“The old Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Brooklyn Heights now has 11 lush gardens. We’ve got photos” by Lore Croghan is a nice description of the intensive landscape design and construction at the Panorama project in Brooklyn Heights. I haven’t discussed this project much and may have to get around to addressing that gap, but the short version is that it’s a complex of five buildings – three nineteenth-century warehouses and two 1920s factories – converted to offices in the 1960s and recently upgraded to be high-end office and retail space. It’s over 750,000 square feet, so it’s not a small thing no matter how you approach it.
The article focuses on Terrain-NYC, the landscape designers, who had to work with the unpromising site of a steep hillside mostly covered by old buildings and remnants of other old buildings. We are proud to have collaborated with Terrain, with Gensler (the architects), and with CIM and LIVWRK (the developers), along with the many other firms involved on this project. Because of the nature of the work – re-adapting an already converted group of buildings – no one design type and no one construction trade really dominated: rather, we were all working around the inescapable presence of the existing structures. As a result, I feel there was more collaboration than we often see on commercial projects.
