The notion of multi-family housing in New York brings to mind unromantic concepts like density, (un)affordability or noisy neighbors. But maybe there are some simple ways to re-enchant the idea of dense urban living. This week’s feature offers one such strategy: identifying, mapping and analyzing those residential buildings that have proper names. 150 years ago, a residential structure for more than one family meant tenement, plain and simple. And in order to convince residents that sharing a roof and some walls with unrelated neighbors didn’t have to confer a social stigma, property developers had to do some marketing, 19th Century style. The practice of naming buildings is still in effect, but remains subordinate to the more homogenizing numerical identifiers of address or grid. Help tektonomasticians Haruka Horiuchi and Frank Hebbert put a more personal face on New York’s building stock by adding a building to their citywide map of named buildings. Here, the two of them describe what they are up to with this project in advance of their psychogeographic tour of the named buildings of the East Village and this weekend’s Conflux Festival. Read more below, join them this weekend, and contribute to their growing database. -C.S.

Tektonomastics: The Building Names Project is a collaborative effort to map the named residential buildings of New York City and beyond. But first, what does tektonomastics mean anyway?

“Tektonomastics” is a made-up word, combining “tekto-” — Greek for “building” — with “onomastics” — the study of the history and origin of proper names. More established branches of onomatology include toponomastics (the study of place names) and anthroponomastics (the study of personal names). We are starting a new branch — tektonomastics — or, the study of building names.

Launcelot and Elaine, neighboring buildings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn named after star-crossed lovers. For those not familiar with the story, Elaine loved Launcelot (usually spelled “Lancelot”) her whole life - even though Launcelot was devoted to King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. Eventually Elaine died of heartbreak, but here on Eastern Parkway, someone has thoughtfully restored her lover to her side once more. The two buildings were built almost 100 years apart: Launcelot was added 2006, Elaine was built in 1908.

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After moving to New York, we began to notice intriguing names on residential buildings around our neighborhood in Brooklyn. A lot of the names refer to notable people (Martha Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Abraham Lincoln), while others are typical “nice place” names (Majestic Court, Park Central, The Lakeview). But some are just downright quirky (Mattowacks, possibly a long-forgotten name for Long Island), and others are more enigmatic and poetic (Ada, Launcelot, Lillianette). Why did someone chose those particular names for buildings? Why don’t we call them by their proper names anymore? Was there a time when friends said, “Let’s meet at the Martinique at 6”? Or lovers wrote letters addressed to their sweethearts at Monbijou on East 17th Street?
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Meet me at Monbijou? Or Patrician Court?

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We began noticing named buildings everywhere — in Astoria, Inwood, Chelsea, and more — and realized that they exist all over New York City. These eclectic monikers evoke a bygone era when owners, builders and designers identified their buildings with personality and humor.
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A taxonomy of building names in the tektonomastics database

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Our own collection of photos of these buildings grew — but the city remains so vast. Enter the crowd: the map and building inventory are online, at tektonomastics.org, where anyone can put named buildings on the map. By taking photographs and plotting the locations of these buildings, we are creating a map of this forgotten landscape and helping these neglected titles live once more. Is there a named building on your block? If so, click here to add it to the map.
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The Building Names Inventory from tektonomastics.org

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So, what qualifies as a named building?

1. The building name should be architecturally integrated. The name must be visible and the physical sign declaring the building’s name must be part of the building itself, not simply added on as an afterthought. For the most part, this means that the name will be carved into stone, or be made of wooden or metal letters that are attached to the building. Printed names on canopies and overhangs, decals attached to glass, or recently added marketing signs don’t count; names that reflect permanent identity are interesting, not those that can be changed on a whim.

2. The building should be primarily residential. Public buildings, institutions, hotels, etc. are usually already known by their given names. We are looking to learn the names of more modest buildings — buildings that would normally only be known to residents and neighbors. Besides, sometimes the most humble and ordinary buildings have the quirkiest names.
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A group of buildings with female names

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The inventory now stands at 125, growing in spurts since May, with contributions from a dozen or so spotters. Each named building in the inventory is geo-located on a map, and photographs of each building are stored on the Tektonomastics Flickr page. By hand, we add more information from the Department of Buildings where available, including neighborhood, year of construction, number of units, zoning, and more. By storing all of the locations and information in a database online, we can easily generate live-updated charts and maps; a full selection of up-to-date building stats can always be viewed on the data page of the Tektonomastics website.
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What have we learned about the named buildings of New York City? Most are in Crown Heights and nearby neighborhoods, but this reflects our geographic bias, rather than a representative picture of where these buildings exist city-wide — or does it? Until all neighborhoods are canvased, we won’t know where the greatest concentration lies.
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Preliminary geographic distribution of named buildings

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Why do these buildings have names? It seems that names were central to demonstrating the respectability of apartments as a new type of middle class dwelling. First advocated to American architects by Calvert Vaux in 1857, “French flats” were put forth as the ideal solution for an affordable and respectable form of dwelling for the urban middle class, better than a tenement but more affordable than a single family house. What better way to demonstrate this respectability than with a solid, English name like the Cambridge or the Oxford?

The very first middle class multifamily residence in New York City was named Stuyvesant Apartments. Commissioned by Rutherford Stuyvesant, designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt, and completed in 1869, this ur-type of multifamily living was directly inspired by the “French flat.” Though it’s unclear if the name Stuyvesant Apartments was actually carved over the entryway, the naming itself set a precedent for the slew of new apartment buildings that followed. The peak era of buildings in the inventory seems to be the ’20s.

As apartment buildings became more familiar, names helped give distinction and helped with the rental of units. If your street address wasn’t notable, the name could be. Some of these early building names were simply after their owner (like the Stuyvesant Apartments), but others were eclectic: The Knickerbocker, the Spanish flats, the Rembrandt, the Dakota, the Albany. Some of these early named buildings have since been demolished, but the names collected by this project so far display a similar diversity.
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Buildings in the Tektonomastics database by year constructed

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In 1984, Thomas Norton and Jerry Patterson published a guide to the named buildings of Manhattan (we discovered it some months after starting the map, and have so far resisted the temptation to cross-check results). They write: “The names of Manhattan’s apartment buildings, like the city itself, are inconsistent, surprising, and sometimes enigmatic.” Their guide contains nearly two thousand buildings in that borough alone, so we have some work to do. Join us on this unusual urban treasure hunt, anytime, at tektonomastics.org. Or, next weekend, as part of the Conflux Festival, you can become a tektonomatologist for the day, as we try to locate and research every named building in the East Village. Meet you at Monbijou?

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Further reading on the history of multifamily housing in New York City:

A History of Housing in New York City (Columbia University Press: 1990) by Richard Plunz

Alone Together: A History of New York’s Early Apartments (Cornell University Press: 1990) by Elizabeth Collins Cromley

Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History (Dover Press: 1992) by Andrew Alpern

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Haruka Horiuchi and Frank Hebbert are Holobiont, half architect, half urban planner. When not mapping the named buildings of New York City, they’re building the Super Table, an activation device for unused storefronts, and painting chalkboard neighborhood maps on stopped construction sites.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

“Interpretive Trails” Katarina Jerinic

“Honey, do we have any plans this weekend?” “Well, I was quite hoping we could take a psychogeographic drift down 8th Street.”

This weekend’s Conflux Festival sets out with the goal of turning the streets of the East Village into a laboratory for investigation, exploration and interpretation of the urban environment through art and technology. It’s the seventh annual staging of an event devoted solely to exhibiting the work of artists dealing with an interest in psychogeography. As originally defined by Guy Debord in 1955, psychogeography is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Conflux bills itself as exhibiting work ranging from continuing investigations in the mode of Debord and his fellow Situationists to “emerging artistic, conceptual, and technology-based practices.” In collaboration with host institution NYU’s Steinhardt School, the festival was founded by and continues to be produced by Christina Ray, with whom Urban Omnibus readers should be familiar through our series of interviews with Ray-represented artists Swoon, Heather L. Johnson, Emily Henretta, and Roberto Mollá. Urban Omnibus’ own Cassim Shepard was proud to introduce the Omnibus to Confluxers at last year’s festival, and this year we’re pleased to be on board as an official media partner. As such, we want to offer the following teaser for the over 75 installations, performances and expeditions scheduled for the weekend.

Kicking things off on Friday, urban historian, photographer, and explorer Steve Duncan will deliver the keynote speech at the festival’s base camp at the Barney Building of NYU at 34 Stuyvesant Street. Following the address is an opening party with a performance by the new media collective Soundwalk. The party is free and open to the public, but the speech and the panels taking place at the Barney Building over the weekend require a $5 fee — check out Conflux’s website for details and a map of events.

Complementing the exploratory happenings are a series of “indoor events” scheduled in the Barney Building. A few familiar faces will convene at four long table discussions throughout the weekend, including Mark Shepard — curator of last year’s Architectural League exhibit Toward the Sentient City and creator of the Sentient City Survival Kits (the latest edition of which features a Situationist-inspired iPhone app, which issues users with deliberately confusing directions to encourage confrontation and heightened awareness of the world around us) — and artist and activist Brooke Singer, who shared her project Superfund365 during last summer’s Goo Gone discussion.

“Dances for Here” Cara Spooner

The bulk of Conflux takes places throughout the East Village, with over 75 interactive art exhibits scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. This year’s stated themes of “investigation, action and transmission” just might be ambiguous enough to encompass what promises to be two days full of innumerable approaches to addressing ways of interpreting the everyday of urban life. Among the more eccentric, Cara Brostrom will spend all of Saturday attempting to walk the entire perimeter of island of Manhattan, and Aidan Dahlin Nolan will be dressed as a “ghost frog” in Tompkins Square Park, a former wetland, to recount the history of the city’s valuable and disappearing wet lands. Somewhere in between, “The World is My 8th Street” propositions you to find your inner flâneur through an audio tour juxtaposing personal accounts of space with stories of urban encounters from pop culture, literature, and historical accounts. Towards more practical ends, the DuKobe Studio is running a workshop on Saturday to “show how to combine crowdsourced data with infrared satellite data to create a multilayered, composite map from soil to atmosphere.” In another instance of crowd sourcing, one team will offer the chance to be a tektonomatologist for a day (stay tuned for more on tektonomastics, the study of building names, in this week’s Omnibus feature, going up on Wednesday).

The pervasiveness of artists’ engagement with virtual space and its confluence with the real space of the city finds an extreme in what might be the festival’s first-ever post-human performance artist. Sculpture 1.2 is billed by creating artist Chad Stayrook as “an autonomous multimedia object aware of her location in space in time.” Stationed at Conflux headquarters, Sculpture will interact with festival participants through voicemail, email and Twitter and will photograph, record and tweet “her” geographic coordinates every hour.

Miram Simun and Hans Gullickson's "Informational Derive"

In a world in which interaction increasingly means virtual interaction, a litany of exhibits are happening through the use of smart phones and geo-tagging. Barcode Cinema, and Code.Drift for instance, will both allow participants to access layers of information using camera phones by scanning barcodes and tags placed at sites around the neighborhood. Admist all of these high-tech exhibits, Miram Simun and Hans Gullickson’s Informational Derive — which will place on the street white-painted newspaper distribution boxes containing blank white magazines — reads as a deviant and techno-phobic critique of the proliferation of (pointless) information.

Several projects seek to look at the broader potential for how new media can and is changing how we experience space in specific ways. Team_Intersection aims to answer the question “What happens when the geographical distance between different urban territories is collapsed and a new virtual space is created?” by placing two-way cameras and video screens at disparate sites in far-away neighborhoods throughout the city. Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek’s We AR in MoMA also explores the possibilities of fictive realities by using augmented reality technologies to create and then “invade” MoMA with participant-created artworks of their own.

“We AR in MoMA” Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek

In 2006 artist Sheryl Oring embarked on a cross-country “performance” in which she sat at a typewriter while participants dictated letters to the president. Her proposal for this year’s Conflux merely states an intent to “collect clothes and redistribute them both from the booth and through community organizations working with low income families.” Is this act — which takes place every day of the year via thousands of collection bins that differ only in lacking their own web presences — “art?” A question to ponder as, on the streets of the East Village this weekend, you try and figure out which passerbys holding smart phones are participating in an art festival and which ones are not.

The 2010 Conflux Festival runs October 8-10. Click through for a complete schedule of events, the Conflux Twitter feed, and a live stream of the keynote speech and lectures.

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Eric Peterson is a project associate at Urban Omnibus.

We’re always tickled by the weird and wonderful places Omnibus content pops up across the world wide web, but especially flattered when posts beget sophisticated analysis and commentary. Ulrich Franzen’s Street, made in 1969, spurred some passionate commentary when we posted it back in February, but just this week inspired a thoughtful reflection from Michael Mandiberg, for whom the film led to comparisons with the bike cultures of Shenzen, Amsterdam and Portland.

Some perspective from beyond our fair city is always welcome, and, for sure, we know how certain New Yorkers feel about the Broadway street closings, but how did this urban innovation go down in LA?

Design innovation in New York’s public realm is what the Omnibus is all about. And if you’ve been checking out the stuff we showcase, you know there is plenty of innovation afoot in this city to go around. With that in mind, we agree wholeheartedly with Andy Bernheimer’s open letter to Nicolai Ourousoff. Andy’s letter serves as a reminder to all of us – not just the architectural criticism establishment – to look closer at the wealth of socially and pedagogically engaged design practices and projects going on in New York. You can start by exploring some of the inspiring projects, speculations and opinions posted right here.

As we were reminded at our Goo Gone live talk show last month, chemical safety is defined as much by politics as by science. In a recent book, Noxious New York, American Studies scholar Julie Sze analyzes the history of urban health and the environmental justice movement in New York through a racial lens. Read a conversation between Sze and the science bloggers of World’s Fair.

On Wednesday the City DOT unveiled the first two of a series of sculptures coming to a public space near you. If you live in East Tremont, check out the plywood installation of oversized building blocks; and if you live in Red Hook, check out the wine-barrel seating with attached birdhouses. And if you live in neither, go check them out anyway.

Finally, save the dates: September 17th-20th. The Omnibus’ humble project director will be sharing some highlights and insights from the past eight months of seeking out and presenting the most inspiring urban innovations in New York at this year’s Conflux Festival. Come out in force. And stick around for the biggest psychogeographic art festival around, celebrating “the investigation of everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological and social practice.” More info here.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.