Architect Joseph Pell Lombardi has designed a pair of new condominium buildings planned for opposite sides of Washington Street between Vestry and Laight Streets in the Tribeca North Historic District. His faithfully contextual design of red brick with arched windows make these loft condos seem, to the untrained eye at least, like manufacturing buildings of the nineteenth century. 414 Washington Street will have 15 lofts while the larger 415 Washington Street will have 26 units. Steel canopies over raised platforms (think loading docks) will add to the historical allusion. Each building will be six stories tall with two setback stories. Lombardi has a strong track record of delivering the kind of sensitive and accurate designs that landmark committees and preservationists (not to mention downtown loft buyers) love. More about Tribeca's back-to-the-future lofts after the jump...
Joseph Pell Lombardi's work also includes restoration and conversion of Tribeca's Ice House on North Moore Street, the Julliard Building, The Sugar Warehouse, the Mohawk Atelier, and 30 Crosby Street in SoHo. Because 414 and 415 Washington, to be known as the Pearline Soap Atelier and the Fairchild & Foster Atelier respectively, will be new structures rather than conversions some observers disagree with the application of this kind of undiluted historicism. The blog Tropolism has recently noted its low regard for contextual designs like this. We here at Triplemint can live with them when (as here) they are executed competently and faithfully. Still, Tropolism makes the very key observation that contextualism is a broader concept than just style, something we've also noted before. More important than style is scale. A modern design by BKSK for a glass condo on Hudson Street near the brunch joint Bubby's fits in well because it is in scale with its neighbors and seeks to match nearby floor plates, keeping the horizontal orientation of its block as one continuum. In so doing it creates a dialog between old and new.
The truth is the Landmarks Commission and community boards are not composed of design professionals, and there will always be this barrier to new architecture. What we really dislike are designs that seek a brainless compromise between the two points of view and end up being neither fish nor fowl. We're thinking of a midblock rental building now rising in the Flatiron district on 18th Street that is just awful. The developers threw a bone to the landmarks committee in the form of oddly colored bricks, but no one on the committee seemed to notice the tinted windows. This process produces mediocre muddle. A totally new and contemporary piece of architecture (again in scale with its neighbors) would have been much preferable to what's going up there now.
While we'll never resolve this debate, we keep coming back to our steadfast position that New York is best as a mix of old and new, a variation that can include both the radical and the reactionary. Both have equal risk of being either sublime or pathetic. The thing about design is that you can't always account for good taste, no matter what your ideology.
Return to Triplemint main page
