The Ghost in the Shell

Light-filled offices rise from the Domino Sugar refinery's dirty past

- Justin Davidson

DOMINO: I master, I rule, I subjugate. The imperial brand name affixed above the Williamsburg waterfront (and on a billion packages of sugar) is candid about its past and the corporate family that created it. But the new Refinery at Domino Sugar, a lucid loaf of an office building emerging from a flaking crust, carries another message best expressed in plain English: Not anymore. The architect Vishaan Chakrabarti and his firm, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, offer a simple concept: a glass nave tucked inside a 19th-century temple of industry, its rounded, seethrough vault rising above the roofline.