Monday, September 1, 2008

Rooftop houses cute or crap?

EIGHT stories above Broadway, on the southeast corner of 97th Street, construction is near completion on three little houses that sit atop a turn-of-the-century apartment building.

Tan in color, they have jaunty oval windows and tiny gabled roofs. On a recent morning, workers in hard hats scurried about porches resembling those in a community of hillside tract houses.


Little Boxes, Far From the Hillside

Doron Rice, an architect who was holding a large pair of barbells, peered out the window. “You want my opinion?” he said, “It’s out of context. It’s not the same materials, and it’s not the same scale. It looks like it was dropped here from somewhere in Long Island.”

But Ms. Gavilanes found the penthouses alluring. “I would get a car,” she said, “and put it out in the driveway. And then I’d add a white picket fence, and AstroTurf. Maybe have a golden retriever playing in the yard.”

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Crap.

Anonymous said...

they're gonna blow off next time we get a major storm.

Anonymous said...

I love it. Very cute. Very different. Oh, right..around here, different = crap!

Anonymous said...

"...Oh, right..around here, different = crap!"

No, crap = crap.

Anonymous said...

"Oh, right..around here, different = crap!"

Perhaps you missed this from the article...
Doron Rice, an architect who was holding a large pair of barbells, peered out the window. “You want my opinion?” he said, “It’s out of context. It’s not the same materials, and it’s not the same scale. It looks like it was dropped here from somewhere in Long Island.”

Anonymous said...

Unusal to see the roofs etc - not sure how practical that will be one day. Not sure if they can be seen from the street.

Forest Hills has a few of these on an 8 story complex, but are boxy without the peaked roofs, but do feature very large picture windows and cannot be seen from the street; somewhat private as those in ajacent towers can peer down. Still with trees, bushes etc - it pretty quite up there.

Anonymous said...

How surreal!

It's a microcosm roof top suburbia!

Are they going to be putting in front lawns to accommodate the residents' folding aluminum beach chairs?

Heaven forbid they should ever consider moving out to Levitt Town where they can get the real Mc Coy
a hell of a lot cheaper.

Definitely C-R-A-P !

Anonymous said...

Just pay off Mr. Kahn at the DOB and you TOO can do this on pre-war building.

Anonymous said...

Nice back yards for the kids to run around in. As long as you make sure they're wearing their parachutes at all times.

"dave in milwaukee"

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