S K Y L I N E | Flatiron on Flatbush
Downtown Brooklyn’s electric tower, plus Chip Lord bids farewell to the car and more
Issue 121. If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing to our print edition.
Welcome back to NYRA’s regular helping of news and views bubbling up from the city’s architecture scene, and beyond. On deck this week: a series of dispatches, a report from atop a new Brooklyn skyscraper, and a summary of the last week’s headlines. Events seem to have dried up for the month, but you’ll find a few listings at the very bottom of the page.
DISPATCHES
07/29
Seismic Importance
LAGUARDIA PLACE — Bridging across time zones, “Mid-Term Relief and Transitional Programs,” a symposium co-held at the Center for Architecture in New York and at the Salt cultural institute in Istanbul, took the aftermath of Turkey-Syria earthquakes as its departure. Panelists representing a diverse geographic spread shared their professional experiences in post-disaster responses, beginning with the rural anti-seismic rammed-earth projects of EDWARD NG, professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. YASMEEN LARI, co-founder of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, argued that self-built and low-impact structures — like the shelters and community centers she has designed for Pakistani villages effected by flooding — can “decarbonize and decolonize the humanitarian model.” JAMES GARRISON, an architect teaching at Pratt, noted how planning ahead and testing emergency-housing prototypes, such as the ones he developed with the City of New York, is a crucial step to avoid interim housing from lasting years or permanently displacing communities. Urbanist ALP ARISOY reflected on how the Turkish state’s improvised response to the February earthquake resulted in unlivable temporary communities without access to shade or water, “setting the ground for a second disaster.” In the Q&A time, Ng underscored the challenges faced when advocating for post-disaster rammed-earth solutions in China’s Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, as the local government favored reconstructing reinforced concrete, prohibitively expensive for farmers. All the speakers agreed that working in close contact with local communities is the only way to move forward, and all the solutions presented were the result of a long mediation between external planners and local knowledge. —Giacomo Rossi
Baby, Why Don’t We Go?
WEST VILLAGE — “Even resources you don’t have, you can use them.… I made up some resources,” said D. SMITH after a screening of her celebrated documentary, Kokomo City, for which she acted as director, producer, cinematographer, composer, and editor. (Her admission that she cut the film using iMovie elicited a ripple of sympathetic laughter inside the main theater of the IFC Center.) Smith’s black-and-white cinematography unifies a collage of verité interviews interspersed with campy reenactments and stock footage. But against this visual unity, Smith refuses to smooth over the differences among her subjects — four Black trans women making a living as sex workers — in pursuit of easy metanarrative. In interviews shot largely in their own homes, LIYAH MITCHELL, DANIELLA CARTER, DOMINIQUE SILVER, and KOKO DA DOLL speak to questions of passing, their relationships with Black cis men and women, and their proximity to deadly violence. The film doesn’t impinge on these conversations but treats them as a starting point, Smith noted, “I hope trans women are inspired to protect other trans women.”—Ben Barsotti Scott
07/26
Quiet Interventions
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — The Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Arguments lecture series ended its summer run on a gentle note. FUMINORI NOUSAKU and MIO TSUNEYAMA presented the work of their Tokyo design practices — Fuminori Nousaku Architects and studio mnm — which are distinct yet intertwined, overlapping in the perennial project that is making holes in their house. “There are memories in materials,” Nousaku said softly to a room of attentive students and professors. With slides consisting of construction details (drawn and photographed), broken concrete, and earthworms and elegantly chronicled policy and industrial histories, the partners deftly illustrated their precise optimism for the work of the architect at present. There is an urgency underpinning their bricolage activity tempered by the lucid historicity of their intentions. Elaborating on their theme of “urban wild ecology,” Nousaku and Tsuneyama pointed to the tremulous labor of excising a swatch of sidewalk for a plant bed. This transformation of the dead, planar city into a deeply entangled, living place, they suggested, was both ordinary and profound. —Juliana Yang
Tentative Progress
LAGUARDIA PLACE — A panel at the Center for Architecture organized to mark the thirty-third anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act explored the major barriers to creating affordable, accessible, and community-oriented housing for New York’s senior citizens. As troubling as the continued aversion of some starchitects toward ADA is, money presents the greatest obstacle to realizing such projects, the speakers agreed. “You’re not going to JP Morgan to get funding for this [type of socially oriented] building,” said DARIN REYNOLDS, a partner at COOKFOX. Moreover, legal requirements put in place to ensure accessibility in all buildings can check the aims of designers and non-profits fighting to increase the city’s affordable housing stock. In the words of JENNA BREINES, a director of non-profit housing coalition West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing, “perfect becomes the enemy of good.” When asked about alternative financial structures that would encourage the development of more accessible housing, one panelist quipped “not in America,” perhaps obliquely calling for a socialized approach to the problem. Still, the panel took a moment to appreciate the impact ADA has had on the built environment, in New York and elsewhere, even where starchitects (ahem, Steven Holl) seem to disregard its importance. —Michael Donovan
7/19
Goodbye to All That
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — “I was born in a year no cars were produced in America,” said artist CHIP LORD, founder of the countercultural Ant Farm collective, in a talk at Columbia GSAPP. This auto-austerity had been brought about by World War II and come the victorious conclusion of the conflict, America would more than correct the deficit; the car became a national cynosure, a continental obsession. This “car fascination” was long ago crystallized in Ant Farm’s Cadillac Ranch (1974), an environmental sculpture in the flatlands of Amarillo, Texas, made up of ten tail-finned Cadillacs half-buried in a cow pasture along I-40. Lord said he was inspired by WPA-era photographs of rusting cars with an elegant patina sheen, and the installation does strike an ambivalent note of renascence and decay, exhumation, and burial. This many-sidedness is a likely reason for Cadillac Ranch’s durability in the American imaginary, occupying a place halfway between Bruce Springsteen and Pixar’s Cars). Lord mostly skirted the issue of the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, though he joked about the group’s unwitting prescience in retaining image rights for their projects. A valediction of sorts — Lord had titled his presentation, “The Long Goodbye to the Automobile” — only appeared during the Q&A. “Has the automobile been a failure?” inquired moderator GREGORY CARTELLI. “It has been a failure,” Lord answered. “It’s taken the production and population out of cities and destroyed neighborliness.” —Souli Boutis
NYRA on the Town
Flatiron on Flatbush
DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — Coming soon to New York, the city’s first all-electric skyscraper. Also imminent, the city’s first public school designed to Passivhaus standards. Not coincidentally, they’re both part of a single full-block development where Boerum Hill meets Downtown Brooklyn, mixing not only use but also scale, massing, and sustainability strategies to dramatic effect. Prominently sited at the pointy corner of Flatbush Avenue and State Street, the first phase of Alloy Block, slated for completion early next year, is an unusual union of a high-rise residential tower — a sleek, flatiron-shaped wedding cake with slight setbacks on two of its three facades — and a mid-rise school, with triple-glazed windows set in the dark-gray brick of its airtight envelope.
At a recent construction tour organized by the Urban Design Forum, AJ Pires, president of Alloy Development (and board member of UDF), related that they began assembling the site back in 2015. “As both the architect and the developer, we [attended] over 120 community meetings to listen to people’s concerns and iterate with our design capacity,” he said, putting a positive spin on what by all accounts was a contentious ULURP process regarding the height of the two towers as originally proposed in 2018. Then known as 80 Flatbush, it was a NIMBY’s worst nightmare and a YIMBY’s fever dream, up zoned to the effect of 900 transit-adjacent residential units in two towers, plus the public school, literally wedged between a long block of classic Brooklyn brownstones and the historic Williamsburg Savings Bank tower (it now goes by the bland moniker One Hanson Place). Hundreds of meetings and dozens of tweaks later, the project was approved with a 12.5% reduction in FAR, from 18 to 15.75, with the first of two phases slated for completion in early 2024 and the second phase set to break ground shortly thereafter, for a grand total of “1.2-million square feet of seven programs in five buildings” — three new, two adaptively reused — upon completion in 2028.
Of course, the backyard — mine, yours, everyone’s and no one’s, really — has been changing for years, what with Brooklyn’s answer to Billionaire’s Row rising along Flatbush Avenue. In partnering with NYC Public Schools, which owned the western parcels of the block, Alloy agreed to not only to build a new 350-student high school housing the Khalil Gibran International Academy but also a 500-student elementary school for the ongoing influx of residents in Downtown Brooklyn. With that in mind, the development team “chose to make the school building an independent building in the middle of the block, versus a piece of a podium,” for which they enlisted Architecture Research Office. “As architects,” Pires continued, “we didn’t want to conflate the school with the rest of the [design and development process].” ARO’s Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky, also present for the tour, elaborated on the challenges of the site, where they’ve cleverly co-located the two schools in a single eight-story building, with separate entrances — Flatbush for the high school, State for elementary — and learning spaces as well as shared amenities such as the cafeteria.
The tour started in the partially below-grade “gymnatorium” of the elementary school and made its way up to a third-floor terrace (part of the high school) overlooking the Whole Foods 365 Market across the way. Then it was down to the plaza, where the school cantilevers along Flatbush, and around the corner down Third Avenue, circumnavigating KGIA’s current home at 362 Schermerhorn Street on the west side of the block, where it will continue to operate until the new school is completed next year; those historic buildings will be adaptively reused as cultural and retail spaces in phase two. Doubling back on State Street, Pires led us through still-raw lobby and amenity spaces to a finished unit, built as a construction mock-up, and then up the top of the high-rise via hoists near the building’s prow. The phase-one tower, which also includes street-level retail, clocks in at 480 feet, just shy of the neo-Romanesque Savings Bank — arguably its stylistic antithesis — whose clocktower is roughly eye-level with its new neighbor’s rooftop pool; the phase-two tower, which will add office space and more apartments to the western half of the site, will be significantly taller at 840 feet.
Looking past the gilded dome, and in just about every other direction, expansive vistas revealed just how low-lying much of “classic Brooklyn brownstone” country is. This was most starkly illustrated by the drop in rooflines south of Schermerhorn Street — the view to the west, which will be occluded by the second tower — but equally apparent in Park Slope and Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and beyond. I couldn’t help but wonder if there are other ways to densify.
The school is literally and figuratively the heart of the narrative. As Pires tells the origin story, “we approached the only other landowner on the block, New York City Public Schools, to ask about their air rights. Their response was, ‘Actually we’ve been looking for a new facility for this high school.’” Building a public school sans public funding allowed Alloy to tap a Department of Education-adjacent public benefit corporation called the NYC Educational Construction Fund, which issued a competitive bid for a new school that was handily awarded to Alloy. (Founded in 1967, the ECF has built 18 schools in the city, mostly in the 1970s, and was largely dormant for decades until it was revived during the Bloomberg administration.) Although the new facilities would add much-needed school seats, critics at the time noted that the sheer scale of the residential component could perversely exacerbate the deficit in capacity, alongside broader questions about the project’s opaque financing structure.
Unsurprisingly, that didn’t come up during the tour, when Pires merely noted that Alloy received $1.6 million in incentives from ConEd and NYSERDA, and that the tower is $175m and that the school is $160m. Leaving aside the question of whether the city should be building its own schools or relying on private developers to do so, the new school in phase one counts towards the project’s public benefit — valued at over $200 million by Alloy and the ECF — which means that only 10% of the 441 rental units of the new 505 State Street tower will be affordable versus 30% of the second phase; in total, Alloy Block will add 850 units, 200 of them “permanently affordable.”
As for the decision to go all-electric? “From a policy and incentive standpoint, we made a really smart bet relative to the way Local Law 97 is going to work.” Pires admitted that it’s “not that complicated: The boiler is an electric boiler versus a gas-fired boiler and the cooktops are induction versus gas. That’s it.” —Ray Hu
IN THE NEWS
Relief Is on the Way?
Often, New York appears resolute in its aim to be inhospitable. So when an initiative surfaces promising a squidge of relief, most of us can’t believe our good luck — or simply call BS. Speaking of, a contingent of city council members intend to bring a bill that would compel the installation of some 4,200 public restrooms (judiciously spread across all five boroughs, one presumes) in the next twelve years. Christopher Robbins, a co-founder of the website Hell Gate, announced the move in his entertaining Porcelain NY column, which recounts his attempts to avail himself of the city’s scarce public toilets. (The number is as few as four per 100,000 residents, according to the Public Toilet Index.) Robbins assayed one such facility in NYRA #36, which is available now! Our next issue, due out in September, will feature an in-depth essay on the state of shitting in the greatest city on earth, baby!
On the Flip Side
Then again, maybe New York is capable of progress. At the end of July, the state board approved a proposal that would make a third of units in 5 World Trade Center affordable. Four-hundred apartments will be set aside for middle- and lower-income residents. (9/11 survivors will be given preference for 20 percent of the designated apartments.) In exchange, the state would contribute $60 million — with the Battery Park City Authority chipping in an additional $5 million — to the KPF-designed development. But staking out a tiny archipelago of affordability in lower Manhattan — the heart of finance capital — is unlikely to produce a “breakthrough” in housing policy and funding, as Governor Kathy Hochul’s office claimed. Even so, you have to give it to the 100% Affordable 5 WTC coalition, which put up a good fight.
Go Big or Go Home
In retrospect, it seems pitilessly predictable that modernism, which had assumed for itself the mantle of reordering society (the movement was colored by many compelling shades of derangement), would devolve into the stuff of easy pleasures. For those who could afford it, a swish modern house enabled one to live interestingly — if only for the duration of a summer vacation. But all good times come to an end: in the Hamptons, where a shingle-inflected modernism briefly ruled as the residential idiom of choice, midcentury cottages, bungalows, and modest split-levels are falling left and right. Indeed, as Curbed reports, homes designed by the likes of George Nelson and Norman Jaffe are proving too modest by today’s standard of homeownership. Beginning in the 1980s, the dimensions of Hamptons homes exponentially swelled, leading to distended manses with walk-in closets larger than a Manhattan studio. (Self-styled modernists such as Charles Gwathmey and Myron Goldfinger — RIP — capitalized on this louche trend for girth.) Expectations haven’t budged since; if anything, they’ve grown. It seems that these sensibly proportioned modern houses, many of which also happen to sit on very desirable parcels of land, just don’t size up.
Well Said
Kate Wagner, the Nation’s newly minted architectural correspondent (and a NYRA contributor), didn’t pull any punches in her latest column, which analyzes the scandal surrounding the Ghanian-British architect David Adjaye through the lens of labor. Accusations first made public in a Financial Times exposé last month painted Adjaye in an extremely unseemly light: three women who are former Adjaye Associates staffers told the FT that their boss had sexually exploited and harassed them while in his employ. That Adjaye was able to get away with predatory behavior for as long as he did can be explained by disciplinary mores, Wagner muses. Architecture’s inborn misogyny, its lack of racial and class diversity, its allergy to organized labor and its compulsion to elevate figures of scintillating “genius” who blot out the work of hundreds (Adjaye’s firm employs, or did employ, more than 200 people across its London, New York, and Accra, Ghana, offices) — all this can contribute to the unfair-to-horrifying workplace conditions the profession is known for. Wagner underlines the point thusly: “Adjaye is an employer. His abuse is workplace abuse — it cannot take place without the infrastructure of the workplace to provide him power and access to victims.”
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DATELINE
The week ahead…
Tuesday, 8/8
Direct Action: Art against Displacement monthly meeting
6:30 PM ET | Storefront for Art and Architecture
Thursday, 8/10
Underground Anxieties: 2023 CCA-WRI Research Symposium with Andrea Alberto Dutto, Oxana Gourinovitch, & Tomomi Miyata
9:00 AM ET | Canadian Centre for Architecture
Saturday, 8/12
Direct Action: Performance by Cecilia Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo
5:00 PM EDT | Storefront for Art and Architecture
Sunday, 8/13
Hamptons 20th Century Modern Home Tour 2023
10:00 AM ET | Hamptons 20th Century Modern
Our listings are constantly being updated. Check the events page regularly for up-to-date listings and submit events through this link.
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
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New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our editor is Samuel Medina, our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc.
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