Timber Beams and Exposed Brick
For nearly a century, up until about a decade ago, upward mobility in New York City flowed across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Manhattan. Doubtless it is still that way for some. But for the self-styled demimonde, Brooklyn has become the preferred precinct of gritty authenticity.
But in one of the paradoxes of modern life, money is drawn to the haunts of artists, drives up prices, and inadvertently, but predictably, pushes the artists out. But in an equally predictable development, the new inhabitants tend to preserve something of the spirit and aspirations of the artists whom they have displaced. This equation is, perhaps unintentionally, the subtext of a new book, "Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design" by Diana Lind, with photographs by Yoko Inoue.
The subtitle is a bit imprecise, since the focus of the book is clearly small-scale residential buildings — 18 in all — whether renovated brownstones or new structures created from scratch. Ms. Lind divides her book and her discussion into three parts, having to do with aesthetic improvements on existing buildings, gut renovations of the same, and finally entirely new structures. In the process, she captures brownstone Brooklyn's many picturesque neighborhoods, from Fort Greene and Boerum Hill to Clinton Hill, Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Crown Heights.
The narrower focus is to be regretted, since Brooklyn has been a conspicuous and fertile breeding ground for contemporary architecture in recent years. Besides Steven Holl's new Higgins Hall Center Section at Pratt Institute, which is discussed and photographed in the book, scarcely a passing mention is given to such other projects as Richard Meier's big new development overlooking Grand Army Plaza, not to mention high-profile projects — whatever their ultimate destiny — such as Enrique Norten's Brooklyn Public Library for the Visual and Performing Arts, and Frank Gehry's master plan for Atlantic Yards.
As regards the interiors, the book represents the implementation of a sequence of acutely design-conscious motifs that can be seen in private homes and boutique hotels around the world. The spaces tend toward minimalism, with clean and spare straight lines, few curves, patternless area rugs, and equally unadorned cabinetry. As happens so often in contemporary design, there is a devotion to "flow" in many parts of Brooklyn rather than to the tyrannous demarcation of walls. Usually the one concession to earlier taste, amid these fairly standard attributes of the contemporary Neo-Modern style, are bare brick walls and simple wooden chairs, tables, and cabinetry. The world that Ms. Lind chronicles embodies the communitarian ethos of Jane Jacobs. But this newest book is after something that, in its pages, quickly coalesces into a remarkably uniform and at times tedious style.
In the photographs by Ms. Inoue that chronicle this taste, it is possible to find some grace notes, some flashes of original thinking within the lemminglike "originality" that constitutes a defined taste. An especially successful example, if the images are to be trusted, is the interior of a house in Fort Greene designed by Noroof Architects. Here, as well, you find the usual gambit of wood and bare brick, but the brickwork that the architects inherited is a little older and more evocative than usual, and the wood richer and more stylish. Especially inspired is one image of an industrial stairway leading to the second floor and a ladder leading to the basement, set behind a finely conceived minimalist screen of see-through wires.
Perhaps the best of the entirely new houses to rise in Brooklyn in recent years is one in Clinton Hill, designed by David Adjaye, the well-known architect from Tanzania who now lives in London. The block-like graphite-gray façade is formed from a series of flat plastic panels woven together. Across its sheer, flat surface are the asymmetrically spaced apertures of three windows and a door. Along the side, this regularity is subverted by the willful eccentricity of the roofline, which seems to form a hump, such that it and the façade acquire the animated quality of a whale or dragon. Along the garden side, the gray and white façade, making up a curtain wall studded with vertical wooden divides, is contained in a bold, thick-walled frame that has the virtue of exhibiting some thought as well as a spirit of enterprising design.
To judge from this book, there is a great deal of modern design going on in Brooklyn. But given the greater preponderance of pre-war buildings, it is doubtful whether the taste that Ms. Lind describes ever will, or should, define the borough itself.
