A Building’s Third Act

Every old building presents its architect with the same dilemma: what do you keep? At 60 Collister in Tribeca in 2006, the answer was in the brick.

The building began in 1866 as a stable for the American Express Company, built with thick walls, arched windows, and a terracotta bulldog set into the facade — the company's original emblem. When the horses left, the building began a long second act as a home for art and nightlife. Alexander Calder kept a studio here, and later the same rooms held the Area nightclub. By the time it came to us it was boarded up and holding more than a century of the city's life. Our decision was to carry that life forward into a third act: seventeen lofts, and a new name taken from the little street beside it — 60 Collister.

Three decisions shaped the work.

The first was to keep the walls. Brick that has stood since 1866 has a color and a weight that cannot be manufactured, and we restored it rather than replaced it, arch by arch.

The second was to place the new where it would not compete with the old. The all-glass rooftop penthouse steps back from the cornice, so from the sidewalk the building the horses knew still meets the sky exactly as it did in 1866.

The third was to keep the bulldog. American Express had set its original emblem into the terracotta when the building was new, and the bulldog had watched over the neighborhood ever since — through the horses, through Calder's studio, through the ravers. It seemed to us that the people who would live in the building deserved to live behind it, not behind its replacement.

I have come to believe that luxury in an old building is not what you add. Luxury is what you refuse to erase. The city's oldest walls hold something that the newest ones spend decades trying to earn, and the buildings that keep their past give their residents something money otherwise cannot reach: the company of every life the building has already lived — the horses, the sculptor, the underground night life.

What is the building in your neighborhood that deserves to be kept?