Ironworkers Local 580
Apprentice and Training Facility
Long Island City, N.Y.
Daniel Goldner Architects

Daniel Goldner Architects deftly orchestrates an assemblage of metals in a building renovation to signify a union’s identity

© David Joseph

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By Suzanne Stephens

Long Island City, Queens, may have gained an artistic aura by being the home of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Noguchi Museum, among others. But much of the area is littered with dreary, low-rise masonry structures devoted to light industry and related enterprises. Nevertheless, Ironworkers Local 580: Apprentice and Training Facility (for ornamental and architectural ironworkers) shows how a renovation can artfully change that tone.

In transforming a scuzzy medical-supply storage facility with a setback brick garage into the 18,000 square feet of classrooms and workshops, the union leaders wanted to signify the value of their craft through the design of the facade and the public spaces.
They didn’t have to look far: Daniel Goldner Architects, based in Manhattan, had remodeled a nearby building for two structural-ironworker unions in a clean, planar mode evocative of the International Style. In the case of Local 580, it encouraged Goldner to make use of a range of metals to fully emphasize the union’s particular craft.

Goldner and his team gave the facade, entrance lobby, and stairway the full-metal-jacket treatment, in addition to revamping the steel-framed interior for a workshop, an adjoining welding shop, and classrooms inserted in the basement. With the new facade, Goldner left most of the brick exterior wall intact (infilling places with concrete block). Over that he designed an outer carapace of assorted 3⁄16-inch-thick metal panels at the ground floor—an articulated assemblage of bead-blasted stainless-steel (with a soft luminous sheen), pearlized stainless-steel doors, and oxidized steel at the north end—plus an etched-brass pylon. This Modernist composition, limned by reveals and shallow volumes pulled out from the brick backdrop, is further dramatized by slotlike horizontal and vertical windows incised into the planes and filled with lime-green, cobalt-blue, and yellow tinted glass.

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Formal name of Project:
Ironworkers Local 580: Apprentice and Training Facility

Location:
Long Island City, N.Y.

Gross square footage:
18,000 sq. ft.

Owner:
Local Union 580: Ornamental and Architectural Ironworkers

Architect:
Daniel Goldner Architects
143 West 29th Street
Floor 7
New York, NY 10001
T: 212.268.8511
F: 212.268.1129
www.goldnerarchitects.com