Bureau V found and selected the site for the project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an area rich in music history, and one that is more central to less affluent, outer-borough residents than Manhattan. Williamsburg also has a growing, arts-interested constituency and is an area of rapidly rising property values. National Sawdust leverages this property value as an insurance policy for philanthropists to support the fledgling nonprofit's capital needs through a differed donation program (giving philanthropists a larger tax write-off). This philanthropic investor model (devised by Dolan) and the building's location channel the economic engines of gentrification, rising property values and growing disposable income, into supporting young artists, many of whom have been pushed out of this very area. The design of National Sawdust is characterized by the insertion of a highly articulated crystalline form into the rough brick envelope of a former sawdust factory. At its core, the project is a retooling of the 18th century chamber hall model as an incubator for new music. The hall interior is wrapped in an acoustically transparent but visually translucent skin, which allows sound to travel through it freely. Creating a seamless, wrap-around enclosure for a wide repertoire of performances, the skin masks the variable sound absorbing, diffusing, and reflecting surfaces, as well as the state-of-the-art performance, recording, broadcast, and box-in-box isolation systems that allow the nonprofit to achieve its mission: to give young composers and musicians a home, a place in which to experiment, to compose, to make mistakes, to catalogue successes, and to premiere new works.