Better Together

The Wing has taken the coworking world by storm, creating spaces for and by women. Now meet its designers.

- Laura Raskin

After coffee at The Wing in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood, Alda Ly puts on a pink baseball hat with the phrase “Casual Business Woman” stitched on the front. “I wear this when I start to write proposals and people are like, ‘Oh, don’t talk to her,’” the architect jokes.

The hat is classic Wing merch: at once sincere feminist propaganda and a send-up of bro swag, like the fleece logo vests ordered in bulk by Wall Street boys’ clubs. The Dumbo location of the women-only coworking and community space—founded in 2016 and emboldened in its gender-oriented mission in the era of #MeToo—is Ly’s office-away-from-the-office, where she holds meetings and bumps into friends. She also designed it.

In fact, it’s one of six she’s had a hand in so far in the franchise. Others can be found in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles, or even across the East River, in Manhattan’s Soho and Flatiron neighborhoods. But Ly, the sole principal of Alda Ly Architecture & Design, has been involved with The Wing since its launch in 2016: She led the project team at Leong Leong for the company’s first outpost. Shortly after its completion, Ly established her own practice, and The Wing’s founders, Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan, tapped her to lead an expansion to new locations. “They wanted a female architecture team because it fit the profile of supporting female business owners and entrepreneurs,” she says. “It was a really good first big client for us.”