The historic neighborhoods of Clinton Hill and Fort Greene are recognized for their tree-lined streets and quintessential Brooklyn brownstones. But take a closer look at these adjacent north Brooklyn neighborhoods and you’ll find some of the borough’s most creative residents. The Brooklyn Navy Yard alone houses over 450 businesses which employ over 11,000 creators, artisans, fabricators, and innovators in every industrial sector from furniture manufacturing to innovative high-tech research, not forgetting the numerous independent creative studios spread throughout the area. With the variety of creative businesses, cultural institutions, and restaurants located within these neighborhoods, design and its makers certainly abound here.
Founded in 1999 by Laurie Angela Cumbo, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) broaches dialogue around social and political issues endemic to the African Diaspora through the utilization of the visual and performing arts, exhibitions, community programming and educational initiatives centered in social justice. The museum started off as Cumbo's graduate thesis for her degree in visual arts administration at New York University–she was concerned about the economic, social, political, and aesthetic decline of central Brooklyn, and was exploring the contributions an African diaspora museum could make to its revitalization.
Currently housed in a 1,700-square-foot ground floor space in the James E. Davis Arts Building at 80 Hanson Place, MoCADA is set to move into L10, the soon-to-be-completed 50,000 square feet of space at the mixed-use development at 300 Ashland Place. MoCada will share the new space with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the Brooklyn Public Library, and 651 ARTS across four floors.
MoCADA
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Christophe Roberts is the owner of Manza Studios. The Chicago-born multi-disciplinary artist and designer uses upcycled waste and organic materials to craft sculptures, collages, and installation work. He is especially known for his dynamic sculptures created from Nike boxes. Heavily influenced by hip-hop culture, Roberts’ work explores themes on “complex masculinities, rebel origin myths, and the commodification of identity through meditations on mass culture iconography.” A 2020 Life WTR Visual Artist and a Nike Master of Air, Roberts’ work has been widely exhibited across the United States and he continuously creates for his ongoing commission with Nike.
Manza Studio
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Founded in 2010, Brooklyn Grange is the leading rooftop farming and intensive green-roofing business in the US, operating the world’s largest rooftop soil farms. The company owns 5.6 acres of rooftop across three roofs in New York, with 1.5 acres located at Building 3, Brooklyn Navy Yard. Together, they generate over 100,000 lbs of organically grown produce per year. With clients ranging from private homes to corporate companies and low-income hous ing facilities, Brooklyn Grange also designs, builds, and maintains several urban greenspaces in New York City, including the rooftop farm at the Jacob K. Javits Center. With 2,000 square feet of paved patio and winding walkways, Brooklyn Grange can host everything from educational tours to weddings and yoga sessions amongst their rows of kale, microgreens, and sunflowers, at their Brooklyn Navy Yard farm.
Brooklyn Grange
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Bednark Studio has occupied Brooklyn Navy Yard’s 65,000-square-foot Building 28 since 2019. Utilizing wood, plastic, metal, print, and integrated lighting to create retail environments, experiential marketing infrastructure, and architectural millwork, Bednark serves industry-leading designers, architects and retail brands like Nike and Balenciaga. The custom fabricators are vertically integrated, so everything from concepting to product delivery and installation, takes place in-house.
Building 28, a former shipbuilding hangar, filters natural light through clerestory windows onto a six-hundred-foot-long vestibule surrounded by a mezzanine which houses the studio’s offices on a top tier and fabrication floorspace below.
Bednark Studio
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SOUR, a hybrid studio specializing in architecture, interiors, urban space, and product design, is on a mission to tackle social and urban issues with sustainable and inclusive solutions. Using a tech and data-centered approach, SOUR creates solutions by experimenting with fabrication and materials to realize the full potential of their ideas, and by using research conducted in collaboration with other multidisciplinary experts. An excellent example of their work is Degree Inclusive, the multi-award-winning deodorant applicator made for Unilever, created specifically for people with visual and upper extremity impairment. SOUR collaborated with those in the disability community and a multi-specialty team to come up with the award-winning design. SOUR offices can be found both in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Istanbul, Turkey.
SOUR Studio
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On the northeast corner of the quiet intersection where tree-lined Willoughby Avenue meets tree-lined Adelphi Street, is Rhodora, New York’s first carbon-neutral natural wine bar and the country’s first trash-free bar. Opened in 2019, a contemporary-rustic decor—complete with reclaimed-wood floors, ceiling, and booths, complemented by an exposed-brick wall and a mix of marble and wooden tabletops—reflects the locale’s ambitious sustainability ethos. The bar’s zero-waste program sends absolutely nothing to landfill—there are no garbage cans, all food scraps are composted, and no single-use plastics ever enter the premises. Wines originate only from natural, low-intervention, small-farm producers. If you’re going for a visit, Rhodora’s façade of paneled windows framed and anchored by weathered steel is hard to miss.
Rhodora Wine Bar
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Sculptural designer Rosie Li and her former Roll & Hill colleague, engineer Philip Watkins, are the founders of Rosie Li Studio, a boutique lighting manufacturer and design studio. Their stunning unconventional designs are rooted in the study of geometry, nature, science, and math, resulting in fixtures with pared-down organic and geometric forms, all made-to-order. Within the high-ceilinged, light-filled studio is a showroom at the storefront designed by Office of Tangible Space, and a makerspace to the back which accommodates a machine shop and an assembly area where all fixtures are fabricated. Several plants in a variety of sizes line showroom walls, adding a biophilic warmth to the space.
Rosie Li Studio
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Co-founders Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova started Terreform ONE—a nonprofit art, architecture, and urban design research group—with the notion that we can save the planet from extinction by working with nature, using architectural socioecological design to do so. The two created the word Terreform by combining the word “terre” (earth, soil) and “reform” (rebuild, reconstruct, recreate) with the intention that whatever they ideated would be design that reforms “current pollution-causing global trends”.
Stationed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the interdisciplinary lab can be found on any given day prototyping incubators for sustainable food creation like their Cricket Shelter; creating and testing new bio-engineered building materials like their biopolymers generated and used in their Gen2Seat; or creating renderings of what a post-carbon city looks like if we were to allow nature to take over.
Terreform ONE
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Established as the New York Experimental Glass Workshop in 1977, UrbanGlass is a nonprofit organization founded by three art school graduates to further experimentation and critical understanding of glass as a creative medium. Located in Brooklyn’s former Strand Theater, UrbanGlass’ fully equipped 17,000-square-foot studios, are the largest and most renowned open-access glass studios in the United States. Over 380 professional artists, students, graduates, and those just wanting to learn the art of creating with glass, make use of the innovation hub each year.
At street-level is the publicly accessible Agnes Varis Art Center, housing the Robert Lehman Gallery—an expansive space with high ceilings and polished cement floors where a rotation of glasswork and contemporary art exhibitions take place throughout the year; and the UrbanGlass|ware shop where glass jewelry and objects made by artisans using the facility are sold.
UrbanGlass
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For over thirty years, Brooklyn Stone and Tile (BKST) has been specializing in the fabrication and installation of stone surfaces for residential and commercial projects. In 2018, just as the former owner was about to retire and shutter the business, The Working World—a non-profit organization—stepped in and helped transfer ownership to employees, some of whom had been working at the company for eighteen years. Currently housed in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the fabricators pride themselves on being an employee-owned cooperative and on the excellent work they produce in their field.
Brooklyn Stone and Tile
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Kickie Chudikova began her product and furniture design studio with the aim of taking quotidian items and elevating them into much more aesthetically enjoyable objects that are still every bit functional, like her award-winning “Love Birds”, a stainless-steel salt and pepper shaker set in the form of two kissing birds. Chudikova purposely uses bold colorful design to elicit positive emotions from its user. Established in 2020, Chudikova’s studio is part of Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Newlab, an 84,000- square-foot facility housing a community of over 200 entrepreneurs and inventors who share resources and leverage technology and a collective spirit of innovation, to design and create products that can transform the world.
Kickie Chudikova Studio
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Clinton Hill & Fort Greene
Take a design journey through Clinton Hill & Fort Greene
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The Self-Guided Journey platform was developed and curated by Valerie Hoffman and Maya Bayram. Written content for the Clinton Hill & Fort Greene, NoMad & Flatiron, and Harlem maps is by Michelle Duncan. As the Crow Walks' Patra Jongjitirat created the map illustrations; David Timoteo was involved with the design. James Eades, Steven Wisley, and Stephanie Couture captured and edited the video content.
Thank you to the SVA Department of Design Research, Writing & Criticism for supporting this project.
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