By some measures, the reconstruction of the old Domino Sugar refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront makes no sense at all. It was expensive to build. It contains not a single apartment, let alone anything affordable that might ameliorate New York City’s housing crisis. And it is not a cultural facility, which is what so many enormous and obsolete industrial structures of landmark quality end up becoming these days, in the manner of the Tate Modern, in London, or Dia Beacon, upstate, or Mass MoCA, in the Berkshires. The just completed Refinery at Domino is now, of all things, an office building, which you would think is the last thing the city needs today, considering that around 20 percent of its office space is currently vacant.
But this is the best piece of new architecture along the New York waterfront right now, and, arguably, the most important, which tells you how wrong the common wisdom can be. As a work of design, it’s the most compelling juxtaposition of old and new that the city has seen since the completion of the Hearst Tower, in 2006. There are some curious similarities between Hearst and Domino, in fact. In much the same way that Norman Foster, Hearst’s architect, used a structurally bold glass tower as a counterpoint to the grandiose base designed by Joseph Urban in the 1920s—hoping that sleek new architecture would help purge the Hearst Corporation of its founder’s pomposity—Vishaan Chakrabarti, of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, the architect for Domino, had to enact an even greater feat of exorcism as he worked to craft something meaningful for 21st-century New York out of the remains of a 19th-century building that had been a harsh and oppressive working environment for an industrial corporation whose profits had come, in part, from enslaved plantation workers.
