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 each pedestrian step. Where neighboring developments attire themselves in thin pseudo-brick veneer, Escobedo refuses the easy read. The building’s street presence is dense with incident: shadow lines, material shifts, a rhythm of compressions and releases. Escobedo has suggested that the surface treatment is a contextual nod to the bay windows of brownstone Brooklyn, but I struggle to see it. If anything, it hearkens to the latticed brickwork interior she designed for the Aesop Park Slope a couple blocks over. Escobedo has slowly made this hamlet of Brooklyn into her own image, and we are better off for it.
Alas, her design ambition is constrained, in the last instance, by the risk appetite of New York’s developer class. Bergen is the architect’s first luxury condominium project, and it seems this style of production is at odds with Escobedo’s quiet yet forceful gestures.
Step inside (as I did recently, posing as a prospective buyer) and the building’s confidence dims. Layouts genuflect to the developer’s premium on maximized square footage over livability. Rooms are wide enough to photograph well and narrow enough to furnish awkwardly. The material palette, so assured from the street, grows timid at the threshold. Drywall, painted white so as to be perfectly inoffensive to the buyer, drowns out the otherwise envy-inducing finishes designed by Workstead.
“A ****ing joy.”
Step into the basement and you will begin to question whether they’re selling homes or a lifestyle brand. On offer is a labyrinth of amenities for the introverted minotaur: a wellness lounge! a ceramics workshop! a tearoom! a boxing gym! With this many reasons to never leave your building, why even live in a city?
The pocket park cutting through the block to Dean Street, a promising civic gesture, terminates in a landscaping scheme that feels provisional, as though the money ran out after they added the Zoom room. And if Escobedo is correct when she says that “architecture is about voicing invisible questions of power relations,” then it is worth noting that this boutique park is not open to the public.
The building’s best ideas exist at the scale of the city. Its compromises exist at the scale of the unit, where architecture bends more readily to the whims of the luxury market. This tension is not unique to Escobedo but endemic to the style of production where the developer’s pro forma is the first and final client, where artistic risk is pitted against financial risk. Bergen is what happens when the former is given more room than usual to breathe. It is unfortunate that it feels like an exception.