The historic Starrett-Lehigh Building, located at 601 West 26^th Street in Chelsea spans a full city block on Manhattan’s West Side. At 2.3 million square feet, the former rail hub and distribution center is one of the largest building footprints in New York City. Co-developed by the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Starrett Corporation—whose owner William Starrett concurrently oversaw construction of the Empire State Building—the complex was designed by Yatsuo Matsui of the firm Cory & Cory. 

Nearly 100 years after it was built, Starrett-Lehigh has been reimaged as a multi-use destination for working and gathering, with a variety of corporate offices; shared workspace; amenities; public spaces; retail; and flexible areas that can be configured as needed art exhibitions, public programming, events, and more. Located in a neighborhood renowned for its hundreds of art galleries, Starrett-Lehigh is at the epicenter of a vibrant district, and home to globally recognized companies in fashion and other creative industries.

Studio Loutsis designed the comprehensive placemaking and wayfinding system for the revitalized Starrett-Lehigh campus. The landmark building has a unique architectural vernacular whose signature is bands of large, multi-paned windows—unusual for industrial buildings from this era. We created a bespoke placemaking system based on a grid, leveraging the tile-like units of the building’s trademark windows. Studio Loutsis’s close collaboration with STUDIOS Architecture ensured that the architecture, signage, and wayfinding worked together seamlessly and intuitively.

Not only did the modular system we designed reference the building’s history, but it also prioritized the need for flexibility across such a large and complex campus. The tiled system we introduced allows for information on signs and directories to be easily updated as tenants change and as the building’s functionality evolves. The system also provides an integrated hierarchy of information—macro level signage and wayfinding spans more units within the grid, while micro level has a smaller footprint of tiles.