SKE+CHED with Morris Adjmi Architects
SKE+CHED ft. Morris Adjmi from Morris Adjmi Architects
Be inspired and dive deeper into the thought process behind The Grand Mulberry, New York
The Grand Mulberry
by Morris Adjmi Architects
56-DD Special Shapes
The dots are in fact domes built into custom brick. These bricks come in roughly thirty different shapes. All have a uniform, clay color, and all are laid using a double-stacked running bond coursing. Only the dots are unusual.
Read Transcript:
I am Morris Adjmi of Morris Adjmi Architects, we have an office here in New York and also in New Orleans. I was fortunate I studied with Aldo Rossi, the Italian architect Pritzker Prize winner, and that experience really gave me a foundation for the way that we work today. Looking at a site, looking at the context, really creating a dialogue between what we create and what's surrounding the project, we can look at why things are the way they are and try to create a narrative that links what we're doing now to why the place is what it was and what it is now.
For this project at Grand and Mulberry we really use that sort of approach of looking at the surrounding neighborhood and the site. It's in Little Italy special district, and it's known for a lot of legacy of Italian Americans who lived and worked there but also there were a number of tenement buildings all around this project and so we started to look at what made those buildings special to have an Italianate characteristics but also grouping of windows and an organization of a facade that reflected a certain time.
And so we came up with this idea - we looked at different Source images from different buildings - and this idea of a of a dot, of a dome, of something that could kind of work as a pixel where you could create a drawing with dots on the facade and so we reflected the tenement buildings and that classical architecture using this pixelation of the facade and the bricks and then overlaid a window pattern that really is more akin to the buildings that we built today and also the lifestyle that we live today. I think that really unlocked the whole design.
I love brick, and we've done a tremendous number of brick buildings and on a lot of those buildings we work with Glen-Gery, but when we came up with this idea and approached them they were really excited about it and we were lucky that they embraced it, and they find the developer embrace it as well, and they were able to realize something that we could only dream about. One thing that all brick has is it has humanity. We have a connection to brick.