 2021

Located on the corner of Washington Avenue and Park Avenue near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, this ambitious adaptive reuse project has rejuvenated a six-storey, 38,000 sq ft, former masonry factory built in the 1920s, as well as a cluster of four other historic buildings adjacent to the property. 

The building honours the site’s past while generating a mutable, multi-use workspace that can flexibly accommodate an array of tenants. A sprawling artist studio and a photography studio occupy the adjacent one storey structures. 

Located at the site’s centre, the six-storey factory building anchors the overall complex. This is bordered on the right side, to the south, by three one storey structures connected by a private, verdant central courtyard open to the sky, carved out by removing a roof that had originally covered the space. A garage located to the factory’s left was removed and the space transformed into a lush garden, designed by Michael van Valkenburgh Associates, and a bike storage area, accessible to all tenants.

By removing infill masonry walls, Worrell Yeung restored the original storefront openings of the single-storey structure that houses artist and photography studios, creating a strong visual presence at street level on Park Avenue and filling the interiors with natural light. For the corner artist studio, they created a large glass block clerestory to bring in natural, diffuse light that also glows like a lantern in the evening and activates the corner. The exterior of each building was painted dark blue to unify the buildings.

In the garden, the original yellow wood gates, visible from the street, were preserved and exterior brick walls were left untouched to reveal a ghost imprint of the previous structure. With reference to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the benches in the garden are three solid oak logs, collected after various storms over the past decade from New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire by a shipbuilder that might normally use them for refurbishing boats.

This strategy extends to the interiors of the central, six-storey factory building, where material selections like diamond plate floors, unfinished steel railings and doors, and concrete floors echo the industrial properties inherent in age-old Brooklyn factories. Worrell Yeung worked with Navy Yard based woodworker, Bien Hecho, to salvage and reconstitute the wood from the timber floor joists as a custom conference room table and lobby bench. Highly textured brick walls with layers of old paint were cleaned, sealed and complimented with clean, uniform concrete floors and white walls.

In the lobby, a large window draws light from the private courtyard accessible by the adjacent one storey buildings. As it does throughout the entire complex, gridwork appears repeatedly in the lobby, in the diamond plate steel floor, glass block elements, and a distinctive plywood lobby wall. In order to creatively approach the bar protection requirement for elevator shaft openings, 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, as well as from inside the cab.


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