1 Wythe Avenue is a seven-story, 104,000 SF commercial building between Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Downtown Engineers delivered the full mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection (MEP/FP) engineering, in collaboration with Studios C and partner Louis Handler. Brooklyn Brewery anchors the ground floor with 41,000 SF.
The project carried three constraints from the first day of design. The lot is triangular and sits where three streets meet. It holds an environmental E-designation and it falls within a designated flood zone. Each constraint shaped the MEP approach. The E-designation required coordination with the NYC Office of Environmental Remediation before the mechanical strategy could move forward. The flood zone determined how mechanical, electrical, and plumbing routing was planned across the building. And Con Edison required a utility vault, which had to be accounted for before the plaza layout was fixed. The stair pressurization system carried the tightest margin. As a high-rise commercial occupancy, the building relies on mechanical life safety systems beyond sprinklers and fire alarms. Underdesign the pressurization and it will not reach the required pressure differential, which fails inspection. Overdesign it and the stair doors become too heavy to open during an emergency.
Full MEP/FP engineering for a seven-story, 104,000 SF building anchored by Brooklyn Brewery.
We developed the mechanical ventilation strategy through direct coordination with the Office of Environmental Remediation, satisfying the E-designation review.
Flood zone elevation drove the routing of the MEP systems from the start, so critical distribution was planned around it rather than reworked later. We built the Con Edison vault into the plaza design early, avoiding a costly retrofit once the layout was set. For the stair pressurization system, we coordinated shaft design, architectural layout, duct routing, and fan sizing together from the beginning. Stair pressurization is an approved smoke control strategy for high-rise buildings over 75 feet where smokeproof enclosures are not provided. It supplies air into the stair shafts to create positive pressure, keeping smoke out of the means of egress. Selecting it also avoided the need for vestibules, which preserved usable floor area while holding the life safety performance. We worked on a short design timeline and still reserved MEP capacity for Brooklyn Brewery's future fermentation and chilling systems. The infrastructure stays ready for the brewery to expand when it chooses to.
Months of coordination produced a single, code-compliant MEP/FP system, planned around the flood zone and built with room for the brewery to grow. Most of this work stays behind the walls, which is exactly the point: the building runs because the systems were solved from the start.
104K
104,000 SF · Seven-story commercial building engineered under one MEP/FP scope
41K
41,000 SF · Ground floor anchored by Brooklyn Brewery
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