The Flatiron Institute is woven into the fabric of the historic storefronts, lofts, and residential buildings of Manhattan’s Flatiron District. This facility brings together the world’s brightest scientific minds to pursue advances in computational analysis in disciplines like astrophysics, biology, mathematics, and quantum physics.
Working alongside our longtime client and partner, The Simons Foundation, we devised a master plan and designed a phased, gut renovation of the building. The design creates spaces that generate creative collisions and inspire innovation, while also responding to the building’s own past and that of its neighborhood. Known in the early 20th century as the Ladies’ Mile shopping district, the area is now called Silicon Alley for the high-tech firms that settled there a century later. The new Flatiron Institute shows the flexibility of existing buildings and their ability to adapt to a changing population and new uses. A two-story interior renovation continues the restoration at the institute’s headquarters across the street. This renovation expands the institute with a new Center for Computational Neuroscience and creates a conference center that is shared with the foundation.
The Vision
The client’s goal was for scientists, computer programmers, and administrative staff to collaborate more effectively. Our team created a master plan for a vertical research center in a populated urban setting, capitalizing on design, programmatic, and operational opportunities to spark collaboration between research groups.
Our team had to navigate a complicated leasing schedule that required threading new infrastructure for the building around previous systems while many floors were still occupied by tenants.
The master plan dealt with this issue by organizing the construction across several phases. Our team began with redesigning the lobby, infrastructure, and vertical circulation. Next, we renovated the research floors in two separate phases. The final phase consisted of renovating the public spaces: a top-floor dining room and atrium that leads to a rooftop board room and garden; and a second floor auditorium and lounge.
The design brief had to accommodate multiple functions within each small floorplate: heads-down research, collaborative and communal spaces, amenities, and public-facing areas. To achieve this, the institute is organized around multiple two-story computational centers, each with an opening in the floor at the widest section of the floorplate to visually and physically connect people on each floor. Commons spaces are situated around these openings on every floor, allowing access to daylight on Fifth Avenue and to the corner views facing Madison Square Park and the adjacent Flatiron building.
Private and semi-private offices are located on the perimeter of the layout, allowing for calm spaces for investigation. The offices’ glass walls send more light into the center of the space where there are a variety of collaborative spaces. These core spaces are stacked as a trapezoid that rises up through the building, a nod to the shape of the neighboring Flatiron Building. The angled volume opens up the corridors towards the Commons spaces on Fifth Avenue. The core walls are covered entirely in chalkboards that teams can use to explore mathematical and scientific concepts. The chalkboard surfaces encourage collective activity by inviting researchers out of their private offices and into the communal spaces, creating an environment for innovation.
Light of Knowledge
Throughout the design, the light of knowledge has been a motivating force throughout the design, animating scientific discovery that happens throughout the institute.
Each floor in the building is connected through a glass-walled staircase, lit through new windows and a skylight above, to bring natural light deep into the upper and lower floors. The stairs form a vertical quad, connecting the Commons spaces and conference rooms on the research floors, and allowing for a glimpse into the research of each discipline. Exciting views of the surrounding historic district can be seen from each window, encouraging movement around the institute. As the staircase rises, a colorful tiled wall showcases different colors to create an identity for each computational center and assist with wayfinding.
Light is also featured prominently in the auditorium, where the Flatiron Institute and the Simons Foundation bring scientists, academics, and members of the public together frequently for events. Our team fashioned it from folding wood panels, with light streaming through them to illuminate both presenters and the audience. The auditorium also features acoustical window walls, surrounded by theatrical curtains, to bring natural light in for daylong conferences.
A Higher Plane
The central core deconstructs again as it reaches the upper floors of the institute where a communal dining room is located as well as a rooftop addition for the foundation’s board room. The board room resides above the dining room and blends into the garden through structural-glass sliding walls. The rooftop garden has views of the surrounding city and grounds the Flatiron Institute well within its urban surroundings.
Nature also plays an important role because the institute promotes collaboration between the sciences and integrates their work with the natural world. The roof garden features a wide range of seating and teaming spaces, fostering professional interaction in an outdoor setting, suggesting nature as an important partner of interdisciplinary thought. The layered gardens invite leisurely walks and create private spaces to get lost in thought.
Seasonal plants brighten the terrace, while supporting resiliency within the urban context. The greenery moderates the temperature of the building, combating urban heat-island effects and capturing stormwater, while a climate-sensing drip system irrigates the plants to reduce water usage.
Our team worked with Dirtworks Landscape Architecture to select plantings that support local pollinators. Meanwhile, a sunlit atrium allows light into the communal dining room below, where a tree planter extends the garden indoors and a floating stair summons staff up to the rooftop garden. The dining room has an open plan for flexibility to host the institute’s daily meals and programming, and to provide the views and daylight available at the top of the building.
Honoring History
Another design priority was finding a way to blend this modern, cutting-edge institute into the building’s historic Beaux Arts architecture style. The lobby was redesigned after the team discovered neo-Corinthian capitals, egg-and-dart plaster molding, and dentils. Now, the entrance on 21st Street highlights those elements in its design. In the lobby, a sculpture of a figure carrying a torch was the inspiration for the theme of the Light of Knowledge.
The slate walls in the lobby are a nod to chalkboard material, a favorite material of scientists and mathematicians. The slate extends to the exterior as a small display of the institute’s inner workings. This is one of the few instances where the new building pokes through the historic envelope in a respectful way to mark its insertion into the historic fabric.
The entrance features exposed structural steel canopies, this steel-plate structure is a manifestation of the institute’s name and also pays respect to the Flatiron Building’s wedge shape, a design motif that is repeated throughout the design. The entrance, now on the 21st Street side of the building, attracts more pedestrian traffic, animating the block.
The rooftop addition complements the existing structure through its defining detail, a structural roof cornice. The roof garden also has slate walls, some of which are used as chalkboards.
The dynamic between modern and historic elements speaks to the values of this research institute whose mission is to advance the future of science with respect for both the past and present.
Expanding the Mission
The most recent phase of this master plan takes place across the street inside another late 19th century neo-Renaissance building where The Simons Foundation’s headquarters are located. This project consists of a two-floor renovation and allows the foundation to widen the extent of its research capabilities and spread knowledge to bigger audiences. A new Center for Computational Neuroscience will use and develop computational models to reach a better understanding of how brains work and how machines learn through artificial neural networks. The research area is linked with a light, airy stair, and like the other Centers for Computation, organizes heads-down space at the perimeter around collaborative research spaces in the middle.
One floor of the new building includes a conference center with two multi-purpose rooms, adding to the amenities available at the Flatiron Institute. The conference center becomes another useful space for the foundation to host events for scholars who travel from universities and institutes around the world.
Altering the Fabric
Cities must constantly evolve as they respond to the population’s needs and desires. This transformation reveals itself in how the historic building fabric has been adapted over time to fulfill society’s latest needs. At the turn of the 20th century, the Flatiron District was known as the Ladies’ Mile shopping district. The buildings in the neighborhood were built to sustain small manufacturing and commercial ventures that supported the growing demand from department stores. The lower floors were structured for retail, with tall ceiling heights and large column spans, while the upper floors were designed for storage and manufacturing needs. This layout made buildings ideal for adaptive reuse, and over the last hundred years they have supported a series of uses including retail, manufacturing, office, and residential.
The Flatiron Institute illustrates the transformation of the Ladies’ Mile district into a magnet for the tech industry and solidifies the city as a world-class hub of technology and science. The institute’s robust programming makes the spaces a nucleus of intellectual exchange and a driver of in-person interaction. The aim is to provide opportunities for meetings and conversations which can spark the creative process and light the way to discovery.
