Two erstwhile Brooklyn architects turned a run-down frame house on the border of Park Slope and Sunset Park into one of the borough’s funkiest residential buildings.
Caleb Crawford and Annie Coggan, spouses and long-time Fort Greene residents, transformed a once-creaky home at 270 21st St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, into an eco-friendly, Modernist gem.
“It was a wood-frame building and in really bad shape,” said Crawford, who was an architecture professor at Pratt Institute for 10 years before moving south to chair the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. “It was ‘old building meets new building.’”
Perhaps “new building replaces older building” would be more apt. For, as Crawford and Coggan dug into the project, they discovered that there wasn’t much existing edifice to speak of.
“We were like, what the heck was holding this building together?” said Crawford.
But the concept of old-meets-new remained. Hence the punched-window façade of the building (old). And the glass and steel, curtain-windowed back of the building (new).
Of course, building funky in Brooklyn, where zoning and other regulations can pile as high as the latest Downtown skyscraper, is no easy task.
“It was a long crawl to a certificate of occupancy,” said Crawford. “The city these days, it’s becoming more and more difficult.”
Construction was completed about a year and a half ago. But it took months to get the official city sign-off. The top two condos are now occupied. But Andrew Giancola, the developer of the building, has yet to move into his first-floor home — even so, he told Boom that the building “came out amazing.”
That’s high praise from a developer.
©2008 The Brooklyn Paper
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