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Architecture in Formation: Dream projects, all real |
When architect Matthew Bremer, AIA, isn’t busy designing cool projects like a VIP lounge in New York’s JFK Airport, a showroom for an upscale purveyor of Brazilian design, Manhattan apartments, or the redevelopment of a 103,000-square-foot former prison site in Brooklyn, New York, he’s working on his dream project—developing his family’s ranch land in Bulverde, Texas, into a walkable, modern, mixed-use community. “It doesn’t matter where you are,” says Bremer, “the Texas creeps back into your blood.”
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But it wasn’t always like that for Bremer. His love of drawing, building, and “the idea of how people interact in intimate spaces,” led him to get his undergraduate degree in architecture from Rice University, in Houston. But he says at that point he couldn’t wait to get out of Texas, moving east to get his master’s in architecture from Yale, then living in New York and Italy, where he worked for esteemed firms such as Pei Cobb Freed and Tsao & McKown Architects in New York City, and Studio Citterio Dwan in Milan. He started Architecture in Formation in 2001 because, he says, he found that most of his friends had more disposable income than he did, and they wanted his help. “It was a very conventional transition into starting a firm,” he says. “We had very small projects at first, but they were real, not paper, architecture. I respect the blob-flower guy, but that isn’t me.”
Bremer’s very real clients have grown from friends to include the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Brooklyn’s Navy Brig prison was built in the early 1940s and closed in 1994. As part of Mayor Bloomberg’s 10-year plan to create new housing, the development, called The Navy Green, will comprise 434 residential units, commercial and open space, and a new community center. In collaboration with FXFOWLE and Curtis Ginsberg Architects, Architecture in Formation designed the master plan. “Polshek just finished a project like this in Brooklyn,” says Bremer, “and Helmut Jahn did one in Chicago. These types of projects prove that Modernism is not inherently hostile.”
And it’s that rich and habitable side of Modernism that Bremer hopes to bring to his Texas project. “It’s New Urbanism with the cute kicked out of it,” says Bremer about his plans for the land, some 150 acres that has been in his family for seven generations. “I’m so emotionally tied to this project—selling the family farm with their encouragement. I’m working on the design and the business plan now, and trying to deal with Texas politics, which is all about water rights. I love the Texas vernacular—the old dance halls and ranch architecture—and I want to create a mixed-use development honoring that without resorting to pastiche.” But with a full plate in New York, Bremer is finding it hard to resolve the commitment it might take to complete his dream. “When I’m working on projects here, I’m completely subsumed,” he says. “Still, doing this right might mean moving back to Texas. The developer as bad guy and the architect as savior doesn’t hold up anymore. For me, it’s the next step, and it’s long-term.” Luckily for Bremer, the Texas in him understands the meaning of slow and easy.
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