High-Visibility Low-Visibility

I’ve mentioned before that our work is usually invisible in completed projects. With a few exceptions you generally can’t even see the portions of a project building that were our responsibility because what you’re seeing is the architectural design work that we enabled but not create. The project I’m mentioning below is typical in that our work is invisible to just about everyone, but it’s not typical in the sense that the final result is being seen by literally millions of people.

Between 2016 and 2021, we were the structural engineers on a team converting a five-building complex on Columbia Heights, the westernmost street at the top of the bluff above the East River that gives Brooklyn Heights its name. The buildings had industrial origins: three were late-1800s warehouses that had served the docks adjacent to Furman Street (at the bottom of the bluff), the largest two were 1920s concrete-frame factories. All five had been used as offices from the late 1970s onward, but that conversion had been pretty much nothing more than putting up cubicles and some partitions in the space. The project we worked on was intended to create high-end office and retail space, but it unfortunately opened for rentals during Covid. Much of the space remains now as it was in 2021: white-boxed and empty.

Last year, we were contacted by ITV Sport, a UK-based network that was renting part of one of the big concrete buildings to use as a temporary studio for their coverage of the 2026 World Cup. Our work involved checking the base building for the loads imposed by the set and equipment (partly indoors, partly outdoors on a terrace facing the Manhattan skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge) and designing some temporary equipment supports. This is all ordinary stuff for us, made slightly easier by our history with the base building. Usually, everyone, including us, would forget about it a few weeks later, but it’s hard to do so when I look at the news and see the results.