There’s a jaunty pink palazzo going up on a corner in Fort Greene, a jumble of bays, balconies, stacked rooms, and mini-towers that, especially in its unfinished state, looks more like a midnight sketch than an actual hunk of New York real estate. Move closer, and the delirium resolves into rational construction. The loud paint job subsides into fluted concrete panels tinted — not painted — a vibrant dusty rose. A set of rowhouses along Vanderbilt Avenue clambers up to an eight-story apartment complex at the intersection with Myrtle Avenue. A two-story bay juts out beneath a terrace, and as that play of protrusion and retreat comes into focus, so does the history it invokes. The building at 144 Vanderbilt Avenue, the third in a series of Brooklyn projects planned by the tiny company Tankhouse and designed by SO-IL, intimates how varied New York residential architecture could be again, if only more developers and architects dared to shake off their lazy provincialism. |
|
Continue reading » |