Award of Merit - Office

Atlantic Terminal

The triumph of the Atlantic Terminal Complex is how its many elements - office, retail, and transit hub - came together in Downtown Brooklyn.

The 400,000-sq.-ft. office portion of the property cost $55 million to develop and was constructed atop a four-story 471,000-sq.-ft. retail podium. The players on the mixed-use project had to find ways to negotiate with each other and work over the largest public transportation hub in Brooklyn - the third largest in New York City.

"The complexity of working over an operating subway and railroad made it stand out," said one judge.

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The coordination took many guises on the project that broke ground in February 2002 and employed more than 1,000 workers. For instance, the team had to design the lobby of the office building within the retail base, with shuttle elevators transferring passengers from the entry lobby to a fifth-floor sky lobby that served the offices above. In order to distinguish office from retail, the architects included a horizontal band of glass between the structures visible to passers-by.

One task was most daunting for all of the players, including Brooklyn-based developer Forest City Ratner Cos., construction manager Forest City Ratner Construction Services LLC, office portion designers Swanke Hayden Connell Architects of New York, and Ives Group Architects of Fair Lawn, N.J., which designed the $82 million retail base. That mutual challenge was what lay beneath the retail structure - the 101-year-old Atlantic Terminal, which houses stations for the Long Island Rail Road, nine Metropolitan Transportation Authority subway lines, and street infrastructure for four MTA bus lines.

The demands of the MTA and LIRR to run transit operations safely and with very limited schedule interruptions guided the construction, limiting the available project work hours. Other adjustments to speed up construction and minimize impact on the rail lines involved boring the retail columns directly on the terminal's existing column grid, eliminating the need for deep transfer girders. This turned the structural grid for the portion of the property above the train station at a 45-degree angle to the rest of the building.

In addition to this innovative engineering, transit authorities stipulated that the work had to meet load placement restrictions. It demanded that none of the loads from the retail structure sit above the railroad, so the team essentially split the inner structure of the retail complex into two parts.

Additionally, the engineers - already reusing the existing foundations and structural steel of the 100-year-old train station - had to adapt the foundations to make them code compliant with modern seismic regulations.

All of this work was taking place while the LIRR's Atlantic and Culver rail lines and the N and R subway lines were undergoing renovation. All told, there was nearly $1 billion in construction taking place in the area, occasionally creating logistical logjams that limited construction access to the site.

Despite all of these obstacles and the complicated web of public and private parties involved in the construction, the team completed the complex on time and relatively smoothly. And the trains kept running.