The Grand Mulberry Flats / Morris Adjmi Architects

The Grand Mulberry Flats / Morris Adjmi Architects

Textual content description supplied by the architects. Situated on the intersection of Grand and Mulberry Streets within the coronary heart of Little Italy, MA’s design of The Grand Mulberry attracts inspiration from the wealthy heritage of historic Italianate tenements discovered all through the neighborhood. The custom-profiled brick that clads the up to date condominium constructing creates a spectral reference to this heritage.

Whereas MA steadily takes inspiration from close by buildings, the agency’s designs hardly ever replicate particular buildings. The Grand Mulberry is considerably of an exception—the facade is an abstraction of a literal copy. The classically impressed, irregular grouping of “ghost home windows” creates stress with the common cadence of the constructing’s actual home windows as a technique to juxtapose previous and current.

Historically, Italianate tenement buildings featured a tripartite façade that consisted of a base, center, and prime with differing particulars and brickwork used for every portion. Emulating this custom, The Grand Mulberry’s façade sample consists of banding on the constructing’s base on flooring 1-2, pediment home windows within the center on flooring 3-5, and arched home windows and a cornice on the prime portion on flooring 6.

Quoining particulars outline the bays. Given the undertaking’s setting, the target from the onset was to design a constructing that was contextual but unmistakably up to date. Whereas the facade sample is conventional, the appliance of the hand-molded domed bricks could be very fashionable—every brick was rigorously positioned throughout the double-stacked working bond coursing to current the phantasm of a conventional Italianate façade.

The {custom} bricks are available roughly thirty completely different shapes to execute the sample, together with double bricks with double domes (probably the most prevalent), double bricks with a single dome, curved bricks, lipped bricks, and easy shapes with out domes. All have a uniform red-orange clay colour that pays additional homage to the crimson brick buildings discovered within the neighborhood.

On the rear of the constructing, the seventh flooring steps again to create a gracious terrace for the penthouse unit that faces each Grand and Mulberry Streets. The penthouse and the constructing’s bulkhead are wrapped in medium grey standing seam metallic panels that create a refined distinction of fabric and colour. This enables these parts to face alone however not detract from the brick façade under.