By Jared Ebersole in Video — 10 Jun 2026

Why 325 Kent Avenue Has a Hole Through the Middle

325 Kent Avenue's dramatic opening was a way to build housing at Domino without turning the Williamsburg waterfront into a wall.

325 Kent Avenue looks like a mistake at first.

The building rises on the Williamsburg waterfront, then opens up into a giant rectangular void, as if someone cut a clean hole straight through the middle. In another setting, that move might read as pure architectural branding. At Domino, it is more specific than that.

The hole is the solution to a neighborhood problem.

Where it is

325 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249

The building was the first residential tower completed in the Domino Sugar redevelopment, the 11-acre remaking of the old refinery site along the East River. That location gave it two opposing responsibilities. It had to help make the project financially real by adding hundreds of apartments. But it also had to avoid becoming exactly what waterfront rezonings are often accused of producing: a private wall between inland neighborhoods and the river.

The earlier Domino master-plan fight had centered on scale, access, and views. New York's waterfront had spent generations as working infrastructure, then became one of the city's most valuable residential edges. When factories closed, the question was not just what to build. It was whether the public would gain a waterfront or lose sight of it behind towers.

SHoP Architects' master plan tried to answer that with buildings that frame openings rather than simply line up along the water. At 325 Kent, that produced a massing that is part courtyard block, part tower, and part giant viewfinder.

The building is not one slab. It is two stepped residential wings rising from a shared podium. As they climb, the wings step back toward the east, making a transition between Williamsburg's lower inland blocks, the taller Domino buildings closer to the water, and the Manhattan skyline across the river. The western side is connected by a three-story bridge, leaving the big opening that gives the building its donut-like silhouette.

That opening does several things at once.

Visually, it stops the building from reading as an uninterrupted block. Light, air, and views pass through the gap. From the neighborhood side, the East River and the landmarked refinery remain part of the composition instead of disappearing behind a flat wall. From the waterfront side, the void turns the building into a frame.

Programmatically, the bridge solves an efficiency problem. If 325 Kent were treated as two completely separate towers, the developer would need duplicate circulation, duplicate amenities, and a less coherent residential experience. By linking the two wings, the building can share major amenities while still keeping the openness that makes the massing work.

That is where the design starts to rhyme with another New York experiment: the courtyard-tower hybrid.

The building wraps around elevated outdoor space, borrowing from the old European residential-block idea that housing can be organized around a shared interior courtyard. But it cannot simply become a low courtyard block, because this is Brooklyn waterfront real estate and the project needs density. So the courtyard logic gets lifted and stretched into a taller form.

The result is a building whose most memorable feature is also its planning argument.

325 Kent contains more than 500 rental apartments, with more than 100 below-market units, according to SHoP. When its affordable-housing lottery opened, the demand became its own headline. Coverage at the time reported roughly 87,000 applications for 104 affordable apartments, making it one of the clearest examples of how intense the housing shortage had become in North Brooklyn.

That tension sits underneath the architecture.

The building is not modest. It is a luxury rental on a transformed industrial waterfront, with skyline views, amenities, and a sculptural exterior. But the hole through the middle is not just an indulgent shape. It is a visible compromise between density and permeability, between private apartments and public views, between the old Domino site's industrial memory and the new neighborhood it was becoming.

The most interesting thing about 325 Kent is that the conflict is still legible.

You can look at the building and see the pressures acting on it. Build enough housing to make the project work. Do not block the landmark. Do not wall off the river. Give residents shared space. Keep the skyline dramatic. Connect the towers without making them feel like one blunt object.

That is why the void matters.

It is not empty space. It is the part of the building where the city pushed back.