Bjarke Ingels’ architecture firm is relocating from Lower Manhattan to Dumbo, the Brooklyn neighborhood the starchitect calls home.
BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group signed a lease for 50,000 square feet at Two Trees Management’s 45 Main Street, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The new location is more than double the size of BIG’s space at 61 Broadway, and is closer to the firm’s workforce. Ingels told the Journal that he estimates about three quarters of the nearly 200 people who work in his New York City office live in Brooklyn. News of the deal was first reported by Crain’s.
“The creative workforce that my colleagues are, they all live in Brooklyn,” said Ingels, who paid $3.9 million for a Dumbo apartment in 2015.
BIG will take the full ninth floor at the 12-story building. Two Trees has been continually upgrading the three large office buildings it owns in the neighborhood, and plans to add outdoor roof decks designed by James Corner Field Operations, part of the design team that worked on the High Line park.
“Our bread and butter always has been those design-based firms and software or tech firms,” Two Trees’ Jed Walentas told the Journal. “Dumbo was never going to be a financial services back office area.”
Mary Ann Tighe, Tim Dempsey, Ken Rapp, Chris Mansfield and Peter Gamber at CBRE represented BIG in the deal. [WSJ] – Rich Bockmann