By Jared Ebersole in Video 27 Oct 2026

How the William Vale Lifts a Hotel Above Williamsburg

The William Vale’s giant diagonals do more than announce a Brooklyn landmark. They reconcile two competing ambitions: skyline views above and open public space below.

At the William Vale in Williamsburg, the most revealing view is the one looking up from below. Beneath the stacked balconies, enormous white diagonals cross the glass, gathering the tower onto widely spaced supports. The hotel seems to stand with its feet apart, leaving room for the neighborhood to pass underneath.

That stance answers a problem familiar to anyone who has watched a skyline change. A view can be a building’s greatest asset, yet much of what determines it happens beyond the property line. Another development can occupy the very slice of sky that made an upper-floor room desirable.

Designed by Brooklyn architecture firm Albo Liberis, the William Vale elevated its guest rooms partly to preserve sightlines as surrounding sites developed. But lifting the hotel created another question: how could the architects support the rooms without filling the space below with columns? The answer became the building’s defining feature. Designboom’s account of the architects’ design connects those ambitions directly.

Where it is

The William Vale

111 North 12th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11249

Williamsburg, near McCarren Park

The hotel lists this entrance on its official website. Construction coverage also identifies the property as 55 Wythe Avenue, on the same block.

The hotel opened in September 2016, with 183 rooms. At roughly 250 feet tall, it introduced a conspicuous vertical presence into this part of North Williamsburg. Its silhouette separates into distinct layers: low buildings beside the street, a broad middle section crossed by structural diagonals, and the balconied hotel above. The Skyscraper Center records its height, completion year, and room count.

Each layer has a different job. Together, they explain why the hotel looks so unusual.

The lower portion accommodates a mixture of commercial uses and amenities rather than beginning the guest rooms immediately above the sidewalk. During construction, reported plans placed offices on floors five through nine and guest accommodation higher up. That arrangement gave the rooms an elevated starting point while keeping other useful space beneath them. New York YIMBY’s May 2015 construction report documented the proposed distribution.

Elevation was a strategy for a changing neighborhood, rather than a guarantee of permanent openness. Raising a window changes the angle over nearby buildings; it cannot determine what every neighboring owner might eventually construct. The William Vale’s architecture makes sense as an effort to improve its position within that uncertainty.

The payoff is especially legible in the guest rooms. Private balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows make the city part of the accommodation itself. The hotel’s current description still places those features at the center of its identity. Views are integral to the product the building was designed to deliver. The William Vale’s official overview describes both features.

Below those rooms, however, the architects pursued a different experience. A central plaza and a rooftop landscape above the low retail buildings invite movement through the site. Stairs connect different levels, turning the development into a sequence of outdoor spaces rather than a single tower planted on an enclosed pedestal.

The project’s ground-level ambition matters because a tall building has two audiences. Guests experience its height through the windows. People walking past experience its edges, entrances, and the space it occupies along their route. The William Vale attempts to accommodate both, using its lower buildings to meet the street while pulling the tower upward and inward.

According to the architects’ explanation published by Designboom, the plaza and green roofs helped organize the entire project. Open space was part of the reasoning that produced the building’s form.

That ambition complicates the structure. In a conventional arrangement, closely spaced columns can carry upper floors downward through a repeating grid. Continue that grid to the ground and the support problem becomes comparatively direct. But the same columns can interrupt a plaza, divide walking routes, and limit what fits beneath the tower.

The William Vale instead concentrates support through a large truss assembly. An architectural tour led by Nick Liberis described its principal components as four legs and a central truss, landing on a substantial beam at the base. The large structural zone also accommodates office space. It is an occupied part of the building that performs a transfer function for what stands above. The Architect’s Newspaper’s 2017 tour report explains that arrangement.

The diagonals make that transfer visible. A force carried along an inclined member has both vertical and horizontal components. Connected members and their joints balance those forces, allowing loads from above to reach supports that are offset from where the loads began.

A useful comparison is a bridge. A bridge must carry weight across an opening while reaching supports at selected locations. Here, the opening is part of the space beneath a hotel. The structural depth rises through several levels, giving the framework room to span between its major supports.

Triangulation helps explain the familiar V and X patterns. A rectangular frame with freely rotating corners can change shape without its sides changing length. Adding a diagonal divides it into triangles, restraining that movement. In an idealized truss, members carry forces along their lengths through tension or compression. Real building connections require more detailed analysis, but this principle explains why diagonals recur in structures that must carry loads across open space. TeachEngineering’s lesson on truss geometry outlines these fundamentals.

The result is also an architectural expression of Williamsburg’s industrial inheritance. Albo Liberis linked the truss to local bridges, manufacturing structures, and tower supports. Rather than reproducing a warehouse facade, the designers drew on the neighborhood’s vocabulary of exposed support and large structural gestures.

The William Vale’s apparent lightness therefore comes from substantial work concentrated in particular places. Above, the rooms gain distance from the street and a broader outlook. Below, the tower’s narrowed points of contact allow outdoor space to extend around it. Stand beneath the diagonals and those two experiences become one architectural idea: the view upstairs depends on the structure overhead, and that structure helps make room for the city at your feet.