Macro Sea

October 5, 2016

Macro Sea’s David Belt takes us inside New Lab, an 84,000-square-foot thinkspace in the Navy Yard

The Brooklyn Navy Yard has since its inception acted as a pole for the cutting edge and creative, from its time as the "The Can-Do Shipyard" where U.S. warships assembled, to present day as urban farmers, photographers and filmmakers carve out spaces for themselves on the campus' more than 300 acres. But the latest most notable addition to the Navy Yard is most certainly New Lab. New Lab is the creation of Macro Sea (who many will remember brought dumpster pools to NYC a few years ago) and is a revolutionary hub that turns an 84,000-square-foot former shipping building into a thinkspace for nearly 300 engineers and entrepreneurs working in advanced hardware and robotics. Here, members whose work include everything from designing nano microscopes to using synthetic biology to engineer cities can take their ideas from concept to prototype to production under one roof. It's what the founders are calling "a breakthrough ecosystem of shared resources." In this 6sqft feature, we speak to New Lab's co-founder and Macro Sea Executive Director and founder David Belt. David is also the founder and Managing Partner of DBI, which is currently managing the realization of the Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center, amongst other high-profile projects around the city. Ahead, he takes us through the new facility and gives us some intel on what inspired the design, the cutting edge companies that have taken up space, and what he ultimately hopes to achieve with New Lab.
Learn more about New Lab with David here
May 10, 2016

400-Bed Designer Dorm Headed for Williamsburg

When you spend your student years living in an architect-designed former car radio button factory in the ultra-hip Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg, face it, you’re just going to be a little spoiled for everything else. And it should come as no surprise that, thanks to a developer specializing in student living, students in de facto hipster sister city Williamsburg will be getting a similar opportunity to live in architectural bliss rather than institutional semi-squalor. New York City-based real estate development company Macro Sea piloted the design-friendly dorm—outfitted with found furniture and slatted ladder-style stairs–in Berlin's Kreuzberg district last year. FastCompany quotes company principal David Belt: "Most people build student housing and they want to build it as cheaply as possible and the furniture to be as rugged as possible, because they think that students will wreck it." Diverging from this idea, Belt's company "sought to create an environment that treats students as savvy global citizens rather than wards of an institution."
Student housing or co-living for adults, what's the difference?