STEAM Center at Brooklyn Navy Yard

Brooklyn, New York

Firm

Perkins Eastman

Client

Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation and NYC Department of Education

Area

33,000 sq.ft.

Completion Date

02/2019

Andrew Rugge-Perkins Eastman, Ty Cole-OTTO

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A critical piece of the massive 5.1 million-square-foot Brooklyn Navy Yard redevelopment—the lynchpin of New York City’s revived manufacturing economy—is the STEAM Center at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

It is home to a new public technical high school program that addresses emerging, high-growth industries that are based in technology. The design challenge of the STEAM Center was to create a 21st-century school that houses the cutting edge in STEAM technologies in an innovative learning environment promoting collaboration, transparency, and flexibility.

Given the school’s site within the Brooklyn Navy Yard and specifically its proximity to the co-tenants of Building 77—furniture, manufacturing, design, media, and culinary tenants—it was important that the STEAM Center look and feel more like a creative office and learning lab and less like a traditional school.

Using materials and finishes that recall the industrial context, the space encourages cross-pollination between student pathways—construction technology, design and engineering, film and media, computer science, and culinary arts—while it serves as a teaching tool for qualifying students to learn about building technologies.