BRUTAL NYC

The windowless skyscraper was designed to resist a nuclear fallout – self sufficient for 1,500 people for two weeks, with 250,000 gallons of fuel to power generators, water and food for the occupants…

Large-scale urban renewal projects were in no way unique to New York City. White Plains, the suburban city just north of the Bronx would undergo major renewal projects to its downtown core in the 1960s...

The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) campus in Chelsea is a hodgepodge of mid-century modernist architectural styles that to this day fail to provide the school a with a singular identity…

University Village occupies a five-acre superblock that is part of the larger Washington Square Urban Renewal Area. I.M. Pei designed three identical 30-story towers made of reinforced concrete…

The city would drastically transform Roosevelt Island in the mid twentieth century, creating a pedestrian friendly community of stepped back concrete highrises...

The Midtown skyscraper, 909 Third Avenue, with its deeply coffered cast concrete window walls above a concrete podium is the largest building by volume and height in this survey…

Lower Manhattan's brutalist federal prison has housed some of the most notorious criminals in its secure concrete facility. Designed by Gruzen and Parters, the prison sits next to the firm’s civic center…

Officially named Manhattan Detention Complex, was designed by Urbahn Associates, and opened in 1989. The bulky facade is clad in a reddish-pink concrete, with rounded vertical bands covering the…

The three towers are flanked by large concrete structural expanses that expand outward as they near the sidewalk. The most striking feature of the overall bleak towers are windowless sides…

The first exposed concrete residential buildings in the city, they were a departure from the walkup tenement and brownstone buildings that were common in the neighborhood. The gridded cast-in-place…

The four towers, designed by Davis, Brody & Associates range from 31 to 37 stories and are clad in dark brown brick, described in the AIA Guide to New York City as "cut and carved cubism" with cantilevered…

The thirty-story curvilinear tower designed by Horace Ginsbern & Associates is directly across the street from Lincoln Center for The Performing Arts. The beige concrete of the rounded columns…

Two saw-toothed poured concrete towers of 32 and 13 stories, surrounded by a raised landscaped private plaza with 50 townhouses. Construction on the 420‐unit cooperative development began in…

Clad in limestone, with narrow dark windows running the length of the building, the top of the structure protrudes out, interrupted only by the one narrow horizontal window of the top floor. Simplistic in…

Clad in travertine, Pietro Belluschi's Juilliard School is the northernmost building in the Lincoln Center complex and the only one that directly faces broadway. Belluschi’s design for Julliard is nothing…

The museum's façade consists of 1,500 gray granite slabs, each weighing between 500 and 600 pounds. Inside Breuer used a vast array of materials including terrazzo, board-formed and…

Retail and parking are combined in one cylindrical structure, 426-feet in diameter. The perforated facade was created by sandblasted, poured-in-place concrete. Automobile-oriented modernism…

Chatham Towers bring together modern building technology, daring aesthetics, elemental, sculptural form, and emerging theories of urbanism. At 25 stories, the height of the towers made it possible…

The two octogonal concrete towers provided a much-needed landmark to the north side of Central Park, one that grounded the skyline and intersection at the northeast corner of the park. When the first..

1199 Plaza is a bulky brown brick apartment complex on the border of East Harlem and the Upper East Side facing the East River. It was envisioned as an urban renewal project that would break away from…

Built in 1966, the American Bible Society building in the city to be constructed with load-bearing, precast concrete panels. Set back from Broadway with a small public plaza, and ignoring the angle of…

Columbia University's East Campus was the first major addition to the Morningside Heights campus in decades, adding a superblock of new buildings across Amsterdam Avenue from the main campus…

The Lowenstein Center is a narrow slab, a steel structure clad in precast-concrete with narrow vertical windows on the north and south sides. The east and west facades are windowless concrete walls…