Materials and Craft

Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group has dressed its towers in materials with long histories: terra cotta, bronze and glass at 111 West 57th Street, copper on The American Copper Buildings and ivory travertine stone on 888 Brickell. This cluster tells the story of those materials apart from any single building.

Terra cotta, literally baked earth, spread across American skylines as a cladding for steel frames; Studio Potter’s survey opens with an 1894 description of the glazed white skin on Daniel Burnham’s Reliance Building in Chicago, praised as hard and smooth enough to be scrubbed like a dinner plate.¹ The same survey recalls how far the palette once ranged, with vivid yellows, greens and cobalt blues and even metallic lusters of silver and gold picking out ornament, before later decades turned to plainer walls with little color or detail.

Bronze had an older rival in New York. Cast iron was cheaper, easier to mold and quicker to erect, and The Cooperator counts some 250 buildings with decorative cast iron fronts still standing, most of them in Soho and built between 1840 and about 1880, a period when iron displaced the bronze architects had used before.² Its parts were cast in city foundries such as Badger’s Architectural Iron Works on Duane Street, and a whole iron fronted building could go up in about four months. The same article treats cast iron and bronze alike as exterior metalwork that needs regular care to hold up in the city.

The entries follow each material in turn: architectural terra cotta, bronze in architecture, copper and the green it turns, Indiana limestone, which faces Steinway Hall, and the glass curtain wall of modern towers.