1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge

What went up on Pier 1, a cargo wharf before the park took it over, was the first 1 Hotel built from the ground up rather than fitted into an older shell, with Marvel Architects on the building, Incorporated on the interiors and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates on the landscape and the rooftop pool. Rain off the roof runs down exposed pipes in the lobby to a tank underneath, then out into the park, where the shallow wetlands sit just past the windows. The hotel helps pay for their upkeep.

Just over half of what the hotel is made of came from somewhere else first. Uhuru Design turned heart pine beams out of the old Domino Sugar refinery into the lobby tables, the walnut came from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the pine floors from an Old Crow distillery in Kentucky, and the lobby granite from the quarry that supplied the Brooklyn Bridge. Rachel Mica Weiss tied six thousand pounds of obsidian to a wood frame with hand-dyed rope and set it into the bend of the staircase, where it reads as a rockfall caught mid-drop. The green wall behind it went in by hand.

The 194 rooms, 29 of them suites and the largest six bedrooms, mostly face the water, behind windows that run floor to ceiling and slide open. Bathrooms are marble, with a rain shower and a five-minute hourglass timer. Water comes out of a wall tap on a metal wheel, filtered, into green glass recycled from wine bottles, and the mattresses are hemp. The rooftop pool sits three feet deep on a deck of reclaimed railroad ties, looking straight at Lower Manhattan. It was built for lounging.