Grids are out, brick is back, and Philadelphia architects have rediscovered the arch

It’s one of the paradoxes of Philadelphia’s 21st century residential building boom. The more rowhouses and apartments that get built here, the more they look alike.

The streets of Fishtown and Graduate Hospital and Spruce Hill are now awash in interchangeable blocky structures, all dressed in the same dreary gray clothing, their aluminum panels shrink-wrapped around the exterior like a sheet of graph paper.

Instead of providing the kind of fine details that enlivened earlier generations of buildings, their architects try to distract us with patches of color and cheap trim.

The look is derisively known as fast-casual architecture, McUrbanism or developer modern. No one likes these buildings, not even, I suspect, the architects who stamp the drawings. But because they are cheap and easy to build, the no-frills grids have emerged as a developer standard across America.

As bad as they might look in newer cities, their flat, lifeless facades are especially jarring in Philadelphia, where even humble rowhouses are animated by varied textures of brick and recessed windows.

While there’s little chance that developers will start building them like they used to, a few Philadelphia architects have thrown a curve into the works. The arch, which traces its origins to Roman times, is making a comeback.

Once you start looking around the city, you can’t help but see contemporary arches and rounded corners everywhere: on metal-clad rowhouses and brick-faced apartment buildings, in restaurant dining rooms and hotel lobbies.

To be clear, today’s arches bear only a faint familial resemblance to their brawny predecessors, which come in all sizes and architectural styles, and typically have a large keystone at the apex. Those old masonry arches were workhorses that helped buildings stand up.

But as construction methods advanced in the early 20th century, arches ceased to have a structural purpose. The changes coincided with the rise of Modernism, which largely eschewed the form in favor of straight lines, at least until the 1960s, when architects such as Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi — both Philadelphians — began sneaking them back into architecture.

Arches started reappearing on Philadelphia buildings about a decade ago, after Bright Common’s Jeremy Avellino marked the entrance to his Kensington Yards project with an exaggerated arc that seems to be descended from the famous Chestnut Hill house that Venturi designed for his mother. Even though the gesture was also a nod to the arched windows on the 19th century townhouse next door, Avellino intentionally emphasized his building’s contemporary look by cladding it in metal. He considers his arches as nothing more than a “geometric memory.”

The new-wave arches come from a different place. Although they certainly help architects break free from the oppressive grid, arches help their contemporary designs blend in better with their neighbors.

It’s no accident that arches began to proliferate just as brick was enjoying a revival as a building material in Philadelphia. Roland Kassis, a Fishtown developer who is responsible for several buildings with arches on Frankford Avenue and Front Street, says he first began using brick for building facades as a reaction against the poor quality of fast casual architecture.

Even though brick took more time and expertise to install, and ultimately cost slightly more than other materials, he felt it was worth it because it set his projects apart from the competition and signaled quality to potential renters. Later, he added arches. “I got tired of building shit,” he told me.

Most of Kassis’ buildings that feature arches have been designed by Gnome Architecture. They include a new mid-rise apartment building and a small hotel that are now under construction on Frankford Avenue.

While Gnome’s use of the arches is a way of paying homage to Fishtown’s industrial past, the firm’s most interesting design is less referential. Located at 17 Girard Ave., the skinny, mixed-used building features brick-framed oval windows that float up the facade like elongated soap bubbles. It functions as a sort of urban lighthouse at the entrance to Fishtown.

Several other Philadelphia architects have embraced arches in their work for developers, including Digsau, KJO Architecture and Morrissey Design. What unites their aesthetic is a strong interest in craft. They’re not just pasting factory-made brick panels onto facades; they’re hiring skilled workers from Philadelphia’s brickworkers union to lay the blocks on site, one at a time.

That kind of craftwork isn’t something architects usually learn in school. To ensure that he gets the arches right, Gnome’s Gabriel Deck signed up for the International Masonry Institute’s training camp, where he tried his hand at using a trowel and spreading mortar. Digsau’s Mark Sanderson, who used a variety of arch types for Wilmington’s Cooper apartments, jokes that “we have the institute on speed dial.”

The institute’s regional director, Casey Weisdock, says she’s noticed an uptick in both the use of brick and modern interpretations of the arch. She attributes brick’s newfound popularity to the Biophilic design movement, which believes natural construction materials are better for people’s health and can improve their moods.

“A brick has a human quality,” she says. “A block fits right into your hand.”

Digsau has a long history of incorporating wood and brick into its projects, yet the firm started adding arches into the mix only a few years ago. Like other architects, Sanderson, one of Digsau’s founders, says he was frustrated that design is increasingly dictated by financial models that result in the mass-production of look-alike apartment buildings. Arches were a way of breaking out of that rut.

The rebellion against straight lines and slick facades has spread to other big cities, and now even big corporate architects who specialize in skyscrapers are playing with bricks and arches. Pelli Clarke Pelli, which is responsible for designing many of the crystalline towers along the Schuylkill River, just dropped a ring of soaring arches into Boston’s newly renovated South Station. (Of course, staying true to type, the firm’s tower, located on top of the station, is still a blue glass ice sculpture.)

The urge for curves extends into interior design. Furniture showrooms overflow with tub chairs and sofas with curved backs. Virtually every surface at Enswell, an upscale Center City cocktail lounge designed by Stokes Architecture & Design, bends and flows in some way. The firm is responsible for several rounded counters in Philadelphia’s cafes and was part of the team that created Borromini’s interior arches.

“You hear the words ‘comfy and cozy’ used a lot these days,” and the arch is one way to achieve that, says architect Brian Phillips, the founding principal at ISA. Interestingly, it’s hard to find arches in any of the firm’s work, which relies on textured materials, strategic cutaways and complex geometry to animate its work. ISA did, however, introduce an arch and some curves for the Frankie’s Summer Club pop-up at the former University of the Arts building.

While the arches have allowed architects to fight back against the deadening sameness of Developer Modern, the new style risks becoming its own cliche.

So far, those Philadelphia architects who include arches in their work haven’t embraced the literal historicism of Robert Stern, but neither have they come up with anything as groundbreaking as the exaggerated and ironic forms introduced by Venturi and his partner Denise Scott Brown. In some cases, the use of arches seems arbitrary — merely decorative, to use the Modernist critique. And arches aren’t always well integrated into the composition.

The most satisfying of Philadelphia’s new-wave brick buildings has plenty of curves, but no arches. Bloc24, a small condo building on 24th Street between South and Bainbridge, is a bravura essay in different styles of brickwork.

A curving screen made from bull-nose bricks, laid on the diagonal, sweeps across the facade. Because it protrudes several feet from the surface, it functions as a giant bay window. While it’s a stretch, you could consider the stylish, curved cut-out at the entrance a sideways arch.

Bloc24 was designed and developed by Moto Designshop, the firm responsible for a charming brick chapel at St. Joseph’s University. Moto has made intricate brickwork its signature and, unlike those designs that use brick as a veneer, every detail of Bloc24 is integrated into the overall concept.

Perhaps the most out-of-the-box use of the arch can be found at Avellino’s Mi Casa houses, a group of rowhouses in tropical colors that he designed as affordable housing for Xiente (formerly the Norris Square Community Alliance). Because the sites are scattered around the neighborhood, often on very narrow lots, he was unable to replicate the standard, double window pattern found on most Philadelphia rowhouse. Instead, he used single arched windows, placed asymmetrically to energize the facades.

There isn’t a single brick in sight, evidence that the arch has come full circle.