Dos Fabricas is an industrial structure that incorporates two processes — a recycling and waste to energy facility, together with an educational component of a public gallery. Challenging America’s “not in my backyard” mentality, the juxtaposition between industrial processes that deal with garbage and art combines high and low culture elements that bring a new perspective to what these facilities can be.

Recognizing the future flood plains in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, the project embraces this and welcomes the water into the site boundaries to create a new urban ecology. The building is also lifted to allow the various processes in the building to continue uninterrupted in the future.

Using bioreceptive concrete and classical architecture elements such as arches, Dos Fabricas is a proposal that anticipates the aesthetics of a ruin by finding a connection between nature and infrastructure—not as a place that needs to be demolished or forgotten, but as a place that brings nostalgia, beauty, and purpose.


This project was a collaboration with Carlos Acosta Perez.

Pratt Institute GAUD
Design 4
Critic: Dylan Baker-Rice
Structures: Alfonso Oliva
MEP: Bob Kearns 
Facades: Reid Freeman