The Return of Brick Buildings in New York City

Finally, however, the new brilliant thing has aged, and the rough old thing is being stimulated. The brick, the stone and the terracotta, the products which have the solidity and the shade of the earth, timidly but perceptibly have the repertoire of architectural ambitions of New York. At a pâté de Maisons du trio de Béchers tailor from Meier, the Leroy Studio firm built a brick and terra-cotta replica at 145 Perry Street: a massive house at a single-family house posing as a pair imbued with small apartment buildings. In this part of the West Village, where the residential and industrial stories of the city overlap, the manufacturers of robust structures and on a small budget had a limited choice of pallets: mainly red or cream color pallets. Leroy used the two shades, sliding a dark skin retreat behind a broken white veil. A perforated screen of staggered bricks turns the corner of Washington Street; The openings in the wall give built -in windows, like a mask that leaves the eyes sunk from the exposed carrier. This is anti-exhibitionist architecture, a private manor that offers only attractive glimpses of itself.

Even at the height of the fashion of transparency, New York had a lot of old bricks and stone, of course, ranging from the quality of the rewarding buildings of the 1880s in New York, the novel, the Washer building and the They win the pressure buildingwhich combined delicacy and muscles. New masonry facades have materialized from time to time. In historical districts, the monument preservation commission required that the new designs relate to the old one. Affordable housing and condos built at low prices used prefabricated panels with metal membranes or brick veneer. At the other end of the market, Robert Am Stern has never ceased to believe that a pace of framed windows placed in walls dressed in stone gave luxury residential towers their New Yorkté and their pretension to quality. The recent high level of limestone of his business to 200 East 83rd Street evokes the great heaps of art deco of yesteryear. A decade or two ago, these choices read as special cases, imposed by circumstances or reactionary resistance; Now they seem premonitory.

The new citizen of Morris Adjmi by Little Italy. Dome -shaped protuberances act as pixels, creating a window -of -window model on the facade.
Photo: Justin Sullivan

An architect who was ready for a new trend was Morris Adjmiwhose company has long developed a clever way of mixing the 19th century warehouse architecture with contemporary aesthetics. “I don’t know if I was ahead of time or behind them, but if you do something long enough, it comes back,” he said. The Grand Mulberry, the six -story Ajmi building in 185 Grand Street, is dressed in hand -made bricks and designed by hand, some of which display rounded bumps, such as Lego blocks. From a distance, small domes act like pixels, forming a motive for ghost windows which do not align with the real, like the traces of a disappeared city which haunts its own replacement. The facade evokes memory, reminding passers -by that, like each square foot of the city, the corner of the Grand and Mulberry streets is in a temporary state – that other buildings have been held and other New Yorkers have lived on this patch. (One, moreover, was Nikola Tesla, who had a studio in the block.) It is a means for the architecture any new recognition of time and to concede the possibility of his future disappearance.

The color, shape and standard windows of Grand Mulberry mark it as an ordinary citizen of Little Italy. The rounded corner softens the turn, and these broken bricks echo the small gusts of free magnitude in a district of modest buildings and commercial structures. They are like the flower terracotta shields which adorn the sparls of the arches at 176-180 Grand Street and imply a parasitic aristocratic connection. Cheap buildings in the early 1900s have engaged in many of these standard fulfillments, and I read them as suction declarations, an easy way to report high intention.

From left to right: On the left, KPF glass Supertall, a Vanderbilt. Right: the mixed use building of the same company of the same company of the same company of the same company at 520 FIFTH Avenue. Photo: Raimund Koch / Kpf graciousnessPhoto: Kinyan Studios / KPF courtesy

High: On the left, KPF glass Supertall, a Vanderbilt. Right: the mixed building for mixed use of the same company of the same company of the same company at 520 fifth A … more
High: On the left, KPF glass Supertall, a Vanderbilt. Right: the mixed use building of the same company of the same company of the same company of the same company at 520 FIFTH Avenue. Photo: Raimund Koch / Kpf graciousnessPhoto: Kinyan Studios / KPF courtesy

Even Kohn Pedersen Fox discovered the elegance of the solidity of the house. These days, Von Klemperer says: “There is a greater interest and an appreciation of crafts and humanist architecture. We like to see how the bricks are placed and the wood is strawberry. Coming from a global supplier of frozen superalls, it is almost a declaration of remorse. KPF recently designed a ten-storey building at the 64 University placed like a pile of shallow arches, each deep enough to have a substance-to give illusion, that is to say that the arcade on several levels is something other than itself. The poured withdrawals, the built -in windows, the laminated courses which form each arc – these techniques make all the surface less superficial, creating a buffer of shadows between the window and the street. It is not much – the surface of Manhattan is too expensive to sacrifice everything to a deep facade – but it is enough to remind the eye that a building is a durable three -dimensional object and not a levitation window.

In modern buildings, the bricks are no longer supposed to transport a structural load, so that they are often launched in fine plates, applied to a support and hung in large leaves which require clumsy joints. KPF is not above such an opportunity, but in this case, a temporary economic wave made it less expensive to use bricks that have been handcrafted and posed, one by one, by a team of qualified equulorians. The manufacturing manifests itself in the color and precision of the coulis, the walking of dark spots and the triangular pieces where the arches meet – details which give the facade a subliminal liveliness.

A close -up of 64 arched windows from the university.
Photo: Haddis meseret / KPF courtesy

At the turn of the 20th century, Terra-Cotta provided Louis Sullivan’s Buyard building – condemned On Bleecker Street and Cass Gilbert Woolworth Tour With the Gothic frosting and the watermark which gave massive structures their foam. These days, companies like Boston Valley Terra Cotta have developed a technology to scan, copy and reproduce eroded elements of these landmarks, making it a golden age of historical catering. The casting is however an expensive process in several stages, and the same façades can provide facades for new constructions by the simpler extrusion technique, producing beautiful but less ornate panels. This is what allowed Som to by generating the Disney headquarters in green terracotta and KPF to surprise even with a graceful and fresh but retro tower for mixed use at 520 FIFTH avenue, with offices below and apartments above. Again, the Von Klemperer team has deployed stacked arches, rhythmic loss, corrugated panels and a range of textures which are added to a rare architectural quality: surface character.

It is an encouraging sign when the architects – and more importantly, the developers for whom they work – to rediscover the tools they should never have abandoned. The art of construction is already too manufacturer to abandon shadows, texture, depth, color, organic imperfection and marks of time. The manufacturers have relied on these fundamental qualities since they started to make dirt in huts, and no modern megalopolis can never exceed them.