In the News: The Brook Completes Work in Downtown Brooklyn

The completion of The Brook, a 600-foot-tall residential tower in Brooklyn, received top billing in The Architect’s Newspaper.

Situated on a triangular lot with challenging soil conditions above an MTA entrance, the in-house collaboration of DeSimone’s structural engineers and façade and building envelope experts proved integral to the creation of The Brook.

With the Flatbush Avenue MTA entrance and tunnel cutting into the site, typical column configurations were not possible. Our structural engineers, led by Managing Principal Luis Ramirez, PE, and Senior Associate Milo B. Adams, PE, tapped into their ingenuity and found a creative solution—cantilever a portion of the structure over the MTA entrance. To overcome challenging soil conditions, our engineers devised a “raft” foundation system combining shallow and deep piles, requiring one of the largest high-strength concrete pours ever executed in Brooklyn.

Collaborating closely with the architect, Beyer Blinder Belle, our façade and building envelope experts, led by Principal Rok Lee, AIA, and Senior Associate Whitney Boykin, AIA, assisted the architect in developing a custom curtain wall solution to realize the architect’s vision for the dynamic façade and versatile building maintenance unit (BMU) to facilitate efficient access to every face of the structure. The team worked carefully to suspend new cladding systems around the MTA entrance, incorporating it into the style of the Brook with virtually no impact on the existing structure.

You can read the article in The Architect’s Newspaper here.