How to bring innovative design to old neighborhoods.

Many architects sometimes find themselves in a situation where their artistic vision is restricted by the character of the neighborhood in which they're working. This can be frustrating. But if you accept the principle that each building is merely a detail in a panorama that has a unified form of its own, adapting your ideas to that form can present a challenge that's interesting and inspiring rather than daunting.

Keeping this principle in mind--that your project must stay true to its context--is important whether you're building new or designing an existing building for adaptive re-use. Just recently, Scarano & Associates Architects has been involved in several projects, primarily in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in which our objective was to emphasize the positive characteristics of a neighborhood, instead of dismissing them.

For example, we were commissioned to give new life and purpose to three buildings at the corner of Hicks and Warren Streets, in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill section. We were dealing with three landmark structures--a church, a rectory and an academy--in a neighborhood that still retains its 19th-century majesty.

The Arches at Cobble Hill contains 60 units and a garden corridor--95,000 s/f in all. We took great care to integrate the church layout and detailing into the design. The apartments and common areas incorporate many of the original architectural elements, such as vaulted ceilings, free-standing wood columns, original wood trusses, stained glass panels, original molding and exposed brick walls. The facades have deteriorated considerably over time, but instead of replacing them with a more modern look, we restored the brick, stonework, stained glass windows and architectural sculpture and ornamentation. The bell tower was retained, too--as a 30-foot-high atrium.

We stuck to the same principle in another project, at 133 Water St. in DUMBO. This is an industrial area that is currently undergoing tremendous change, including an increase in commercial to residential conversions--but there has been no new construction in more than a century. Still, the old warehouses give the area a certain charm and we wanted to keep the new development in line with those buildings.

The street frontage of the 12-story mixed-use condominium tower at 133 Water St. is composed mainly of concrete, in keeping with the surrounding warehouses. The top eight floors are made of glass, which serves a double duty: providing residents with splendid vistas, while minimizing the effect of the building's height on the overall look of the neighborhood. Rather than employing Manhattan-style modernism, we employed a design that celebrates the historic qualities of the neighborhood. The result is a building that literally reflects today's DUMBO and the Manhattan Bridge.

When it came time to add to our own headquarters, we stuck to the same principle. We had outgrown our space at 110 York St. in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn, and instead of moving to another building, we seized the opportunity to simultaneously showcase our most innovative work and enhance the neighborhood by building an extension on this elegant 100-year-old building.

Again, we employed steel and glass in the extension, composing a distinctly angled steel truss structure with a corrugated aluminum and wood panel facade. The project includes a 1,700 s/f open-air roof deck. The base building was built as a warehouse, so the ultramodern rooftop provides a dramatic contrast, and yet the near-transparency of the extension gives it a fluidity that allows it to blend with the original building. The steel truss system echoes the design of the Manhattan Bridge, which runs parallel to the building, only 20 feet away. What we've created is a building that everyone notices, but that doesn't obtrude, but complements the surrounding architecture.

This concept of preserving the character of a neighborhood while introducing modern treatments is one to keep in mind no matter what the project, no matter where it's located. In some cases, of course, a dramatic shift of purpose will lead to extensive change across an area of several city blocks, but this almost never happens at once. And in many cases, wonderful old buildings that might otherwise have been lost through needless demolition can be saved for adaptive reuse. One example is Silo House, two former oil storage cylinders along the Gowanus Canal that have been turned into habitable spaces with wood-finished floors and ceilings and a roof lined with skylights.

A new building that pays tribute to its neighborhood can serve as a stabilizer, as a foundation for future growth--like Red Hook Apartments on Columbia Street in Brooklyn. We used masonry in the construction, which is compatible with the other buildings in the area, and added a dramatic 12-foot window treatment to make the building highly identifiable. It has sparked an interest in a previously blighted area. That, after all, is often the purpose of architecture: to help uplift a neighborhood, not to make it over.

ROBERT SCARANO

PRINCIPAL

SCARANO & ASSOCIATES ARCHITECTS