‘The banks thought we were mad': coral castles and look-at-me loos reinvent New York housing

The Guardian

28-01-2025

For all its metropolitan dynamism and heady sense of possibility, New York is not a city that produces good housing. Its building codes are so strict, its land values so high, and its construction practises so intractable, that the results tend towards grim stacks of cells. New apartment blocks – even at the high end – do little to disguise the fact that they are simply physical spreadsheets of units, expressions of brutal economic efficiency, occasionally garnished with a thin architectural dressing.
'New York is supposedly the greatest, most competitive city on Earth,' says Sam Alison-Mayne, who grew up in Los Angeles, son of the prominent west coast architect Thom Mayne. 'Competition usually breeds the best solutions for things – but not when it comes to housing.' While he was working as a contractor, he met Sebastian Mendez, an Argentinian architect at Foster + Partners at the time, and the two realised there was scope to do things differently. They quit their jobs, founded a development company, Tankhouse, and, 10 years later, have built three of the city's most innovative housing projects in recent memory.
Their latest provocation stands on the corner of Vanderbilt and Myrtle avenues in Brooklyn's trendy Fort Greene neighbourhood, rising from the sidewalk like a jaunty pink castle. Its rose-tinted mass lurches in a staccato rhythm along the street, growing in blocky jolts from four-storey townhouses, up to eight storeys on the corner. The cubic volumes fold and twist as they rise, framing a world of shared terraces and open, breezy landings. The pink precast concrete walls are grooved like fine needlecord, their surfaces variously etched and bead-blasted, making the building shift and shimmer in the bright sunlight, casting sharp shadows across the facade. It recalls the enchanting work of Ricardo Bofill in Spain, whose La Muralla Roja stands like a vertical casbah on the Calpe coast, or the pastel-hued levels of the video game Monument Valley – as if this 3D jigsaw of apartments and courtyards might reconfigure itself at any moment.
The striking coral-coloured outcrop is the work of SO-IL, a Brooklyn-based architecture practice led by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, who hail from the Netherlands and China, and bring a healthy outsider's perspective to New York's real estate conventions. 'Everything here is driven by 'net-to-gross efficiency',' says Idenburg, with a Dutch sense of exasperation at North America's mercenary reality. 'The architect's task is just to maximise the sellable floor area within the smallest possible building envelope. The result is narrow, windowless corridors, with single-aspect apartments either side, stacked up into a dumb box. So we tried to do the exact opposite. And everyone thought we were insane.'
Since the earliest decades of the 20th century, the regulatory corset of the 'zoning envelope' has defined the architecture of New York. After the city's 1916 zoning resolution, the architectural draughtsman Hugh Ferriss created a prophetic series of illustrations, depicting how the set-back rules – which dictate how buildings must step back as they rise, to allow daylight to reach the streets – would lead to a particular architectural form. The zoning envelope, he wrote, is a 'shape which the law puts into the architect's hands,' and it has determined the city's form ever since.
In a new book about SO-IL's work, In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today, architect Karilyn Johanesen explains how the situation has since evolved into a complex cocktail of ever more constraining codes. 'Subsequent amendments to the zoning resolution such as height factor, floor-area ratio, open-space ratio, quality housing deductions, and affordability incentives,' she writes, 'have added more complexity to a matrix of ratios that pits zoning and code requirements against profit maximisation.' A building's boundaries are predefined before an architect can even make their first move.
SO-IL's impressive talent is to limbo beneath the bureaucracy, stretching loopholes and exploiting zoning quirks, to carve out space for architecture. Tankhouse began working with them in 2014, with an approach that, to their peers, looked like commercial suicide. They chose awkward corner plots that came with hosts of restrictions, but then turned those constraints, jiu-jitsu-like, to their advantage. On each project, the team decided to build out to the maximum volume that the zoning envelope would allow, in order to then carve out 'unsellable' space within it – in the form of terraces, balconies, stoops and shared outdoor circulation space, drawing on the developers' experiences of outdoor living in the sunnier climes of LA and Buenos Aires.
'The banks and the brokers thought we were mad,' says Mendez, who drummed up investment from friends and family in Argentina for their first project, after the usual lenders were reluctant to cough up. 'We weren't maximising the sellable floor area, so it simply didn't fit any formula they were used to dealing with.'
The gamble paid off. On the corner of Warren and Bond streets, in the formerly industrial Brooklyn neighbourhood of Gowanus, stands the group's first mini manifesto: a cluster of 18 homes, arranged around three lush courtyards, which sold out before construction was completed in 2023. A sculptural outdoor staircase curves its way between broad, convivial landings, where the homes enjoy views out in all directions on to planted gardens, crowned with a stunning roof terrace. In conventional real estate terms, the floor plan is as economically 'inefficient' as it gets; but the payoff is a liberating sense of connection to the outdoors, and a sociable, neighbourly, child-friendly place to live. Mendez liked it so much, he moved in with his family.
The design details are as pragmatic as they are ingenious. A drape of wire mesh netting, stretched tautly between the curving landings, is a cheap and cheerful substitute for balustrades (and has led to the space being hired for several photoshoots, a handy income stream). The walls are built with inexpensive concrete blocks, spiced up with a greenish aggregate, and laid at an angle to create an unusual serrated effect. 'It's also a way to overcome a bit of imperfection,' says Idenburg. 'Building here is not like the precision of Japan. In New York City, you have to create a lot of noise.'
He would know. Idenburg used to work for Sanaa, the Japanese masters of minimalism, leading their project for the New Museum in New York – acting as the translator between Japanese perfectionism and less-than-perfect US building practises. It left him with a dogged single-mindedness, and an uncompromising ability to push builders and suppliers beyond their usual standards (if sometimes alienating them in the process – Alison-Mayne jokes how many contractors refuse to work with them again).
Sign up to Art Weekly
Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions
after newsletter promotion
While 450 Warren and 144 Vanderbilt both take mid-rise courtyard forms, a third project, between Dumbo and downtown Brooklyn, shows how the same approach can also work in a high-rise context. Standing as a shimmering pleated apparition, worthy of Issey Miyake, 9 Chapel St is another intelligent essay in interpreting zoning codes. It makes use of special allowances for features such as dormer windows, bulkheads and balconies, to play with the form – and create nicer apartments in the process.
As in the other projects, the elevator opens on to an outdoor hallway, leading to wide decks and generous porches in front of each home. All units have deep balconies, some of which wrap the entire way around, shielded by a perforated screen of metal mesh that ripples its way the full height of the building. Gentle vertical corrugations in the mesh create an irregular play of shadows across the building, while also serving a structural purpose – the pleats allow the panels to span floor-to-floor, without the need for additional support. Subtle rotations between bedrooms and living areas create varied views across the city, and capture sunlight at different times of day, while some bathrooms enjoy full-height glass doors to balconies from the showers – a moment of exhilarating exhibitionism, 15 storeys up.
It's impressive stuff, but none of these flats are cheap. Could the Tankhouse model be scalable, and, more importantly, affordable? 'Those are the two big questions,' says Alison-Mayne, who says the team is now working on their biggest project yet, a 20-storey tower of rental apartments in Gowanus with 'a deep affordability component'. It looks set to be a big, bulky thing, but one that has been elegantly chiselled into shape by SO-IL, with serrated sawtooth facades providing the apartments with views in two directions, as well as day-lit corridors, and a silhouette that recalls the muscular early days of Manhattan towers. Details like grey, iron-speckled brick, laid in a stacked bond with blue-green mortar, promise to give it a powerfully monolithic, mineral quality.
'I don't want to pretend like we're solving all the problems,' says Alison-Mayne. 'We've built a bunch of very expensive housing.' But there are lessons here, in terms of intelligent spatial thinking beyond the units-by-numbers approach, that developers of all tenures – as well as those in charge of codifying the city – could do well to learn from.
In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today by Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu is published by Lars Müller