Architecture review: Brutalism revisited

Contemporary architecture in New York City tends to come in one of three broad formal categories: the deconstructivist style of Frank Gehry’s 8 Spruce Street, the neoclassicism associated with Robert A.M. Stern’s 15 Central Park West, and the neo-modernism that inspired Shigeru Ban’s Metal Shutter Houses on West 19th Street and Jean Nouvel’s 40 Mercer in Soho.

In the last of these categories, one of the more honorable names to emerge in recent years is that of Cary Tamarkin, a rare bird who happens to be an architect and a developer at the same time. Such is the general level of quality that Tamarkin Co. has attained to date that one wonders whether architecture around the world would not be better served if the two roles were combined more often.

Tamarkin’s latest project is at 508 West 24th Street, in the heart of Chelsea and literally a stone’s throw from the High Line. Set between 10th and 11th avenues, the neo-modernist 10-story condominium is only beginning to rise, but renderings show a very promising start. One especially striking element of the project is that it impressively develops the historicist tendencies that were always present, though unsuspected, in the neo-modern style. At the project, Tamarkin has used the language of neo-modernism as much as a period style as Stern did with the fluted pilasters and oeils de boeuf of the Beaux-Arts fantasy 15 Central Park West. But instead of looking back to Napoleon III, Tamarkin fondly invokes the more austere style of half a century ago, and does so with considerable sensitivity and skill.

508 West 24th Street

Strangely, neo-modernist architecture is generally better than the modernism that inspired it. The newer style is more comfortable, more respectful of the environment and more attentive to the finer points of design. It has also, I would contend, learned from the mistakes that were committed by the modernists the first time around. In addition, materials and technological processes have improved over the past half-century, so completed projects tend to look far better-made (because they are).

The dominant idiom of Tamarkin’s architecture is neo-modernist, in the sense that it revives the vocabulary of the mid-20th century. But neo-modernism is almost as varied as the style upon which it was based, and so Tamarkin’s designs draw inspiration from several sources. The curving setback of his 456 West 19th Street is inspired by the prewar works of the German modernist Erich Mendelsohn, while the strictly rectilinear Shelter Island home that Tamarkin built for his own family recalls Richard Neutra’s California houses and elements of the French modernist Jean Prouvé.

In his latest venture, however, Tamarkin has used a very different set of aesthetic coordinates. His 508 West 24th Street is one of the first buildings in New York that attempts to revive the Brutalist style, with its broad expanses of unfaced concrete. Le Corbusier initiated the style in the 1950s, and it came of age in Manhattan in the 1970s.

The most conspicuous feature of 508 West 24th Street is béton brut, or unadorned concrete, along its entire expanse. But while the exterior harkens back to the 1970s, the details of the building recall the early International Style that was common during World War II. Were it not for the promising elegance of this design, one would have thought the collision of these two styles incompatible. The building is a hybrid, and a strikingly original one at that.

Conceptually, the building’s massing recalls that of Tamarkin’s 456 West 19th Street, a red-brick building with double-height windows and curving setbacks. The 24th Street project has ribbon windows alternating with infill up to the seventh floor, at which point the building recedes in a sequence of rectilinear setbacks.

It is at ground level that the Brutalist style is most emphatic. The canopy of the building juts out into the street in the form of an aggressive cantilever, while the ground floor on either side of the canopy, as well as certain points on higher floors, is articulated with the sort of striated patterns that the Brutalists invoked in the ’70s to add visual interest to their buildings in hopes of mitigating the severity of the concrete.

But the overall spirit of the building is not Brutalist, in the sense that its massing is restrained rather than assertive, while the detailing of the concrete is, in the renderings, so delicate as to suggest some of the lusher delights of Art Deco. This is especially true of the refined if minimalist clock that is promised for the second floor of the façade — a grace note that rarely if ever appears in Brutalist buildings — as well as the marking of each concrete panel of infill with a tastefully incised dot.

Because of the free-handed way in which Tamarkin has mingled styles, 508 West 24th Street is really a cross-breed of a building, though it will effortlessly fit in with the utilitarian, early-20th-century structures that define its surroundings. It re-imagines and reapplies the standard formulas of modernism with a spirited abandon that would doubtless have seemed heretical to such masters of the International Style as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. But in that very act of fanciful initiative, Tamarkin proves that the modernist vocabulary, in its essence, never was the timeless and universal idiom that its inventors aspired to create.