The Brooklyn Rail

Building in this city is not easy: an odd-shaped lot, an unlikely access point, a steep sidewalk, dueling frontage on multiple streets, a looming neighbor, restrictive zoning. But difficult sites aren't necessarily bad, not architecturally at least. They’re demands for unlikely shapes, calibrated alignments, measured relationships—new geometric orders all their own that solve hard-to-use circumstances. The buildings they sponsor don’t just learn from the city, they’re made of it: weirdnesses crystalizing into form—and often inventing architectural ideas in the process. Buildings play these games all around us, often hiding in plain sight.

Just south of Canal Street, at 32 6th Avenue lives just such a building. Its bigness might be familiar to neighborhood gallery workers rushing past to meetings, but it’s not like any building nearby. This is the AT&T Long Lines Building, one of a number of structures built in the early twentieth century for equipment, not just people. It housed the termination of three thousand long distance lines connecting 360 North American cities, as well as the more than 5,500 workers needed to operate them all, according to its Landmarks designation report. But these long distance needs could not be furtively layered into the city, their demands for sheer scale meant an infrastructural problem had to become architectural, too.

It looms high and foreboding above the sidewalk, as commuters slip out of the subway beneath its big brick bulk that fills the entire block. Its masonry touches down to the sidewalk on all four sides, never once giving way to anonymous glass walls that allow us to forget to look up and see the buildings, which like puppets off stage, populate our streets with big personalities but forgotten stories. Like many in the city, this is a building whose strangeness we have learned to walk past. But its quiet bulk deserves our attention.

The typical office buildings that fill the city are often shaped by the fact that workers need daylight, meaning floors that aren’t too deep. But telephone equipment happily operates in the dark. As a result, the building uses the city block in a new way—not sliced carefully into a variety of scales of buildings—but instead as a structure that consumes the whole block in one cartoonish swallow. Wandering the city-block-sized building when it first opened, its floors populated with humming equipment and busy workers, might have felt a lot like wandering the city itself.

Its sheer size meant a handful of architectural problems shared by other contemporary new types such as industrial buildings and skyscrapers: How to make it not feel as enormous? How does its bigness fit into its tight urban context? On three sides, tall neighbors and narrow streets mean it's hard to even get far enough away to get a look at its size unless you remember to look over your shoulder a few blocks away.

Its delicate, polychromatic brickwork helps it manage its unwieldy size and perplexing site. Triangular folds of brick, like pleats, slip vertically between columns of punched windows. Its articulated brick feels agile and featherlight. Instead of a single mass, the building is composed of distinct parts, almost a collection of buildings themselves. These layered, almost two-dimensional facades, each with their own style of brickwork, construct a skyline of personalities, a backdrop of an opera set in a futuristic city. And yet, the shared palette of red and brown-hued brick brings a collage of cutouts together.

This composition of pieces helps it fit into the city, too. While the dominant grain of the block is the Manhattan grid, the building’s entry fronts that deviant stretch of 6th Avenue that cuts obliquely across the block. It also happens to be the only side of the building fronting any open space, thanks to a bite-sized park, marking a key vantage to witness the structure from sidewalk to skyline.

Making a grand entrance along 6th Avenue, the brick lifts its delicate folds like a curtain, revealing double-height bronze and cast-glass. A pair of bold, oversized triangular brick piers flank either side of the entry—announcing this as the unlikely face of the whole building.

A surprise comes following those brick piers skyward, where the lower stories that front the avenue give way to something new above. Those triangular brick piers that seem to frame the entry are, also, the oblique corners of a collection of smaller towers in the sky. These upper volumes show an allegiance not to the accidental frontage of a misbehaving avenue, but instead rotated to the larger Manhattan grid, to the project of the city itself.

The unlikely protagonists of the brick piers seamlessly couple two buildings separated not vertically, as might be two neighbors side-by-side in the city, but instead horizontally like the waist of a surrealist giant. The building is an exquisite corpse: a head of one architectural idea stacked on top of the body of something different entirely, yet perfectly stitched together. The angled 6th Avenue facade is startlingly symmetrical, as are each of the two rotated towers above, even though they face a different direction. Their worlds align so effortlessly that neither is betrayed to be doing any work to allow it to happen. Hiding the upper or the lower portion with an upheld hand, each portion feels to be a coherent whole, just another building in the city.

This building acts like it could be anywhere, and sports its art deco confidence like a sly glance. But this structure, with its enormous footprint, and industrial-scale bulk, and an awkward frontage at the overlap of two city grids, with the lightest-weight brickwork of them all is a monster that could only be native to this city. It’s a tough act to do so much at once, we should be in awe of those that do it with a twist.