By Jared Ebersole in Video — 12 Jun 2026

How One South First Carries Apartments Over Open Air

One South First at Domino looks like part of it is floating, because its apartments bridge across a gap above the Williamsburg waterfront.

One South First looks like a building that forgot gravity applies.

At the northern end of the Domino Sugar redevelopment in Williamsburg, a tall residential tower rises beside a shorter office building. Then, high above the street, the taller portion stretches across the gap. From the right angle, it reads like half the tower is floating over open air.

It is not floating, of course.

But the illusion exists because the structure had to solve a real problem.

Where it is

One South First / Ten Grand, 260 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249

This building sits only a short walk from 325 Kent Avenue, the earlier Domino tower with the giant hole through its middle. Both buildings came out of the same larger urban idea: the waterfront should not become a continuous wall. The Domino master plan wanted density, but it also wanted view corridors, light, air, and public connection between Williamsburg and the East River.

At 325 Kent, that produced a donut-like residential block.

At One South First, it produced a harder structural puzzle.

COOKFOX designed the project as two interconnected towers: One South First, the residential portion, and Ten Grand, the office portion. Field Condition describes the completed project as a 42-story mixed-use tower with 330 rental apartments, 150,000 square feet of office space, and retail at the Domino site. Other project references describe the combined building as rising about 435 feet.

The awkward part is that the two towers are not the same height. The office side rises to one level. The apartments keep going. To preserve the gap below, part of the residential structure reaches across and connects above the shorter volume.

That is where the simple visual trick becomes engineering.

Buildings usually like to send their loads straight down. Columns, walls, slabs, and foundations are most comfortable when gravity has a direct path to the ground. A stack of apartments hanging above a gap breaks that expectation. The weight still has to go somewhere, but it cannot drop through empty space.

So the forces have to be gathered, redirected, and delivered into parts of the structure that can carry them.

Structure Magazine's account of the project explains why the skybridge connection was unusually challenging. Concrete construction needs temporary support while it is being formed and cured. Workers need a safe platform, and wet concrete needs something to sit on before it becomes a self-supporting structural element. But building a conventional temporary support tower from the ground up to the bridge level would have been impractical on a dense construction site hundreds of feet in the air.

The answer was to build the working surface in pieces.

Instead of constructing one enormous temporary deck in place, the team used large precast concrete planks. These could be fabricated, transported to Brooklyn, lifted by crane, and placed across the gap. Once installed, they gave crews the platform needed to complete the concrete connection above open air.

That sounds like a construction detail, but it is really the hinge of the whole building.

Without that bridge, the massing loses its drama. With it, the two towers behave as one architectural composition while still preserving the void that the master plan needed. The structure carries loads across the gap, the skyline gets its strange profile, and the neighborhood keeps a measure of porosity toward the river.

The building's facade reinforces the same idea of transformation.

COOKFOX drew inspiration from sugar crystals, using a patterned exterior that gives the towers a faceted, mineral quality. That connects the new construction back to the refinery history without simply copying old brick industrial architecture. Where the Refinery building preserves the actual historic shell, One South First translates the site's past into texture, massing, and silhouette.

The result is a very Domino kind of building: part real estate, part urban compromise, part engineering display, part memory of sugar.

It also shows why dramatic architecture is often less arbitrary than it appears. The opening is not just a shape. It comes from view corridors. The bridge is not just a flourish. It comes from the decision to stack different uses at different heights. The construction method is not just a technical footnote. It is what made the whole visual effect possible.

From the ground, it looks like the apartments are floating.

In reality, they are doing something more interesting: carrying the pressures of a waterfront redevelopment across a gap you can see.