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One Clinton Tower | Brooklyn, New York | 2022

One Clinton Tower | Brooklyn, New York | 2022

Architects: Marvel Architects, Landscape Architects, Urban Designers PLLC.
Design Team: Jonathan Marvel, Lissa So, Jason Jimenez, Tim Fryatt, Erik Chu, David Jackowski, Siyuan Ye, Wook Kang, Teo Quintana, Paul Chan, Jerry Lai, and Mitch Crowder
Brooklyn Public Library Fit Out and Interior Architects: Gensler
Interior Designers: Studio DB
Landscape Architects: DLANDstudio
General Contractor: Consigli Construction Co., Inc.
Client: The Hudson Companies
Photographers: David Sundberg/Esto, Pavel Bendov / ArchExplorer, and Marvel In-house Photography


One Clinton was designed as a new iconic and contextual tower to stitch together neighborhoods and people. Bridging scales between Downtown Brooklyn’s evolving high-rise districts and the landmark Brooklyn Heights Historic neighborhood, and uses from civic, commercial, and residential, One Clinton stands with a quiet and timeless elegance.

The building’s distinctive flatiron shape comes from its triangular site at the fork of Clinton St and Cadman Plaza West, creating three façades that engage Brooklyn Heights and the New York harbor to the west, Downtown Brooklyn to the East, and Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill to the south.

The western façade along Clinton Street is intimate in form and articulation. A low four-story massing of duplex units transitions the tower form to the brownstone-scale of Brooklyn. It houses the main residential entrance along this quieter street, along with retail storefronts, and the bustling DOE STEM lab. Higher up, a distinctive notch in the tower form was carved out to provide a changing relationship as one changes viewpoints from near and distant vistas.

The eastern façade, which faces Cadman Plaza West, represents the civic and most public face of the building. The building’s ground level engages the plaza with a broad and rhythmic colonnade of the library’s main entrance and double-height reading room. The grand civic gesture of the library was designed to have uninterrupted views of Cadman Plaza Park and its collection of civic buildings and memorials. The east and west façades of the tower are composed with classic portions in a distinctive stacked and banded limestone grid, with dark bronze-colored windows and spandrels.

The southern façade changes to exclusively use the dark bronze-colored metal cladding, providing a special face to southern Brooklyn, in contrast to the west and east limestone façades. The overall effect on the building is that of an open book, with the southern metal façade as the pages, and the limestone prow as the binding.

One Clinton is the success of a deeply collaborative public/private partnership, including the developer and their investors, the designer, as well as the NYC Economic Development Corporation, the Brooklyn Public Library, the NYC Department of Education, and the NYC HPD.  The community was represented by local advocates, community boards, volunteers, and many outreach participants through deep engagement.

Input from these groups was analyzed and considered against the site and programmatic requirements to identify critical priorities and opportunities.
These balanced considerations evolved into a design response that welcomes interaction and strives to be a good neighbor. The library design responds to user-identified priorities such as a focus on young adult and children-oriented spaces balanced with quiet adult reading spaces and flexible multi-purpose spaces.

The building massing answered concerns about scale by integrating stronger setbacks and the townhouse massing on Clinton Street, which simultaneously bring the building to the ground gracefully and punctuate the civic and residential character of their respective elevations. The collaborative process, diverse uses, and contextual design response have ensured One Clinton is an anchor within the community and neighborhood.


One Clinton Tower | Brooklyn, New York | 2022
One Clinton Tower | Brooklyn, New York | 2022
One Clinton Tower | Brooklyn, New York | 2022

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