How Olympia DUMBO Turned Zoning Limits Into a Sail
At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, an awkward former parking lot became a sculpted condominium tower. Its curves reveal a negotiation between waterfront history, zoning and gravity.
From the Brooklyn Bridge, Olympia DUMBO looks like a sail catching a breeze. Its terraces sweep around the tower, changing direction as the building rises. Against the surrounding blocks, the silhouette has an unusually fluid quality: a suggestion of movement rendered in concrete and glass.
That effect begins with a less romantic subject: the limits on what could occupy the site. Hill West Architects describes Olympia’s form as a response to an irregular parcel and intersecting zoning restrictions. The sail emerged through a negotiation between the space available, the views worth capturing and the structure needed to hold everything up.
Where it is
Olympia DUMBO
60 Front Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
The development’s website lists this Front Street address and identifies Hill West as the architect, with interiors by Workstead. Its design description emphasizes a tower that curves and steps to orient windows and terraces toward the surrounding cityscape. Those changing outlooks are central to understanding the building: the facade expresses decisions made about the rooms behind it. Olympia’s design overview
A parking lot with an expensive view
Before the tower, the property was a triangular parking lot owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Fortis acquired it in December 2018 for $91.113 million. At the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, the parcel offered an unusually prominent setting, close to the waterfront and facing the skyline across the East River.
The purchase also arrived during a larger change in the neighborhood’s ownership. The Witnesses had been selling their Brooklyn holdings in preparation for their move to Warwick, New York. A utilitarian piece of land became an opportunity for a very different kind of development.
The project moved quickly into construction. Hill West filed a new-building application in January 2019, foundation work received approval two months later, and groundbreaking followed that June. By September 2021, Brownstoner reported that the tower had topped out. The publication also noted an important distinction: although surrounded by a neighborhood closely associated with historic industrial architecture, the property sits outside the DUMBO Historic District. Brownstoner’s construction report
The invisible geometry above the street
A buildable parcel has another shape suspended above it: the volume permitted by zoning. At Olympia, multiple sky exposure planes helped define that volume. These imaginary inclined surfaces establish setbacks intended to allow light and air to reach the streets below.
On an irregular site, their combined effect can make a simple, repetitive tower difficult to fit. Hill West treated the inclinations as an opportunity to carve a twisting sail. Zoning supplied boundaries; the architects chose how to give those boundaries architectural expression.
The resulting building contains 76 residences, with terraces turning toward Lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River. Beneath the tower, a substantial podium accommodates community facilities, parking and resident amenities. Hill West lists completion in 2023. The different demands of that base and the homes above it help explain why Olympia changes character so strongly as it rises. Hill West’s project account
Viewed this way, the facade becomes a record of competing priorities. The building needs usable interior space, outdoor terraces and a coherent outline, all within its permitted envelope. A curve can reconcile those demands, but it introduces consequences elsewhere.
When the floors stop repeating
The crucial complication is that Olympia’s floor plates change as they rise. In a 2024 interview, DeSimone Consulting Engineering associate principal Rodolfo Medina described floor edges sweeping and rotating near the bridge-facing terraces. Elsewhere, the floor expands slightly before drawing inward again farther up.
That changing footprint disrupts one of a conventional tower’s useful efficiencies. Repeated floors allow columns to occupy the same positions from level to level, carrying loads along a direct route downward. At Olympia, a convenient column position on one floor could conflict with the apartment layout above it.
The engineers therefore inclined some columns to follow the shifting outline. The decision linked the interior structure to the exterior silhouette. It also required coordination with the architects so that the supports could do their work without overwhelming the residences. Commercial Observer’s engineering interviews
An inclined support makes the load path harder to visualize. Weight still has to reach the foundation, but the route can no longer be understood as a stack of identical vertical lines. Each change in geometry must work as part of the whole structural system.
DeSimone describes an all-concrete solution with atypical slab edges, setbacks and terraces. Cast-in-place concrete, voided slabs and transfer columns helped accommodate the building’s unusual form and longer amenity spans. The firm also coordinated the concrete structure with the facade, where construction tolerances had to work across several adjoining systems. A smooth-looking exterior depended on careful agreement between components manufactured and installed through different processes. DeSimone’s project description
The amenity spaces presented another puzzle. To open up areas such as the pool, gym and lounge, the engineers used a thickened transfer floor with deep concrete beams. Tower columns bear on that structure, which redirects their loads toward columns beside the open spaces. The broad rooms below and the apartments above can therefore follow different structural arrangements. Commercial Observer
A waterfront reference with real history
The maritime association has substance beyond the building’s branding. This stretch of Brooklyn belongs to a waterfront where crossing the East River once depended on boats, with consequences extending far beyond everyday travel.
On the night of August 29–30, 1776, following the American defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn, Colonel John Glover’s mariners helped evacuate Washington’s army to Manhattan. The National Park Service describes approximately 9,000 men crossing with artillery, ammunition and supplies, aided during the operation by changing wind and concealing fog. The episode gives the nearby river a historical significance that no skyline view alone can convey. National Park Service
Olympia translates that waterfront association into a contemporary residential building. Its most revealing feature is the connection between appearance and construction. The sweeping outline begins with constrained space, becomes a sequence of changing floors, and continues inward through columns and transfer beams. What looks effortless from the bridge rests on a carefully worked-out route to the ground.
Sources
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