He Will Continue Designing Buildings; Is Expanding His Practice
To Include Public Housing, Religious and Commercial Buildings
By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
DUMBO — Robert Scarano could easily hold the title of both the most popular and the most hated architect in Brooklyn at the same time.
He has 350 active construction projects under his name citywide, most of them in Brooklyn. Some have ignited so much opposition that they’ve been credited with initiating rezoning studies of Sunset Park (for a building that would have blocked the statue of Minerva’s view of the Statue of Liberty), Fort Greene (for a 320-foot modern-looking behemoth planned next to a three-story mansion that was built in the 1830s), and most recently in Carroll Gardens, where he has a 60-foot tall building planned.
Scarano maintains that the controversy surrounding his projects hasn’t affected his business, but according to information provided by the Department of Buildings (DOB), his popularity — or the market — is waning.
He filed 57 percent fewer applications with the DOB this past year than he did two years before he voluntarily rescinded his license to self-certify projects, in August 2006, after a series of investigations.
Between August 2004 and August 2005, Scarano submitted 288 applications to the department; this past year he submitted 123 applications.
At the high point, he said he was taking on 10 projects a day.
“It was quite stressful. It was very difficult, I can tell you that,” he told the Eagle. “It probably was why there was a concern in the industry generally that started the attention on us — that we were the vortex that was sucking up everybody’s business because we were so popular.”
Now things have slowed down somewhat at his firm of roughly 50 architects from around the world, but he says the controversy surrounding his projects, and Councilman Bill DeBlasio’s recent call on the state Department of Education to rescind his license, has nothing to do with it.
“Developers, they go to different people. We had a certain idea of a project that was very new and very different, and I think at some point you have to build those jobs, and it takes time to do that,” said Scarano, adding, “They [the Buildings Department] took the time to basically audit three or four years of my work, that I had to defend to them, so I wasn’t out there beating the pavement trying to get jobs.”
Scarano stopped short of admitting that the frenzied pace he was working during the boom years could have caused some mistakes in his projects, but allowed that there are certain developers he worked for that he wouldn’t work with again.
Still, it’s undeniable that the name Scarano raises a red flag on projects for certain vocal and politically adept Brooklynites, who maintain that his name is synonymous with “bad contractors, dangerous job sites and out-of-scale development,” and that he willingly violates state and city zoning regulations.
According to the DOB, approximately 20 percent of his 350 active projects have stop work orders on them, which Scarano says “are given out like water at this point. And it’s all part of an effort to keep contractors on their toes.”
The citywide average for stop work orders is 2.2 percent.
The most recent high-profile stop work order attached to the architect involved The Modern in Williamsburg, a nine-unit condominium with a glassy façade reminiscent of artist Piet Mondrian that sits atop the L train subway line.
Neighbors called complaining that workers were drilling into the subway tunnel, but Kate Lindquist, spokeswoman for the DOB, said inspectors found no evidence of that. The order was issued for excavation work that didn’t conform to the plans Scarano submitted to the department, which were approved.
Scarano also didn’t design the building, although the papers are filed under his name. Lifeform, a small firm headed by Israeli architect Rafi Elbaz that is not licensed to file papers with the city, designed the building and hired Scarano as the architect of record to “sign and file the papers,” said Monica Hernandez, another architect at Lifeform.
Still it was Scarano that got all the attention for the stop work order.
Acknowledging that the practice of one architect designing a project and another filing the technical documents is somewhat common in the city, Lindquist points out that Scarano is still responsible, and legally accountable, for everything he signs his name to.
Dmitriy Shenker, president of the Brooklyn chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), called the arrangement one unique to the United States, particularly in a city with such complex zoning regulations.
Scarano, he said, is the city’s sacrificial lamb to help appease the anti-development Gods.
“The city concentrated on Scarano because he found loopholes in zoning, and they are trying to put all the problems on his head,” Shenker told the Eagle. “Zoning has loopholes, zoning has lots of loopholes, and zoning needs interpretation of every paragraph. The city has given interpretation, then they’ve sometimes taken back that interpretation.
“Zoning is so uncertain that you can get dozens of interpretations from dozens of architects,” he continued, adding that the complex rules are “anti-architectural” and can “suffocate the life out of a project.”
Shenker suggests looking into “real problems” like unlicensed contractors and illegal practitioners.
Scarano, for his part, said he’s going to continue doing what he’s been doing for the past 20 years — designing great buildings.
He said his firm has been expanding its areas of practice into public housing — such as upgrading the Ingersoll and Whitman Houses in Fort Greene, a 3,600-unit project — and into commercial, industrial and religious buildings.
“It’s our cutting-edge ideas [which the firm has won awards for] that keep moving the bar forward and changing the face of the borough,” he said.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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