OMA’s Tetris-like towers break ground at Greenpoint Landing

Courtesy of OMA

Brooklyn’s Greenpoint Landing megaproject, covering 22 acres on the East River waterfront, has been making steady progress since it was first announced in 2011, following the 2005 Williamsburg and Greenpoint rezoning.

The site’s first market-rate rental building opened in 2018, and this week, developers Brookfield Properties and Park Tower Group announced the groundbreaking of two new residential towers designed by Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, as well as a waterfront park designed by James Corner Field Operations.

The towers will stand 30 and 40 stories and will have a total of 745 apartments (30 percent of which will be affordable), along with 8,600 square feet of ground-floor retail. The Tetris-like buildings will feature precast concrete panels and large windows. Marmol Radziner is in charge of designing the towers’s indoor amenity spaces and landscape, while Beyer Blinder Belle is the executive architect and will design the units’s interiors.

The 2.5-acre park, meanwhile, will add 40,000 square feet to an existing green space along the Greenpoint waterfront. To make it more publicly accessible, the space will have a new pedestrian connection on Dupont Street and extend Eagle Street to the waterfront. It will include a lawn, a garden walk, a picnic area, and “salvaged maritime pieces” found at the site. (That’s similar to what James Corner Field Operations did at Domino Park, further south along the waterfront in Williamsburg.)

In total, the megaproject will include 11 residential towers with an estimated 5,500 residential units (1,400 of which will be affordable), and four acres of public open space. Brookfield and Park Tower Group also developed One Blue Slip, which opened in August 2018, and Two Blue Slip, which is expected to debut in January. Other buildings that have been completed at the megaproject—as part of a joint venture between Park Tower Group and L&M Development Partners—include 33 Eagle Street, 21 Commercial Street, and 5 Blue Slip, which together have around 300 affordable housing units.