Domino Sugar

A living landmark on the East River of New York City, 15-story, 460,000-square-foot office building with a unique biophilic twist. Designed by Practice for Architecture and Urbanism with landscaping by Field Operations, the barrel-vaulted glass structure melds history, innovative engineering, and sustainability in an adaptive reuse project for the 21st century.

The architecture team decided to embrace this inconsistency and create a glass building within the 1800s brick façade with more standardized heights between floors, ranging from 12 to 14 feet tall, that allow light deep into the 33,000-square-foot plates. It’s topped by a vaulted glass roof for which the team developed a custom shading system and ceramic frit (a technique used to reduce glare and solar gain). What’s more, the new Refinery building is all-electric powered, meaning that it will have net-zero carbon emissions.