The Switchback House, Brooklyn, NY Home, Real Estate Project, American Architecture Images
The Switchback House in Brooklyn
Exterior and Interior Building Redevelopment in New York, USA – design by L/AND/A
Mar 18, 2018
The Switchback House
Architecture: LIGHT AND AIR (L/AND/A)
Location: Brooklyn, New York, USA
The Switchback House

New York based architecture office Light and Air (L/AND/A) recently completed a gut renovation of an existing 1880s Brooklyn row house.

The Switchback House is a new prototype for contemporary urban living that inverts and opens up the traditional row house by replacing a stacked stair with a switchback stair and inserting a dramatic skylight atop the new vertical stair volume.
While townhouses historically tend to be dark, narrow and divided spaces, with each floor visually disconnected, L/AND/A?s subtle but strategic transformation prioritizes dynamic visual connections both between floors and from the inside out.

The effect is a light, open, and connected experience inside a traditional row house.

The existing house in the middle of a brownstone block in Bedford Stuyvesant was rundown and dilapidated, with much of the historic interior detailing removed or destroyed. The original layout had been reworked over the years into a rooming house with multiple small apartments, eroding the original grandeur of the space.

Most of the existing infrastructure from plumbing and electrical on up needed to be fully replaced. Said arch...