This is not your typical New York City brownstone.
In Manhattan’s Lenox Hill neighborhood, architect Edward Durell Stone took a traditional 19th-century house and gave it a bold new midcentury face.
But first, the backstory.
In 1954, Stone unveiled the American Embassy in New Delhi, India. The building’s dramatic screen facade featured his Empress Breeze Blocks, helping bring decorative concrete block architecture to a global audience.
Two years later, Stone brought that same idea home.
In 1956, he transformed a traditional brownstone with a geometric screen made from the same Empress Breeze Blocks. The result was a striking fusion of 19th-century architecture and midcentury modern design.
And this was not just a client project.
Stone lived in the house from 1956 to 1964 and went on to design iconic buildings such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Today, the home is a protected New York City landmark, and the Empress block facade still stops people in their tracks.
At Tesselle, we love seeing how historic screen block designs continue to inspire modern architecture. Our Rotary Breeze Blocks reinterpret the spirit of Empress for today’s residential, commercial, hospitality, and landscape projects.
Explore Rotary Breeze Blocks and more than 100 other in-stock breeze block variants on the Tesselle website.