Modern Interpretation

That’s a new building – probably apartments with stores at the first floor – at the foot of Sixth Avenue in Tribeca, where it merges into Church Street. The style may not be to everyone’s taste but it jumped out at me because (a) it’s not another glass curtain wall and (b) some inventiveness was present in the design. Here’s a close-up of the base:

First, there are brick flat aches over the windows in the southernmost (far left) bay. They’re exaggeratedly high, filling the entire spandrel panel up the the window sills above, and appear to have specially-made very long bricks to fill that vertical space, but that’s all okay. There’s an ordinary course of brick right above the window head below and right below the window sill above, which strongly suggests there are ordinary hung lintels hidden in there.

To the right, the flat-arch motif is used as pure decoration over a series of windows. (It could be real if you believe that flat arch will span some twenty feet, which: no.) Again, using masonry details as ornament has a long history to it.

I suspect that the water-table at the second floor level isn’t actually corbelled out the way it looks, but assuming I’m right, that’s a convincing fake. It’s actually possible to build a corbelled water-table or cornice that looks just like that, but you need a pretty substantial wall thickness to serve as the back-arm and counterweight. But it looks good.

Finally, the corner arch entrance is obviously fakery, since arches don’t work like that. There’s no way for the compression in an arch to turn a right-angle corner unless there’s a substantial tension tie back at the apex, in which case it’s not really working as a true arch any more. In this case, since this is a frame building, the wall isn’t supporting any load but its own weight for one story, so faking the corner arch was probably not very difficult.

All this discussion of fakery may sound like criticism, but it’s not. Facades are ornamental, whether the aesthetic consists of seeing how flat and shiny you can make your glass, or how many references to old-fashioned masonry construction you can work into a modern non-structural wall. The masonry looks good and the ornament, modern as it is, blends in pretty well with the surrounding older buildings.