SHoP’s design represents a more expansive and inclusive approach than that of its predecessor to the challenge of integrating into the historic area and urban fabric. Gregg Pasquarelli, one of the firm’s founders, explains that the Rouse building’s design was intended to cut tourists off from the neighborhood surrounding the Seaport, including the fish market, because it was considered dangerous. “Here you were, surrounded by amazing views on three sides, and you had a three-story shopping mall on the waterfront,” he says. SHoP’s strategy included restoring those views and facilitating pedestrian circulation, creating a much more open new building and restoring the street grid around Pier 17, to reconnect the site to its environs. “If it doesn’t have streets,” says Pasquarelli, “it doesn’t feel like New York.”

Pier 17’s design is a sophisticated take on the industrial buildings that once filled the area. The top two floors of the four-story structure are clad in a channel-glass curtain wall illuminated with a programmable LED system; the color of the glass is intended to evoke the East River’s gray-green. These upper floors serve as a “roof” for the bottom floors, which contain a village-like cluster of six distinct, two-story structures, variously clad in corrugated zinc, diamond-patterned zinc panels, and jatoba, a Brazilian cherrywood—traditional materials for old buildings here that are “used in a modern way,” Pasquarelli says. On the building’s long (north and south) sides, some bays are open, while others can be closed by 32-by-20-foot slide-up glass doors, in a nod, the architects say, to “classic New York City maritime structures.” What they describe as a “village concourse” offers paths and views through the ground floor to the outdoors; an “oculus” skylight tops the atrium above the escalators. Outdoor “porches,” as the architects call them, provide numerous places to gather and admire the views of the Brooklyn Bridge and water. These are part of SHoP’s extension of the East River Waterfront Esplanade—an ongoing project that runs from the Governors Island ferry terminal to the south, past the firm’s Pier 15 project (2011) adjacent to Pier 17, and which will continue to SHoP’s soon-to-be-completed Pier 35, about a mile to the north.

SHoP, which has been working on the Pier 17 project (for two successive owners) for well over a decade, expects to complete its next phase for the greater Seaport District by 2020. That will include the restoration and renovation of the 1907 Tin Building just west of Pier 17, which will be home to a 50,000-square-foot Jean-Georges seafood market on its ground floor. Another remnant of the old fish market, the 1939 New Market Building to the north of Pier 17, will be demolished and replaced in the project’s third phase. Given Pier 17’s outward-looking design, its upscale tenants, and its emphasis on being a good neighbor, it looks likely to be a draw for even jaded Manhattanites—if they can make their way through the throngs of tourists who are sure to show up.