By Jared Ebersole in Video — 08 Jun 2026

The Glass Office Tower Hidden Inside the Domino Sugar Refinery

Brooklyn's Domino Sugar Refinery could not be treated like an ordinary development site, so its new office building was slipped inside the landmarked shell.

From the outside, the Domino Sugar Refinery still looks like industrial Brooklyn.

From the inside, it is something much stranger: a new glass office building standing inside an old brick shell.

That split is the whole story.

The refinery sits on the Williamsburg waterfront, just north of the Williamsburg Bridge, where the East River once functioned less like scenery and more like infrastructure. Raw sugar could arrive by ship, be unloaded near the plant, and move through a vertical industrial process that turned cane into a refined commodity. For more than a century, the building was not a backdrop. It was a machine.

Where it is

The Refinery at Domino, 292 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249

The Domino complex grew out of the Havemeyer sugar empire, and the Brooklyn refinery became one of the most important sugar-processing sites in the country. Domino Park's history of the site says the refinery reached a peak of about 4 million pounds of sugar a day. In the late 19th century, the Havemeyer operation and the American Sugar Refining Company were so dominant that the Brooklyn plant was tied to a huge share of America's refined sugar supply.

Then the logic that made the site powerful changed.

Sugar refining moved, consolidated, and modernized elsewhere. The Williamsburg refinery closed in 2004. What remained was both extremely valuable and extremely difficult: a waterfront parcel in a booming neighborhood, anchored by a massive 19th-century industrial building that New York City landmarks rules would not let a developer simply erase.

The usual real-estate move would have been simple. Clear the old factory. Build something clean, rentable, and efficient.

Domino could not be treated that way.

The landmarked Filter, Pan and Finishing House had a powerful exterior: brick walls, arched windows, and the kind of weathered industrial scale that new buildings often try to imitate. But inside, it was not naturally suited to modern offices. The building had been assembled for sugar production, not for open floor plates, daylight, elevators, mechanical systems, and contemporary tenants. PAU, the architecture firm hired by Two Trees, described the old structure as a merger of separate buildings with small, misaligned windows.

So the architects made a decisive move: keep the shell, but stop pretending the shell could comfortably become a normal office building on its own.

The masonry walls were stabilized. The interior was cleared. Then a new 15-story glass office structure was built within the historic envelope, set back from the old facade so the two buildings can be read together without becoming the same thing. At the top, a glass barrel vault echoes the rounded industrial openings below, turning the roofline into a contemporary version of the factory's old arched language.

That is why the finished building feels so theatrical.

It is not a cleaned-up factory with desks inside. It is a glass building displayed inside a brick ruin that has been carefully kept alive. The gap between old and new becomes part of the architecture. You can see the preserved wall, the new curtain wall, the planted interior edges, and the vertical drama of a workplace built inside what used to be industrial processing space.

The project also arrived at an awkward moment for office real estate.

The Refinery opened after the pandemic had already weakened demand for large office leases. Early coverage noted that the building was not filling as quickly as its developer had hoped. But the building's story kept changing. Instead of landing one huge tenant, it was divided for smaller companies, creative firms, tech tenants, and amenities. Recent coverage reported the building reaching roughly 90 percent leased, an unusually strong outcome for a highly specific office conversion in a difficult market.

That success matters because adaptive reuse is often discussed as a moral good, but it still has to work economically. A landmark cannot survive on nostalgia alone. It needs a viable second life.

Domino's second life is not subtle. The project wants you to see the compromise. It keeps the industrial face that made the site recognizable, but admits that the old factory's internal logic no longer fits the city around it. The answer was neither demolition nor museum preservation.

It was insertion.

A new building inside an old one. A corporate workplace inside a refinery. A waterfront development wrapped in the memory of sugar.