Rethinking the “Printing District”
The site of Disney’s new Manhattan headquarters covers an entire city block, bounded by Vandam Street, Varick Street, Spring Street, and Hudson Street. It is surrounded by old loft buildings—the former homes of the neighborhood’s printmaking past, and now the adaptively reused spaces of studios, offices, and exhibitions. The architecture of the former “Printing District” called for large floors, and the site of the new headquarters allows for floorplates that reach up to 85,000 square feet—a size ideally suited to contemporary media production—with 1.2 million gross square feet in total.