11 Hoyt Turns Brooklyn’s Skyline Into a Window Seat

From the street, 11 Hoyt looks as though someone has caught its concrete skin mid-ripple. Pale bays peel outward, then retreat into the wall. Follow them upward and the pattern travels diagonally across the tower, giving a tall residential building the suggestion of movement.

Inside, those ripples become something much more familiar: window seats. A resident can occupy the thickness of the facade, sitting beyond the edge of the main concrete floor slab. There is structure underneath, of course. The surprising part is that it belongs to the projecting facade panel rather than an extension of the apartment’s floor.

That distinction explains the building. At 11 Hoyt, the wall does more than enclose a room. It supplies a small, inhabitable addition to it.

A room at the edge

Designed by Jeanne Gang’s Studio Gang for Tishman Speyer, with Hill West as architect of record, the Downtown Brooklyn condominium tower reaches 620 feet. Studio Gang dates its completion to 2021. Its scalloped exterior creates deep window bays, with built-in seating beneath eight-foot-tall windows and views toward the surrounding neighborhood and waterfront. Studio Gang

Where it is

11 Hoyt Street, Downtown Brooklyn, New York

The architectural idea recalls the bay windows of Brooklyn’s residential streets: push the enclosure outward and the edge of a room becomes a place to occupy. At tower scale, however, that domestic gesture raises a construction question. How do you repeat a projecting bay hundreds of times without making the underlying building endlessly complicated?

A conventional flat facade produces a clear boundary. The floor meets the wall, the wall holds the glass, and the room ends. Here, that boundary has depth. The seat puts someone within the building’s exterior profile, where the projection also gives them a glimpse back along the sculpted surface.

The result works at two scales. From across the neighborhood, the bays establish the tower’s identity. From a living room, the same geometry offers somewhere to read, look outside, or simply sit close to the glass.

Keep the floor simple

The crucial decision was to preserve repetition in the main structure. The facade units attach to identical floor plate and column layouts. Their changing arrangement creates more than 190 distinct floor plans without requiring a corresponding collection of differently shaped structural floors. AIA New York describes this relationship between a repeated frame and an inhabitable enclosure in its account of the project. AIA New York

Think of two outlines superimposed on a drawing. One marks the slab edge, repeating as construction climbs. The other marks the outer enclosure, moving outward where a scallop appears. The distance between those outlines becomes usable depth within the apartment.

PCI Journal reports that maintaining a simple, flat slab edge was necessary to meet the project’s cost and construction schedule demands. The precast facade could reach three feet nine inches in depth and was designed to support live load, the engineering category that includes occupants. Its projecting form therefore carries a real responsibility beyond its own considerable weight. PCI Journal

This makes the window seat a structural component’s everyday expression. The person sitting there experiences a comfortable recess; the construction team had to resolve a loaded projection outside the regular slab.

What holds the ripple up?

The pieces are substantial. Construction reporting identified scalloped panels weighing about 22,000 pounds and flat panels weighing about 11,000 pounds. Crews hoisted them into position and connected them to the floor slabs using multiple galvanized steel anchor assemblies, providing both gravity and lateral support. The Architect’s Newspaper

Those two jobs matter. Gravity support transfers weight into the building. Lateral restraint deals with forces acting across the facade, including wind pressure and suction. Describing the bays as hanging seats captures the visual surprise, but the support system is a deliberate connection between heavy concrete components and the structure behind them.

Movement also belongs in the design of precast enclosures. General guidance from the Whole Building Design Guide explains how bearing connections and flexible tiebacks can separate weight support from restraint while accommodating movement of the supporting frame. That describes the broader engineering principle, rather than establishing the exact connection arrangement at 11 Hoyt. Whole Building Design Guide

The visible effect depends on concealed coordination. A facade can look fluid only after its weight, attachments, and relationship to the frame have been worked out.

Brooklyn’s wall began in Quebec

Much of that coordination happened far from Hoyt Street. BPDL manufactured the precast elements in Alma, Quebec. In an account published by the Canadian Precast Concrete Institute, BPDL engineer and project manager Matthieu Gagné described production beginning in December 2017 and continuing over 18 months.

His account also reveals the work behind the apparent repetition. Production involved 119 different molds. Flat and scalloped panels were broad families of components, rather than evidence that the whole tower came from just two molds. Custom aluminum windows fabricated in Italy were installed at the Quebec plant. Waterproofing membranes were also applied there shortly after panels left their molds, addressing the exposed horizontal surfaces created by the projections. Canadian Precast Concrete Institute

Factory preparation shifted demanding work away from the building’s elevated exterior. Even delivery required special planning: PCI Journal records trial truck runs and custom supports for securing the unusual shapes during transport. PCI Journal

Back in Brooklyn, the finished composition also extends across the former parking-garage site through an elevated landscaped podium, which AIA New York describes as the building’s fifth facade. AIA New York

Yet the most direct encounter with the architecture remains the smallest one. The tower’s waves resolve into a seat beside a window. Behind that ordinary act of sitting is an unusually productive division of labor: a regular frame carries the building, while its sculpted enclosure makes room for a person at the edge.

Sources

• Studio Gang: 11 Hoyt
• AIA New York: 11 Hoyt
• PCI Journal: 11 Hoyt Makes Complex Facade Panel Design Look Easy
• The Architect’s Newspaper: Studio Gang’s First Residential Tower in New York Ripples With Scalloped Concrete
• Canadian Precast Concrete Institute: 11 Hoyt
• Whole Building Design Guide: Seismic Safety of the Building Envelope