and complex. This architecture abounds in niches and reveals, in projections and articulations, in complex detail, in moments of great intimacy, in a clear sense of the way in which space is social, conducing privacy, intimacy and more public forms of behavior.

George Ranalli is a total architect, one who sees continuity not simply between building and environment, but between building and its inhabitation. A vision that extends to both the inanimate and the lively. One of the great furniture designers of the day, Ranalli sees autonomous objects – tables, chairs, hardware – as a piece of his larger architectural configuring. There is a remarkably genetic quality to Ranalli’s tectonics of the small, his ability to establish an utterly persuasive continuity between scales by working at once, from small to large and large to small. In this sense, the work is almost gothic. Just as one understands the logic of the cathedral in the DNA exposed by a cut through a pier, so Ranalli’s corbels and echelons signal an architecture that is not simply sui generis, but in which a beautiful, completely worked out prosody structures the whole.

The Saratoga Center flanks and extends a particularly homely public housing slab, a typically deracinated example of the modernist tower. The new building manages – on an amazingly low budget – both to interrogate the slab as a resistant autonomous entity and to reconsider its spare and constricted vocabulary from a formal viewpoint. The adjoining tower is virtually starved of detail and what there is oppresses in its crudeness, the visible lack of concern by its designers to do anything but minimize costs and character. It embeds a semi-punitive message that has long affected public projects for the poor, a kind of grudging insistence on an idea of the minimum that clearly suggests that any artistic supplement to the basic necessities of inhabitation is more generous than the culture wishes to be.

Ranalli’s building is a stunning rebuke to all that, but done in a way that does not simply condemn its context, but seeks to reclaim it for a better, more civic idea of community building. Where the slab has generic metal sash, Saratoga has exquisite mahogany windows. Where the slab has homely buff brick, crudely laid up in unvarying courses, Saratoga has bricks of luminous orange and Roman proportion, beautifully articulated and trimmed with GFRC elements of musical richness. Where the slab and its interior are utterly resistant to detail and irregularity, Saratoga fascinates with amazing shifts in proportion and rhythm, with a panoply of beautiful elements – from cast stone scuppers, to steel kick moldings – that give the whole an almost palatial feel.

This sense of civic grandeur is no place more evident than in the building’s main event, its “community room.” This is surely one of the most elegant