As the storied Brooklyn Navy Yard seeks to reinvent itself as New York City’s next manufacturing economy, it is creating innovative educational partnerships to foster the long-term growth and development of future talent.

The STEAM Center, a public high school program that addresses emerging, high-growth industries that are based in technology, is a critical piece of this massive 5.1M sf plan. The STEAM Center serves as a central location for programming and experiential learning for Career and Technical Education (CTE) high schools. Students spend half of their day here and half of their day at their assigned high school. At capacity, the STEAM Center will serve approximately 400 students and have 15 on-site staff.

Part of the client’s mission was to engage the companies located within the neighborhood, and Building 77 specifically, for their expertise in their given field of the students’ curricula. The students at STEAM work closely with these companies—and many will be offered internships and hopefully employment in their chosen field.

The design is centered on a central wood volume that serves as a collaborative and interactive tool for students and faculty of all disciplines. The design creates double-height spaces in labs and the entry space, allowing for the unique MEP loads as well as increasing natural light into the school. Encouraging transparency and collaboration, the school looks and feels more like a modern office for the intrepid students of the STEAM fields and less like a traditional school. By using glass, wood, exposed concrete, and steel, the materiality of the space encourages cross-pollination between student pathways while maintaining the exposed industrial finishes seen throughout the Navy Yard. Exposed structure and building systems also serve as a teaching tool for students to learn about building technologies.