Courtesy Roman & Williams

When we first moved to New York a hundred years ago, three dollars and a dream to write about architecture in tow, we imagined that we’d wander the city streets, occasionally craning our split neck up to see the very beginnings of the very tops of buildings, and think deep thoughts. We thought that we would thrill various journal editors with the flights of our peregrinations, that our ruminations on buildings would be enough to sustain what we thought was a good life. We didn’t expect to hear about buildings months before they even broke the ground, nor did we think we’d be so carefully corralled here and there, access either freely given or quietly denied depending on who we were affiliated with at whatever particular moment and what we’d most recently written. We could not have imagined how easily we would slip into the world of New York architecture as it truly is: monitored, sold, discussed, fought over, and constantly, constantly, anticipated.

It was the waiting that always got to us. Until we found a few worth waiting for.

We’d been hearing about Roman & Williams first ground-up building, 211 Elizabeth, since we—under pretense of a profile—first talked with founders Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch a few years ago. What was their dream?, we asked. “To build a building that can stand for a thousand years,” they answered. When we asked, it was still the glass condo heyday. We all remember, of course. It was Gwathmey’s Sculpture for Living one week. Johnson and Selldorf’s Urban Glass House the next. Richard Meier at Perry Street. Asymptote next door. Winka Dubbeldam on Greenwich and Jean Nouvel on Mercer. Richard Meier On Prospect Park.

And so, when that’s what we asked, and that’s what they answered, it didn’t quite fit. Now, their hand-laid brick Nolita condo building of fifteen apartments (that includes a penthouse), is so spot-on it’s almost obvious. (Until you remember when they started it.) The architects wanted it to look like it could have been there for a hundred years and will be there for a thousand, and the building is a created and shared moment of openly false history that we desperately need right now. Of course we want privacy. Of course those who can still afford apartments like that don’t want to be seen, either buying them or once they already have. Of course people are looking for something with a different iteration of “value,” something far more entrenched and enmeshed in the architecture itself than in the vague economic aftereffects of buying something with a name attached. It took a year of constant measuring and fitting and feeling and sensing to lay the bricks that make up both the facade and the structure (since when has that confluence ever recently happened?), and the ribbon of a keystone is constructed from three-hundred-pound pieces of rock.

Inside, they’re actually apartments. There are doors—heavy, heavy doors—and hallways, and pockets of little space that would, done any less well, be for the requisite dead cat but actually here start to provoke the mind’s decorating eye into imagining a hanger or a tabletop or a place for keys. Which means that the mind’s decorating eye is actually seeing how people might start to live in these apartments, a virtual impossibility in so many of the other emptier lofts. It’s pretty old-school to have a defined layout, to make doors and entryways and architecturally direct what they’ll be used for. But it’s also pretty new-school, now that the pendulum has swung around and an embrace of tactility and weight is at the cutting edge of tomorrow, the sheen of glass and spareness a languishing holdover from the day before yesterday.

The building’s still under construction and slated to be finished sometime this spring. We’ll be watching, and waiting. Because there’s no dark sarcasm in this classroom.