Warning: the 2009 documentary Casa Bronfman is guaranteed to arouse severe real estate envy in even the most sanguine New Yorkers. The 38-minute film—which is being shown this weekend at the 28th International Festival of Films on Art, in Montreal—takes viewers on a leisurely tour of the Manhattan townhouse of Edgar Bronfman, Jr., and family. Their 12,800-square-foot home was designed in the 1990s by the architect Peter Rose (who also designed the Canadian Centre for Architecture for its founder and director, Phyllis Lambert—the daughter of Samuel Bronfman, Edgar, Jr.’s grandfather.) Rose took a 1918 townhouse that had been converted into apartments and returned it to a single-family home, organizing the interior around two vertically-stacked central courts. This allowed for ample natural light in the middle of the building—traditionally the darkest part of a New York townhouse—and also created an interesting arrangement of space, with a large semi-private event/entertainment core surrounded by a warren of private family rooms. (And, on top of the lower court, an outdoor garden designed by Dan Kiley.) For a quick tour, check out the three-minute sample of the charming-if-jealousy-inducing film above.

Update, 10/19: Due to a technical glitch, the video is now unavailable; we’re working to restore it as soon as possible.

In our running series on accessibility issues in buildings and cities, we’ve looked at some ways that New York City in particular may fall short when it comes to providing easy, well-maintained design for people with limited mobility. So when our publisher noticed what appeared to be a dearth of handicap-friendly design at a well-known restaurant—one that happens to sit in a landmarked building—we took it upon ourselves to investigate.

What we found was one small-scale instance of just how complex these issues can be. In this case, the restaurant blamed the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) for rejecting its request to install an exterior-stairwell hand rail. The LPC countered that it had never received such a request, and that it would almost certainly have approved one if it had. The restaurant’s architect had only worked on the interiors, and therefore claimed ignorance of the whole situation.

It didn’t seem productive to investigate the matter beyond this impasse—but we did want to take a closer look at the larger issues at play here. What interested us most about this case was the building’s historic status. How do city government and private owners reconcile the desire to protect the character of historic buildings with the need to promote accessibility?

In theory, the solution is pretty straightforward. When asked about accessibility features in commercial spaces, a representative from the LPC said, “We’ve never turned down a request for barrier-free access. Our job is to try to figure out a way to solve a problem without detracting from the historic building or diminishing its significance.” To prove the point, LPC provided us with a list of landmarked buildings where new additions had been approved. Where accessibility features like ramps or lifts are necessary, the agency works with building owners to mitigate the visual effect of those additions, sometimes suggesting an appropriate color or material palette or camouflaging the new design with landscaping.

But exploring the bureaucratic world of design regulation made us curious to know more about which buildings fall under what regulations—and since we’d already started, we decided to follow the rabbit hole of building code just a little further. Here, for those curious about how these things work, is what we learned: Read more…

For an enlightening and occasionally amusing glimpse of the arcane world of New York City landmarks preservation, point your browser to HDC@LPC, a new Web site by the city’s Historic Districts Council.

As a nonprofit advocate for New York City’s historic neighborhoods, the HDC reviews and comments on hundreds of applications for alterations to landmark buildings in the five boroughs. (In fact, it is the only organization to do so.) At weekly public hearings, it testifies to the Landmarks Preservation Commission about the appropriateness of the proposed changes. Now it’s also posting that testimony online, making it easy for any New Yorker to tap into the behind-the-scenes conversation about the city’s historic buildings.

This afternoon I spent some time perusing the most recent entries. One thing I noticed right away: the HDC is not afraid to play the neighborhood curmudgeon, giving a resounding thumbs-down to proposals that seem relatively innocuous to this casual observer.

For instance, you may think that installing a bracket sign on an old factory building in DUMBO would easily meet HDC’s approval. You would be wrong. “Bracket signs gussy up the very simple, clean lines of Industrial neo-Classical style factory buildings like 72 Front Street, and after a while they lose their effectiveness, the clutter of signs all canceling one another out,” the HDC wrote.

How about a rear-yard addition to a Greek Revival house in Brooklyn Heights? Read more…

Design activism is on the rise. The most recent and public expression of this movement can be examined at New York’s Center for Architecture. Modernism at Risk: Modern Solutions for Saving Modern Landmarks recently opened to large crowds and runs through May 1. It chronicles efforts taken to save, or try to save, Modern architecture’s significant buildings. For me, the most inspiring of these initiatives is the ADGB Trade Union School (left), built in 1930 in Bernau, Germany, by architects Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. (Meyer, you may recall from your history class, was the second director of the world-shaping Bauhaus design school where Wittwer was an instructor.) The activists in this case began working together in 2001, creating the kind of positive and sustained energy such efforts demand. Local government, business, and academia participated in devising a competition to save and restore the building. Now it’s not only a great place to learn, but a resource for the community as well as an inspiring case study for scholars and architects wanting to know more about the living, breathing buildings of the early Modernists.

Sadly, the record for saving Modernist masterpieces remains spotty. One of the most distressing losses to the cause is Paul Rudolph’s Riverview High School, built in Sarasota, Florida, in 1958 and demolished to make way for a parking lot in 2009. Our film, Site Specific: The Legacy of Regional Modernism (below) was chosen by the curators to be part of the show at the Center. It tells the story of innovative design followed by a willful resistance to new ideas and benign neglect. Though the local and international community of architects mounted a strong campaign to save Riverview—they convinced the World Monuments Fund to put it on its most endangered list—the building was in such bad condition that it was impossible for the school board and the public alike to imagine its rebirth, even though at least one proposed renovation scheme had great potential for bringing Rudolph’s design into the 21st century and creating a smart asset for the community.

Read more…

Urban design–conscious New Yorkers looking for an excuse to drink—and, really, who isn’t?—should be sure not to miss tomorrow night’s delightful-sounding Jane Jacobs Pub Crawl, hosted by the Congress for New Urbanism. The CNU’s president, John Norquist, and staffers from the organization’s New York and New Jersey chapters will lead preservation-minded carousers on a three-and-a-half hour jaunt from the Standard Grill onto the High Line and then over to the West Village for drinks at the White Horse Tavern and the Rusty Knot. Granted, only the White Horse was an actual Jacobs haunt (the Standard Grill just started drawing crowds last summer, and the Rusty Knot has been open about 18 months), but we think it’s a safe bet that the late urbanologist would approve of anything that gets people talking passionately about her beloved city. Interested parties should RSVP here.

Photo: Dillon DeWaters

Thanks to the good folks over at the Architect’s Newspaper blog, we just learned that Albert C. Ledner’s 1964 O’Toole building—which, after a lengthy preservation battle, appeared certain to meet the wrecking ball—may not be torn down after all.

Last May, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee (LPC) voted to approve St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center’s so-called hardship application—which essentially stated that St. Vincent’s would have to close unless it could circumvent typical landmarks restrictions and raze the O’Toole building to make way for a new hospital tower (designed by Pei Cobb Freed). Now a consortium of rival preservation organizations, led by the Municipal Art Society (MAS), has filed a brief challenging the nature of this hardship application.

The legal basis for this latest brief is somewhat complicated, but, basically, it centers on the LPC’s “campus-based rationale” for approving St. Vincent’s request. Read more…

Balkany in front of a Gropius-designed power plant on the Reese hospital campus. Photo: Edward Lifson

When Chicago recently dreamt of hosting the 2016 Olympics, its bid included the demolition of an unused hospital complex to make way for an Olympic Village. Then a young architect in town named Grahm Balkany sounded alarm bells that some of the buildings, the planning, and other aspects were the work of the pioneer of modern architecture and creator of the Bauhaus—Walter Gropius! Once Chicago lost the Olympics to Rio you’d think the city would have called off the bulldozers, right?  Alas, if you think that, obviously you don’t know “The Chicago Way.”

During our recent conversation, Balkany looked battle-weary, as if he fears that if he ever got a good night’s sleep, he’d wake up to find the Gropius buildings gone. It often takes a transplant to show locals what they’ve got. Balkany moved from Denver to Chicago in 1998. “Specifically for the architecture,” he says. “I saw a beautiful Gothic Revival limestone field house, and learned Chicago was about to tear it down! I thought, man, you don’t have buildings like this where I’m from and here they toss them out like rubbish.” He wrote letters to newspapers, and helped establish Preservation Chicago to advocate. Three years ago Balkany brought to light drawings, letters, and blueprints that seem to show that Walter Gropius and his firm, the Architects’ Collaborative, were heavily involved in designing at least eight buildings, plus the master and site plans and the landscaping of the 37-acre Michael Reese Hospital complex on the near south side by Lake Michigan. Balkany founded the Gropius in Chicago Coalition to try to save it all. The city of Chicago, which now owns it, has other ideas.

Did you celebrate when Chicago lost the bid for the 2016 Olympics?

We would never celebrate anything that is a loss for Chicago. But I admit a part of us rejoiced. Only that part that sees this as an opportunity to revisit the premature decision to demolish Michael Reese Hospital. Read more…

Last Saturday I attended a wedding at New York’s Players Club, which occupies a historic 19th-century mansion on Gramercy Park South, next to the National Arts Club. After getting out of the car with my forearm crutches, I navigate a brightly painted step down to the entry then push myself up four steps, where I am confronted by a curved half-flight of stairs up to the parlor floor where the event will be held. An extremely nice coat-check attendant—who seems willing to almost carry me upstairs—tells me that although the building has an elevator, it does not stop at the parlor floor. So I give one crutch to my wife, Eugenie, and slowly ascend the stairs one at a time, my left hand on the rail and my right arm in a crutch, all the while struggling against the flow of traffic heading downstairs.

Once we are on the correct level things are great and, providentially, I don’t need the bathroom two flights down. But what would I have done in a wheelchair? Read more…

Meyer May photos: courtesy Steelcase

Last week I was fortunate to be in the audience at the Meyer May house anniversary symposium, a wide-ranging discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas and principles as embodied in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, house he built for the clothier Meyer May in 1909. In 1987, the local furniture behemoth Steelcase finished a meticulous two-year restoration of the house—which, among other problems, had a seriously leaky roof—and opened it up for public tours. It’s now considered perhaps the most complete distillation of Wright’s vision, and this year it turned 100 years old.

But the symposium didn’t dwell on the past. Read more…

Photo: © The Bernard Rudofsky Estate Vienna/VBK 2009

Bernard Rudofsky, the influential architect, designer, curator, and writer who died in 1988, built only a few private residences in his career. His last one—indeed, his last built project of any kind—was his own summer house in Andalusia, Spain. Designed between 1970–71, “La Casa” is considered a landmark example of Rudofsky’s architectural philosophy—but after his widow passed away in 2006, the property went to a third party and its fate was uncertain. Now, thanks to the efforts of Peter Noever, the director of the MAK Vienna, La Casa appears to be safe. Noever drew up a petition signed by several prominent international architects—including  Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Shigeru Ban, and Thom Mayne—and, this morning, the MAK announced that La Casa has been listed in the General Catalogue of Andalusian Heritage as a protected monument. Noever called the decision “more than gratifying”—and he’s encouraging the Analusian government to take the next step and open the house to the public.