Rogers Partners collaborated with Nanotronics to design its flagship production center, turning a historic Civil War era shipbuilding warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard into a vertically integrated advanced manufacturing facility and headquarters. The design integrates old and new building features as much as it integrates the high-tech production process, creating a fully integrated facility that houses research, design, prototyping, and fabrication under one roof.
Research revealed the building was constructed by Department of the Navy to facilitate their newest technology, the armor plating of wooden ships. Leaving the building’s shell largely intact, enclosed, yet transparent, “pods” are stacked on two floors with double-height public spaces nestled in between. This approach resolves the critical design challenge of creating enclosed workspaces – some of which need to be airtight, soundproof, and climate-controlled –without cutting up the building, impeding the flow of collaborative spaces or compromising the beauty of the long, narrow building. The Pods were constructed of wood, cross laminated timber, to expedite construction. The wood surfaces were left exposed with blackened steel railings, stairs, and wainscot, harking back the steel plated boats that once occupied the building.
Location: Brooklyn, NY | Completion: 2021 | Size: 44,000 SF | Client: Nanotronics
Designed to be cleaner and more efcient than traditional factories, the project’s adaptive re-use of legacy infrastructure greatly reduces the carbon footprint of the City’s frst “smart factory”. Nanotronics’ design incorporates sustainably manufactured Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) construction for the new interior, where the CLT operates as a carbon sink, storing an estimated value of 411.2 metric tons of CO2, efectively ofsetting the new construction’s emissions.
