by: Fran Leadon AIA
Bathgate Educational Campus (left); Bronx Prep Charter School.
Andrea Barley (left); Cinthia Cedeno
I gave a lecture a few weeks ago at the annual conference of the Historic Districts Council, at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. I showed about 100 photos, a small fraction of the 40,000 we’ve snapped during the last two years of preparing the upcoming new edition of the AIA Guide to New York City. I included old and new projects from southern Tottenville to Tribeca, Battery Park to Bayside, but neglected to include images of the Bronx; there simply wasn’t time. During the question-and-answer session, one fellow rightly asked, “What about the Bronx?”
The truth is, much significant new work has been built in the Bronx since the Guide’s last edition in 2000, and that section of the book has been radically altered to include dozens of these new projects. Of course, there have always been architectural delights in the Bronx. Among my favorites are the bucolic assemblage of mansions in Riverdale known as “Wave Hill”(now a garden and cultural center), the ranks of majestic Art-Deco apartment blocks up and down the Grand Concourse, Stanford White’s and Marcel Breuer’s classical and Modernist masterpieces at Bronx Community College in University Heights, and the industrial behemoths of the South Bronx, especially McKim, Mead & White’s Bronx Grit Chamber and Kirby, Petit & Green’s American Bank Note Company. The South Bronx, of course, has been notoriously crumbling for generations, long emblematic of a failed experiment in post-war public housing and urban renewal in the wake of post-war suburban migration. So we were pleased to find a largely re-energized South Bronx, fun to explore and fun (for a change) to write about. Leading the rebirth is a group of innovative schools designed by local architects.
The Bathgate Educational Campus, by John Ciardullo Associates, on Bathgate Avenue, just west of Crotona Park, is neo-Constructivist, with walls in startling colors sharply dividing three separate high schools within. Right around the corner on 3rd Avenue is Peter Gluck and Partners’ Bronx Prep Charter School. Gluck, designer of the equally impressive East Harlem School, uses primary colors and everyday materials (sheet metal siding, for instance) to vividly express the various functions within. Heading south (three non-scenic miles by car along the Cross Bronx and Bruckner Expressways, or two miles on foot, using the southern edge of Crotona Park as a shortcut) is WXY Architecture’s Bronx Charter School for the Arts, on a rather unlikely site along an industrial swath of Longfellow Avenue. We were so happy to find this project that we described it this way in the new Guide: “Hooray! Another great new school! This one uses natural light and colored brick to transform an existing factory building.” After so many years of architectural misery in the South Bronx, when design was often implicated in the destruction of communities, who among us would not rejoice at the arrival of this zesty group: scholarly architecture for budding scholars. Hooray, indeed!
Note: The AIA Guide to New York City, Fifth Edition, will be released on 06.07.10 by Oxford University Press, and can be pre-ordered at www.amazon.com. There will also be a launch party at the Center for Architecture 06.02.10 to celebrate the publication.
Norval White, FAIA, (1926-2009) was an architect, architectural historian and professor who designed buildings throughout the U.S. In addition to the AIA Guide to New York City, he was the author of The Architecture Book and New York: A Physical History.
Elliot Willensky, FAIA, (1934-1990) was an architect and architectural historian. He served as vice chairman of the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, and was the official Borough Historian of Brooklyn. He also wrote a popular history, When Brooklyn Was the World, 1920-1957.
Fran Leadon, AIA, is an architect and professor at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. He lives in Brooklyn.