A new destination for Brooklyn
Working in close collaboration with Brooklyn Exchange (BKX), Journey has developed a strategic design vision to transform a former Macy’s department store into a new destination for entertainment, retail and shared experiences, within the largest block of retail space currently available in New York City.
Bringing together architecture, placemaking, digital interaction and experience design, the project responds to a broader question facing cities across the United States: what comes after the traditional department store?
For decades, department stores and malls were designed around a relatively simple proposition – retail was the destination. Today, people have far more choice in how and where they shop, putting greater pressure on physical destinations to offer something that cannot be replicated online.
Increasingly, that means creating places combining experience, culture, entertainment, dining and social connection, with retail becoming part of a much richer mix.
BKX is the response to that shift.
From retail building to city destination
Repositioning the 440,000 square foot, multi-storey department store on Fulton Street for a new generation of tenants presents a particular challenge.
Businesses at street level naturally benefit from the energy and visibility of Fulton Street. Those several floors above do not. For BKX to operate as one destination, rather than a collection of individual tenants, the building needs to make activity throughout its upper levels visible, accessible and compelling from the pavement.
Journey developed an architectural and experiential strategy centred on visibility, movement and participation, effectively extending the energy of Fulton Street vertically up through the building.
A contemporary podium will anchor the destination at street level, creating a contrast with the historic architecture above. Expansive storefronts, curated displays and a dramatic glazed atrium will reveal activity within, creating a much stronger relationship between the building and the street.
At the centre of the intervention will be a striking stack of escalators cutting through the building and connecting its upper floors directly with Fulton Street.
Rather than treating circulation simply as infrastructure, Journey’s design makes it an experience in its own right. Visible from outside, the escalators will act as an architectural beacon, drawing visitors upwards and into a lively internal piazza while giving upper-level tenants a stronger relationship with the street below.
The destination as a platform
The reinvention of retail destinations is increasingly less about filling units and more about creating a platform that can continually evolve.
Successful destinations need to accommodate changing tenants, behaviours, cultural moments and programming without requiring the identity of the place to be reinvented each time. That requires architecture and technology to work together.
At BKX, Journey has designed a network of custom programmable digital displays across the facade and interior spaces. Together, they will create a shared platform for tenant storytelling, placemaking, cultural programming and changing content.
A flexible content management system will allow BKX to respond to seasonal moments, neighbourhood events and activity within the building, while giving individual tenants opportunities to express themselves within a coherent overall identity. It will create a digital communications layer embedded within the architecture.
A new role for retail
BKX reflects a wider transformation taking place across retail.
As shopping becomes increasingly frictionless and digital, physical destinations must work harder to earn people’s time. Their value lies increasingly in what happens around the transaction: discovery, entertainment, community, culture and the opportunity to share an experience with other people.
For former malls and department stores, this creates an opportunity. Their scale, central locations and generous volumes can make them uniquely suited to becoming new forms of mixed-use cultural and entertainment destinations.
The challenge is to rethink them not as containers for tenants, but as experiences in their own right, and BKX offers a vision for what that can look like.
Once realised, BKX will give new purpose to an established piece of Downtown Brooklyn and offer a model for how the department store can evolve from a place primarily built around shopping into a host for entertainment, culture, retail and shared experience.
