Scholastic Building

Coordinates: 40°43′27″N 73°59′54″W / 40.72404°N 73.998242°W

A view of the Scholastic Building from the north (uptown)

The Scholastic Building at 557 Broadway between Prince and Spring Streets in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, was the first new building to be constructed in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, replacing a one-story garage built in 1954.^[1] Completed in 2001, it is the only New York City work by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi.^[2] Originally conceived of in his New York office, it was completed and refined by Rossi's disciple, Morris Adjmi. It is respectful of its immediate neighbors and pays homage to the district’s cast iron architectural identity. The cast iron architecture that defines this neighborhood straddles between the classical and industrial periods of New York’s past. According to historian William Higgins, "the building’s columnar Broadway façade, in steel, terra-cotta, and stone, echoes the scale and the formal, Classical character of its commercial neighbors. The rear façade, on Mercer Street, extracts a gritty essence from its more utilitarian surroundings of plain cast iron and weathered masonry."

The Scholastic Building was designed and assembled using a "kit of parts" methodology, which is similar to a time when the facades of SoHo's cast-iron buildings were built by ordering the building elements and ornaments in parts from a catalog, having them cast off-site in foundries, and assembled on site.

References

Notes

1. "NYCLPC SoHo - Cast-Iron Historic District Designation Report"
2. White, Norval & Willensky, Elliot (2000). AIA Guide to New York City (4th ed.). New York: Three Rivers Press. ISBN 978-0-8129-3107-5., p.101

External links

• Media related to Scholastic Building at Wikimedia Commons