conditions that inspire very different responses. If the main street conditions are relatively opaque, around the back, where the scheme opens to a large courtyard that extends across the site to the street in the rear, the project is more transparent, more permeable, more continuous with its protected social and spatial extension, held within the calm embrace of the “L” it forms with the slab. Here, Ranalli has organized a larger, more protected social site, a soft piazza.

The success of this building clearly derives not simply from the masterful ar- ticulation of its form and program, but from its author’s passionate sense of a wider physical and social context. Visiting the building at several stages of its construction, I’ve made the drive to Brownsville with George along several different routes and we’ve roamed the neighborhood together. These journeys have provided a fine reminder of Ranalli’s wonderful view, his way of seeing the city, the nesting of his architectural vision in the urban and the political. Ranalli identifies powerfully with a civic tradition in which public works are meant to represent the highest forms of cultural aspiration. He is forever pointing out beautiful schools and firehouses, built a century ago from which a spirit of public pride radiates from their strong and substantial forms, buildings that speak volumes about a progressive public project to elevate the character of daily life.

Ranalli clearly sees his own project as one restoring this sense of consequence to the public realm. Within a few blocks of Saratoga, he finds the elements of the spatial and social ensemble that he so tenaciously identifies with the urban good. The beautiful schools and churches of a century ago are embedded in a traditional architectural field of row house blocks and public parks, a pattern so coarsely interrupted by the oppressive clarities of the city of slabs. Ranalli