Hollwich Kushner (HWKN) completes 25 Kent tech campus in Brooklyn
30/09/2019.
[Brooklyn - New York] USA
metalocus, ÁNGEL VALDEZ
metalocus, ÁNGEL VALDEZ
25 Kent is an office building, the new Silicon Valley in Williamsburg, according to the masterminds behind the project, Hollwich Kushner (HWKN). The eight-story building at 25 Kent Avenue, the first ground-up commercial office development in the area in over four decades, has officially topped out. The building offers 500,000 square feet of office space, retail at ground level and underground parking. Designed by Gensler with concept designs by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN), 25 Kent wants attract young professionals.
25 Kent by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN). Photograph by Ty Cole
Ground floor plan. 25 Kent by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN).
Standard floor plan. 25 Kent by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN).
Roof plan. 25 Kent by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN).
Section. 25 Kent by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN).
Side elevation. 25 Kent by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN).
25 Kent boast a facade of red brick masonry with blackened steel. The building has a flexible floor plan structure, allowing companies to decide which setup would work best. The project features large floor plates to attract established tech-companies like Google and Amazon, while the lower floors’ smaller layouts will serve startups and creative businesses.
Project description by Hollwich Kushner (HWKN)
25 Kent is a social campus that brings innovators, startup founders, and tech leaders together in one collaborative workplace. Taking cues from the neighborhood’s industrial character, the design stacks a series of brick forms that nod to the materials and proportions of the nearby warehouses. The floors are staggered, creating a ziggurat-shaped building that juts in and out as it together in one collaborative workplace. The short ends of the facade are capped in soaring floor-to-ceiling windows that flood the interiors with sunlight and provide commanding views over Manhattan and Brooklyn.
To create a bustling public core, a retail-lined pedestrian street goes straight through the building’s center. Bookended by landscaped plazas, the walkway will connect upcoming Bushwick Inlet Park with the nearby plaza of the William Vale hotel. What was once a forbidding industrial waterfront is now transformed into a walkable district of parks and public space. Ground-floor retail, including cafes and restaurants, activates the surrounding areas and provides social spaces where people can come together informally.
“The way we work is changing. It’s time our office buildings followed suit. We invited the urban energy of Williamsburg directly into the center of the building, creating a social campus that connects entrepreneurs with the community.”
Matthias Hollwich, Principal and Co-Founder of Hollwich Kushner (HWKN).
"This is a place where companies ranging from innovative startups to established tech leaders can come together and inspire each other. Rather than generic buildings designed to shuffle employees to their sequestered desks efficiently, today’s entrepreneurs want their workplaces to be energetic and social environments that generate interaction and inspire them to do their best work."
Marc Kushner, Principal, and Co-Founder of Hollwich Kushner (HWKN).
Inside, the highly flexible floor plates are designed to support a wide variety of tenants, from young startups to tech leaders. The building combines several types of workspaces to offer environments tailored to each tenant’s particular needs. Open plan office floors offer shared co-working spaces. Fully-equipped makerspaces support prototyping and fabrication, inviting local industry into the building and further diversifying the tenant mix. Glass-enclosed conference rooms and collaborative lounges throughout the building offer places for tenants to work together in a highly focused way.
The innovative H-shaped plan offers several key advantages over a generic donut office building. Instead of a typical 45-foot span between the core and the walls, the building achieves 70-foot spans with three-sided window exposure. Distributing mechanical and circulation cores throughout the building created highly flexible floor plates that can be used by single tenants, two tenants, or adapted for a large quantity of multi-tenant configurations. Both wings of the H-shaped building feature their own circulation and mechanical cores, allowing them to be flexibly subdivided. Bridging the two wings is a shared central space that generates chance encounters between tenants and offers a place to socialize and collaborate informally.
More information
Architects
Design Development Architect
Gensler
Client
Heritage Equity Partner,s Rubenstein Partner
Venue/ Adress
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, United States
Area
46,451.52m² 500,000 ft²
Dates
Completed.- August 2019.
Photography
Hollwich Kushner. HWKN
Hollwich Kushner is a leading architecture firm based in Lower Manhattan and winners of the prestigious MoMA/PS1 Young Architects Program where we built Wendy. We have gone on to design projects at every scale: intimate to awe-inspiring, and everything in between. Hollwich Kushner creates forward-looking buildings that place people first. We are a new kind of architecture firm that believes in entrepreneurship — we founded Architizer.com and were named one the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company.
Study members
Marc Kushner, AIA, is an architect with just one agenda: he wants you to love architecture. As partner at Hollwich Kushner and co-founder and CEO of Architizer, Marc is a celebrated designer and pioneer in the digital media industry. Marc presents at events such as TED, PSFK, and GRID on topics surrounding architecture’s intersection with digital media. He is the 2017 Harvard Graduate School of Design Entrepreneur in Residence and has taught at Columbia University’s GSAPP. His book ‘The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings’ published by TED Books and Simon & Schuster in 2015 is #1 in Architecture on Amazon. Marc is the President of the Board of Friends of + POOL, a nonprofit behind the development of a water-filtering, floating swimming pool that will filter and clean urban rivers.
Matthias Hollwich, AIA, has established himself at the forefront of a new generation of groundbreaking international architects. Matthias believes the key to successful architecture lies in finding new and exciting ways to create dialogue and relationships between people and buildings. He was recently honored in Fast Company’s ranking of the world’s top 10 most innovative architects and in Business Insider’s list of top business visionaries. Matthias has spoken regularly at events such as TED and PICNIC and has taught architecture as a visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is regularly published in leading media outlets such as the New York Times, Wallpaper* and the Wall Street Journal and his second book on ‘New Aging’ was published by Penguin Books in 2016.
Jessica Knobloch-Arscott brings a diverse perspective to her projects at HWKN. Her extensive international design experience spanning from Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US has provided her with myriad exploration and innovation opportunities. Jessica led all phases of design for Die Macherei, the studio's first built project in Germany, and explored innovative typologies during the R&D process for WeLive and with the Bushwick Generator, a new office complex in Brooklyn.
Robert May has been the Design Lead of HWKN for the past 12 years. He brings a keen eye for detail and a vast knowledge of design techniques to the firm. He helps teams strategize, plan, and fine-tune their approach across all typologies. Robert's tenure led him to spearhead the Purposeful Beings initiative, a retrospective analysis of HWKN's past work that was brought to life in the form of sculptures. He has led several HWKN projects including the Young Architecture Program's winning entry, Wendy, at MoMA PS1, Journal Squared, a three-tower, high-density transit-oriented development in New Jersey, and Pennovation, the innovation center of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dorin Baul has been with HWKN for 5 years and oversees a team specializing in master-planning and cultural projects. His vision is evident throughout his various projects, where he designs with the user-experience foremost in mind. He led the Riyadh Art Master Plan in collaboration with UAP and Futurecity, fulfilling HWKN’s commission to spearhead and manage Riyadh's cultural urban activation through a consortium of artists, architects, and designers. He also led JAX 01, Saudi Arabia's first art biennale, and collaborated on multiple large scale office building designs.
Olga Snowden holds a vast array of experience spanning U.S. and international markets and has been with HWKN for 2 years. She brings strategic design skills, notably to a new office brand now rolling out nationally in Germany. She has led and participated in projects across a wide range of sectors, including mixed-use (super-tall), health care, education (elementary and special education schools), institutional (embassy), residential, office, and campus (pharmaceutical and corporate). Olga is a registered architect in the state of New York and a LEED- accredited professional. She is currently leading HWKN's in-house intergenerational living brand FLX in both Germany and the U.S.
Study members
Marc Kushner, AIA, is an architect with just one agenda: he wants you to love architecture. As partner at Hollwich Kushner and co-founder and CEO of Architizer, Marc is a celebrated designer and pioneer in the digital media industry. Marc presents at events such as TED, PSFK, and GRID on topics surrounding architecture’s intersection with digital media. He is the 2017 Harvard Graduate School of Design Entrepreneur in Residence and has taught at Columbia University’s GSAPP. His book ‘The Future of Architecture in 100 Buildings’ published by TED Books and Simon & Schuster in 2015 is #1 in Architecture on Amazon. Marc is the President of the Board of Friends of + POOL, a nonprofit behind the development of a water-filtering, floating swimming pool that will filter and clean urban rivers.
Matthias Hollwich, AIA, has established himself at the forefront of a new generation of groundbreaking international architects. Matthias believes the key to successful architecture lies in finding new and exciting ways to create dialogue and relationships between people and buildings. He was recently honored in Fast Company’s ranking of the world’s top 10 most innovative architects and in Business Insider’s list of top business visionaries. Matthias has spoken regularly at events such as TED and PICNIC and has taught architecture as a visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is regularly published in leading media outlets such as the New York Times, Wallpaper* and the Wall Street Journal and his second book on ‘New Aging’ was published by Penguin Books in 2016.
Jessica Knobloch-Arscott brings a diverse perspective to her projects at HWKN. Her extensive international design experience spanning from Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US has provided her with myriad exploration and innovation opportunities. Jessica led all phases of design for Die Macherei, the studio's first built project in Germany, and explored innovative typologies during the R&D process for WeLive and with the Bushwick Generator, a new office complex in Brooklyn.
Robert May has been the Design Lead of HWKN for the past 12 years. He brings a keen eye for detail and a vast knowledge of design techniques to the firm. He helps teams strategize, plan, and fine-tune their approach across all typologies. Robert's tenure led him to spearhead the Purposeful Beings initiative, a retrospective analysis of HWKN's past work that was brought to life in the form of sculptures. He has led several HWKN projects including the Young Architecture Program's winning entry, Wendy, at MoMA PS1, Journal Squared, a three-tower, high-density transit-oriented development in New Jersey, and Pennovation, the innovation center of the University of Pennsylvania.
Dorin Baul has been with HWKN for 5 years and oversees a team specializing in master-planning and cultural projects. His vision is evident throughout his various projects, where he designs with the user-experience foremost in mind. He led the Riyadh Art Master Plan in collaboration with UAP and Futurecity, fulfilling HWKN’s commission to spearhead and manage Riyadh's cultural urban activation through a consortium of artists, architects, and designers. He also led JAX 01, Saudi Arabia's first art biennale, and collaborated on multiple large scale office building designs.
Olga Snowden holds a vast array of experience spanning U.S. and international markets and has been with HWKN for 2 years. She brings strategic design skills, notably to a new office brand now rolling out nationally in Germany. She has led and participated in projects across a wide range of sectors, including mixed-use (super-tall), health care, education (elementary and special education schools), institutional (embassy), residential, office, and campus (pharmaceutical and corporate). Olga is a registered architect in the state of New York and a LEED- accredited professional. She is currently leading HWKN's in-house intergenerational living brand FLX in both Germany and the U.S.
Architecture GENSLER
Gensler is a global architecture, design, and planning firm with 46 locations and more than 5,000 professionals networked across Asia, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and the Americas. Founded in 1965, the firm serves more than 3,500 active clients in virtually every industry. Gensler designers strive to make the places people live, work and play more inspiring, more resilient, and more impactful.
Arthur Gensler Jr., FAIA, FIIDA, RIBA (1935—2021) founded the firm in 1965 together with his wife Drue and their colleague James Follet. He is widely credited with elevating the practice of interior design to professional standing. He was a Fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the International Interior Design Association, and a professional member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Art graduated from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning and was a member of its Advisory Council. A charter member of Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame and a recipient of IIDA’s Star Award, he also received Ernst & Young LLP’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In 2015, he wrote Art’s Principles to offer entrepreneurs the business insights he wishes someone had given him when he was starting out.
Arthur Gensler is recognized as an industry icon and an astute businessman who propelled a small practice into the largest and most admired firm in the industry over the course of his 65-year career.
Arthur Gensler Jr., FAIA, FIIDA, RIBA (1935—2021) founded the firm in 1965 together with his wife Drue and their colleague James Follet. He is widely credited with elevating the practice of interior design to professional standing. He was a Fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the International Interior Design Association, and a professional member of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Art graduated from Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning and was a member of its Advisory Council. A charter member of Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame and a recipient of IIDA’s Star Award, he also received Ernst & Young LLP’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year Award. In 2015, he wrote Art’s Principles to offer entrepreneurs the business insights he wishes someone had given him when he was starting out.
Arthur Gensler is recognized as an industry icon and an astute businessman who propelled a small practice into the largest and most admired firm in the industry over the course of his 65-year career.
