Teo Quintana

New Lab, Brooklyn Navy Yard

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Raw space

Marvel Architects, 2015

There are few sites like New Lab’s, a soaring former machine shop built at the turn of the last century. Long abandoned and facing demolition, DBI sought to overhaul the building and transform it into a innovation lab and maker space. In keeping with its industrial past, we opted to maintain the raw feeling of the space through simple gestures and muscular details. Steel framing is everywhere exposed, joints and connections unembellished, materials left unfinished.

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Maker space

I was involved in this project from DD through CD. The budget was tight, designs were reworked on the fly. Mechanical systems were proposed, designed, priced, then scrapped inside of a week. More than anything else, this project taught me how to design and draw to meet the unique challenges of New York’s construction environment. I learned enormously.

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The contemporary office

There’s something amazing about re-purposing a former foundry that made boilers for warships into an office for the coming age of digital manufacturing. Much of our design works at the level of reinterpreting a large space to fit the collaborative, team-driven, and fluid environment that innovative businesses desire. We strove to make a space that would be both inspiring and functional—based on best practices that both met ho-hum needs and quickened the pulse.