Walking down Boerum Hill’s Fourth Avenue, one gets the impression that risk management is the predominant architectural style. “Here in New York, the ‘pre-structure’ is determined very early on,” the architect Frida Escobedo said in an interview with The Brooklyn Rail’s Nile Greenberg last year. “Everything is coded, either legally or by the developer: the area of the unit, the number of bedrooms, the layout of a kitchen, the width of a wall. This leads to an interesting phenomenon where design begins outside of the designer.” The blocks feeding into this avenue are a hotspot for projects where form follows finance, seemingly engineered to commodify every square inch the city will allow them to build.
Maybe that’s why Escobedo’s newest condominium project, Bergen Brooklyn, surprises. The building arrives on its namesake street, between Third and Fourth Avenues, with uncommon confidence. The pleated façade of pale orange precast concrete catches light differently at every hour, folding and refolding the building’s scale between the monumental and the intimate with e…
