By Jared Ebersole in Architecture — 19 Jun 2026

The Brooklyn Towers That Twisted Open a View

Eagle + West looks playful from the waterfront, but its strange rotated forms came from a serious urban problem: how to build tall without walling Greenpoint off from the river again.

From a distance, Eagle + West looks like two towers caught mid-puzzle. The facades step, slide, and rotate as they rise from the Greenpoint waterfront, making the pair feel less like ordinary apartment slabs and more like a stack of blocks that narrowly avoided falling into place.

That near-miss is the story. The project did not twist itself into shape just to be photogenic. It twisted because the site had a problem: how do you add height to a waterfront neighborhood without rebuilding the wall that cut the neighborhood off from the water in the first place?

Greenpoint's edge along the East River was industrial for generations. Shipbuilding, rope-making, petroleum storage, and other waterfront uses gave the neighborhood jobs, but they also made the shoreline feel separate from daily life. By the time the city began reshaping the area for housing and public access, the larger goal was not simply to build apartments. It was to reconnect Greenpoint to the river.

That made the massing of Eagle + West unusually important.

Where it is

Eagle + West is listed at 1 Eagle Street, Brooklyn, NY 11222. The development also occupies the 227 West Street and 27 Eagle Street waterfront sites within Greenpoint Landing.

OMA's project, led by Jason Long with Beyer Blinder Belle as executive architect, sits within the larger Greenpoint Landing masterplan. Brookfield describes Eagle + West as part of a 22-acre waterfront esplanade, and the finished complex includes two residential towers with a lower podium. YIMBY reported the project at 745 rental units, with towers rising 30 and 40 stories above the waterfront.

The easiest way to build two towers would have been to set them upright and let the floor plates repeat. But repetition would have created a visual and physical problem. The taller the buildings became, the more they risked reading as one blunt wall between the neighborhood and the river.

OMA's solution was to make the towers pull away from each other as they rose.

First came tapering. Then came rotation. Each tower turns on its own axis, but in the opposite direction from the other. That counter-rotation opens space between them floor by floor, increasing the gap that otherwise would have felt compressed. What might have become a barrier instead becomes a frame.

The side effects are what make the building memorable. When a floor plate rotates over the floor below it, corners start to project. Those projections become cantilevers, terraces, overhangs, and setbacks. The shape that looks like playful architectural drama is also the record of a constraint being solved.

That is why Eagle + West is more interesting than a simple luxury-tower story. Its form is not only a brand image. It is an argument about waterfront development. Greenpoint needed housing, but it also needed the river back. The towers are trying to do both: deliver density while refusing to behave like a solid curtain.

The best accidental result is the view corridor. By opening the gap between the towers, the project creates a sightline through the pair and back toward the Manhattan skyline. The script for the video points to the Empire State Building as the unexpected prize: the wall that almost returned became a window instead.

That is a sharp urban lesson. A bad massing decision can make a private development feel like a public loss. A better one can turn zoning, setbacks, and floor plates into an experience people notice from the street, the park, and the waterfront.

Eagle + West still belongs to a broader debate about Greenpoint's transformation. New towers bring new residents, rents, amenities, and pressure. They also bring parks, esplanades, and a waterfront that no longer belongs only to industry. Architecture cannot settle that debate by itself.

But it can decide whether the new city arrives as a wall or an opening.

At Eagle + West, the answer is visible in the twist.