Faux Gehry

Timothy, I’m familiar—like the deconstructivist-ish abode that is obligingly falling apart, the Woodside town house, is missing from Herrin-Ferri’s handbook. As you’ll know, the residential stylings of northwestern Queens command attention by inadvertently raising the slipshod to the level of slapstick, daring the passing pedestrian to temporarily abandon the dispositional indifference that is the rightful inheritance of all New Yorkers (i.e., the shoulder shrug). The primary strategies of layering and accretion accord with the behavioral maximalism of homeownership here in the land of “more is more”; but in New York, the remodeler is compelled to assimilate a local context—the psycho-material substrate of the city. The bearing of your “faux Gehry” betrays the former but not the latter condition, evoking the arid placelessness of a Dwell magazine spread. The squat multifamily walk-up is one of three built in 2007 (just on the cusp of the shelter mag’s great decline) along a parched stretch of Thirty-Second Avenue between Fifty-Eighth and Sixtieth Streets (gaps in the…