![]() ![]() Scarano countered that his competitors just weren’t creative enough, that he thought in cubic feet, not square, delivering more light, more air and more space to an eager buying public. Enemies of overdevelopment protested that his towering designs were ugly and out of context, while other architects groused that he was circumventing the constraints of the zoning code. ![]() They were loftlike, with soaring ceilings that drove their heights above the roofline and their prices to levels unheard of in formerly marginal neighborhoods. In a city of cramped living, where space is guarded as jealously as Bedouin water, Scarano’s buildings were designed to stimulate a primal pleasure center. It wasn’t aesthetics, though, that made Scarano the defining draftsman of that brief and ultimately delusional moment. Working on hundreds of projects, many of them small-scale buildings that could be constructed quickly, without the rigmarole of public hearings, he remolded entire neighborhoods in his steely, angular, brash - some would say garish - style. Through the mid-2000s, a period roughly coinciding with the real estate bubble, Scarano was one of the city’s most productive architects, and certainly its most controversial, an omnipresent force in the outer-borough building boom that transformed row-house streets and industrial districts into colonies of stucco and sake bars. She told it the way a stockbroker might relate the misdeeds of Bernie Madoff, her professional disapproval commingled with a distinct sense of wonderment at the things the guy got away with, at least for a while. I first heard this particular Scarano story - one of many in a genre - from a friend, an architect, over beers at our neighborhood bar in Brooklyn. This building was the handiwork of the architect Robert Scarano. So a few days after they buy the place, the couple takes a sledgehammer to their wall. But the developer says no, he’s dead serious, just look. This is before the crash, near the peak of the market, and no one’s giving away a square inch. At first, the buyers think the developer is kidding. There’s a second bathroom in the apartment, he says, one that does not appear on the floor plan - its doorway is concealed behind an inconspicuous layer of drywall. The buyers go to close on the place, and as they’re signing away half a million dollars, the building’s developer, keeping a wary eye on the hovering lawyers, leans over and whispers something. A young couple decides to buy an 800-square-foot apartment in a new condo building on the gentrifying outer edge of a fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood. ![]() Let’s begin with the mystery of the hidden bathroom. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |