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A mass-timber apartment building in Brooklyn wraps itself around a courtyard with character.
THE DOUBLELOADED corridor is a ubiquitous and rightly derided feature of contemporary housing. Its layout, where residential units line both sides of long hallways, deprives common spaces of daylight, natural ventilation, and, some would say, a sense of community. But adherence to this stultifying building configuration need not be the norm. Frame 122, a five-story mass-timber residential apartment house in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood, designed by local practice Brent Buck Architects, stands in contrast to this prevailing typology, with a parklike courtyard from which residents can access their apartments.
The nearly 31,000-square-foot rental building faces east and is located on the site of a demolished brick-fronted garage. That context, and the neighborhood's abundant brownstones and nearby industrial facilities, like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, informed the project's cladding, Which comprises roughly mortared and variegated brick on the ground floor that transitions to corrugated aluminum sheets and highly regimented rectangular glazing above. The entrance is at the center of the main elevation, where a pair of exposed glulam beams frame the building's cross-laminated timber (CLT) gateway, which is punctuated by a grid of playful porthole-like windows.
The gateway leads to an open-air vestibule-a zoning trick that deducted buildable area from the ground floor, freeing up valuable square footage for the residential units-which, in a few strides, opens to the building's granite-paved courtyard. It is flanked to the north and south by a pair of steel spiral staircases that lead to exterior walkways and...