Good Bones

“You’d think we would be enemies,” remarked Thomas de Monchaux, the architectural critic and Columbia professor, to a small crowd gathered in an upstairs nook of McNally Jackson Books. “I wrote against demolition, Deborah Berke wrote against preservation. But I think we’re for the same thing.” The two co-authored Transform: Promising Places, Second Chances, and the Architecture of Transformational Change (Monacelli), a treatise on adaptive reuse from TenBerke, the studio where Berke is founding principal. “You’ve been adopted into the family,” joked Arthi Krishnamoorthy, a senior principal and co-host for the event.

As the pair read excerpts, they at times battled FiDi’s jackhammers and car horns (which de Monchaux joked were angry developers). In her essay, Berke cautions that attempts to protect “historic” buildings can also fossilize them. De Monchaux riffed on the connection between job sites and kitchens, citing Tamar Adler’s book, An Everlasting Meal, as a secret “manifesto” for reuse. “When you cook, you’re left with scraps that make the perfect beginnings of another meal. The skins and tops of onions for soup and beans, bones for stock, orange peels for marmalade.”

Our very location was a model example, he suggested. The low-rise brick building at 4 Fulton Street was first a counting house and then a long-time fish eatery; it cycled through multiple other uses before becoming today’s chic bookstore. “The point is good bones are good bones,” concluded de Monchaux. “That it’s been here since 1811 probably makes this the most sustainable building on Manhattan Island. Not some LEED-rated Midtown skyscraper (apologies to Norman Foster). We just have to keep it here and make it new in every generation.”