How the SHoP Architects Team Successfully Collaborated on Pier 17, a 12-Year, 168-Person Project
The SHoP Architects team designed one of the most important New York City spaces in recent years. Image: c/o SHoP.
The public sees the ta-da moment, but behind the scenes, architecture requires collaboration, sometimes over decades, navigating complex stakeholder sets, building community consensus and innovating through each project’s particular constrictions and parameters. It is the ultimate team sport.
Recently, the team at SHoP Architects responsible for Pier 17 in New York City—the award-winning reimagining of the South Street Seaport neighborhood—sat down to discuss their 12-year effort from idea to full build. They are all still at SHoP and have become project leaders across the organization. The team includes Angelica Trevino Baccon, Scot Teti, Andreia Teixeira, Sean Bailey and Clinton Miller. Between them, they have or are currently working on SHoP projects including the recently completed Uber Headquarters in San Francisco, the supertall tower 111 W 57th Street in New York and the future Atlassian Headquarters in Sydney.
For Pier 17, the SHoP team collaborated with consultants and external stakeholders, from the client Howard Hughes Corporation to the community board to the New York City Landmarks Commission. The end result is spectacular and extends the city to the shoreline. The district includes David Chang and Andrew Carmellini restaurants, ESPN and Nike offices, an open rooftop concert space that hosted Elvis Costello, Billy Strings and others last summer, and the reimagined Tin Building, the Jean-Georges collection of restaurants and market vendors.
Here the SHoP team takes us inside the project, shares the biggest challenges and how they stayed on track, and what goes into a successful collaboration when you have so many stakeholders.
Pier 17, with its rooftop concert space, shown at night. Image: Taylor Crothers.
The view of Brooklyn looking out from the shoreline. Image: SHoP
Where and how does a 12-year project start?
Scot: As part of the design process, you help the client figure out what they want. The client will have initial goals, but, as we roll our sleeves up and start working through their goals together, we gain a better understanding of the hands-on work that needs to be done toward the bigger picture.
Andreia: What’s unique about the seaport is that it’s a masterplan with several buildings, not just one. We had to look at these buildings and sites from the perspective that they may or may not happen because there were a lot of different ideas about what we could do with the district. In the mix were a historical building, a new building, a pier and public spaces, so we had a lot of add-ons on the project that made the timeline longer.
Angelica: You realize that you don’t just have one client. Working in New York City, there are a lot of end users of the building: the city, the neighborhood, city planning, the landmarks board, the community boards. They were all part of our process. The SHoP team sat in every community board meeting to understand what the project’s neighbors wanted and wanted us to avoid, then incorporated that feedback into the design. That helped make the project what it is today, something the whole neighborhood had a hand in creating.
What was the big vision for this?
Angelica: The vision changed with time. We started in 2010 with a deep understanding of the city and the waterfront. Then Superstorm Sandy hit and it was a different city. It’s imperative to our practice that we design with flexibility in mind. And it always keeps things interesting.
Clint: The facade, for example, can open and close to meet different uses and experiences. The ground plane is not an enclosed mall. Before I joined SHoP, I went down to the site with my dad to see what was there. You couldn’t find the Brooklyn Bridge. Eventually, you could get through the site, but you had to go through this grass mall.
The open plan allows for maximum light and an inside/outside feel. Image: Ty Cole.
How did you introduce a sense of open space in the design?
Clint: We set up the ground plane so you can see both piers as you move through it. We wanted the facade to fit that experience while still being able to respond to inclement weather. For the top floor, we didn’t know what would be there. What is there now is completely different than what we first envisioned. It changed so many times in the process. The upper facade has a mixture of transparent glass and open areas and is as much a reflection of the water outside as it is about any specific program behind it.
What notable constraints did you face during this project?
Sean: There were a tremendous number of constraints on this project because it’s in a historic district and there are so many stakeholders. One of our earlier versions of the event space included canopies. We had to take that away, not because the client didn’t want them, but because the community didn’t want them.
Canopies were the dealbreaker?
Sean: They were. So the configuration of the event space that exists today is the direct result of responses from stakeholders.
What other constraints pushed you in new directions?
Angelica: The Tin Building was the ultimate constraint. It was a historic building that had burned down and we needed to reclaim its essence.
Andreia: We also had technical constraints for the Tin Building because we had to meet FEMA flood lines. We needed to lift the building too because it was under the FDR Drive, which was built after and over the Tin Building. We proposed to reconstruct the building with some historical elements in a different location further back. That created a plaza entrance and allowed for the esplanade from Pier 11 to carry through the entire side. This sounds like a minimal move, but it was incredibly important to guarantee the pedestrian network would function. Our idea, one that stayed throughout the project, was about the connectivity between the seaport and the city. Before, the Tin Building blocked the water views and it was hard to access. We changed that and now you can walk all the way through from the Financial District.
A ship-side view of Pier 17 under construction. Image: SHoP.
The waterside location made the construction more challenging. Image: SHoP.
How did the five of you collaborate and build on each other's ideas?
Sean: We’ve known each other for so long that we have developed a level of comfort with each other. That results in good communication and being able to push back on each other when we don’t agree on things. That often leads to a better result.
Andreia: Our aesthetic styles might be different, but we share the same design principles.
Scot: Each person brings certain skill sets and we’re all ambidextrous as to how we apply those skills. We know when and how to pull in someone else who has a certain strength we need.
You had a lot of external stakeholders here. How did you partner with them?
Angelica: It’s about respecting everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. We had people who were passionate about bike lanes and the pedestrian paths, we had local bird consultants. We worked successfully with all of them because we listened and respected their opinions and balanced priorities accordingly. The pedestrian paths have succeeded, in part, because we are able to manage the truck deliveries.
Sean: The Seaport is a 10-minute walk from our office so it’s also our community. We are stakeholders and community members.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during the 12 years?
Clint: When the project started out, we just worked on Pier 17. The previous version of Pier 17 had this building called the Link Building. Do you remember that scene in Home Alone 2 when Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern arrive in New York and Pesci says it smells like freedom and money and Stern says it smells like fish? That was the Link Building. All of the infrastructure for the seaport—the pipes and electricity—went through the Link Building. It was a scar on the project. But, the more we looked at it, the more we realized it could be the front door to thinking about Pier 17 as a district. That unlocked a much better outcome.
Scot: The Link Building was built as a reaction. That’s true of a lot of the historic structures. What might surprise people is that knocking down a building can be cheaper than renovating or reconstructing a building. We initially thought we could refurbish Pier 17 and then build from there. But, as we peeled back the layers of this particular onion, we quickly realized that during the 1980s there were a lot of corners that were cut in construction. We had to rebuild the 1980s construction and that was a huge challenge.
Angelica: The constructability of it all was an enormous undertaking. None of us had ever built a building over water. The Tin Building sat on historic timber piles, which had to be retrofitted, so the building now sits on something very stable. The subway also runs right below, adding to the infrastructure complexity.
The Tin Building has been completely reimagined and now features a gourmet restaurant hall. Image: SHoP.
Now I understand why it took 10 years. It sounds more complicated by the second.
Scot: You’re also dealing with a building that is not on land, so you have to think about how you are connecting the plumbing and electricity, which typically you can connect via the street. Even how we plugged into the city grid was itself an adventure.
When you face all of these different challenges, how do you keep it all together and directed toward your ultimate goal and outcome?
Angelica: It goes back to asking the essential questions around what we are trying to solve for: What is the end goal? How do we get there? We don’t know everything, but if we can ask the right questions, we can collaborate with the right specialists to get us to that point.
What solutions did you discover here that you’re applying to other projects?
Angelica: Our client wanted an enclosed space for Pier 17. We were trying to prove that New Yorkers want to walk in the streets, not in buildings. Our solution was an operable door that enables both enclosed and open spaces. Solving for that made us think about an operable facade for Uber’s new headquarters in San Francisco and then an operable facade for Atlassian’s headquarters in Australia.
Andreia: Designing the seaport made us think about how to design buildings from the inside out. Maybe it’s not the entire building, but portions of it. That has influenced our work for Uber, Atlassian, and other new projects.
Scot: A common thread for SHoP projects stems from the relationship between the inside and outside. At Pier 17, you are outside, but walking inside. Even when you go up to the roof, there are moments when you are in the escalator and are outside, then flip inside, then the roof is outside. You can see that in how we have designed the ground plane of our new downtown Washington DC project. When you navigate through that ground plane—which is one of the most important first steps of the project—you continue to have a relationship with the surrounding city as you experience the building.
Looking back, what are some lessons learned?
Scot: We learned a lot from this experience about flexibility. It’s not just that the client speaks to the architect and the architect scurries off to design. You have to enjoy the process of collaboration. We’ve learned it’s an adventure we take together.
Clint: I used to have this coffee mug with a chimera on it. We joked that something with wings and a fishtail isn’t going to be effective. During this project, I realized it’s not only important to understand a problem, but also be able to describe it back to the stakeholder or client when they are asking for something that isn’t going to be optimum.
Andreia: Being resilient. We are passionate about design and ideas and we are filled with energy when we are doing that. Then you spend way more time and energy figuring out city approvals, constructability and other review processes, and it’s harder to have motivation. We spent eight months determining whether we should have bollards or a curb on the road. Looking back, though, going through these review and approval processes is the only way you can ensure you’re doing the right thing. Where you put the road or the door to the building is really important. The operational processes were as important to the project as the design.
Angelica: Even though you want to solve everything, the reality is that the range of things to solve for is so wide you can’t do it on your own. You have to rely on others and ask the right questions to bring people together. The strength doesn’t always come in the analytics or the technical aspects. It comes in the passion of bringing people along on the journey and believing it will be a better city and space for people. People want to be at the edge of the water. How do you bring people to the waterfront with a great public space? In the end, we’re fulfilling universal human demands for our cities and our lives.
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