Williamsburg Sports Center |









In 1939 Richmond H. Shreve, of the firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, led a team of architects in completing the first modernist housing project in New York City, the 23-acre Williamsburg houses in Brooklyn. The Swiss born modernist architect William Lescaze was responsible for the overall design of the pioneering development. The project is remarkable when viewed in the context of the traditional grid of the city because the buildings are laid out in superblocks and arranged with reference to solar orientation,rather than to the urban grid, giving a rotation to the composition of linear buildings in which buildings and streets are at an approximately 15 degree angle to each other. Lescaze was following European examples in this abstraction of buildings from the existing urban condition, most notably the pre-war German Functionalism of Walter Gropius.
While the Williamsburg Houses create pleasant interior landscaped walks between buildings, the left over pieces of space at the intersection with streets are not so successful. These orphaned triangular wedges demonstrate the limitations of abstract urban planning methods in which streets are left three-dimensionally undefined. The streets suffer a loss of urban meaning as public life is pulled into the interiors of superblocks and away from the perimeter.
In the original plan a space was left in the middle of the south edge of the development and the William J. Gaynor Junior High School was built on part of it. The building is a traditional rectangular structure of brick with courtyards set back from the street on either side. The remaining part of the site is the location of the Williamsburg Sports Center, a facility for activities including a large gymnasium and multipurpose rooms for recreational programs. The center is rectangular in design, although considerably smaller than the school, and the two form a composition of public buildings where rectilinear geometry distinguishes them from the angled housing blocks.
The sports center is placed at the corner of the lot to provide as much open space as possible for outdoor recreational activities, but also to assert the importance of defining the street, in contrast to the undefined edge of the Williamsburg Houses. While it is approximately the same height as the school, it is designed to contrast with it in several respects.
Where the school is vertical in its proportions, referring back to classical precedents, the proportions of the sports center are horizontal, referring, like the Williamsburg Houses, to modernist traditions. While the school is a solid brick masonry block with window openings, the sports center is a concrete frame structure with infill panels of glass, metal or concrete in varying degrees of openness for enclosure of different spaces. Where the school is symmetrical and static as a composition, the sports center is asymmetrical, turning the most open part of the frame toward the entrance plaza.
In its composition, the design follows an alternate modernist tradition to the functionalism of Lescaze, namely the Italian Rationalism of Giuseppe Terragni. This tradition can be critical of classicism and traditional urbanism, yet achieves its effect through formal dialogue, through abstraction and juxtaposition, rather than through an ideological rejection of context.