Brent Buck Architects Replaces a Brooklyn Parking Garage with Mass-Timber Apartments Around an Open Courtyard

On Waverly Avenue in Clinton Hill, a one-storey parking garage has given way to Frame 122, a five-storey, 30,725-square-foot rental building by Brent Buck Architects for Frame Home and developer CV Partners. It holds 15 two- and three-bedroom apartments, a cellar with parking, a gym and e-bike charging, and a rear communal yard. Its frame is glulam and cross-laminated timber, and it is designed to Passive House standards. Industry sources describe it as the first mass timber residential building completed under the 2022 New York City Building Code, the edition that recognized CLT. One local outlet counts it as the city's second CLT building, after its sibling Frame 283.

The timber is the headline, but we think the plan is the real argument. Brent Buck removes the double-loaded corridor, the enclosed, artificially lit spine found in most mid-rise apartment blocks. In its place is an open-air courtyard ringed by walkways and two spiral stairs. Circulation becomes a shared outdoor room, and fire egress becomes a place where neighbors run into each other. That swap, more than the material, is what other developers in this city should study.

A Reserved Street Face in Brick and Corrugated Metal

From Waverly Avenue, the building gives away very little. A tan brick base carries the ground floor, and corrugated metal panels clad the upper storeys, broken by a steady rhythm of tall windows. The brick reads as a polite nod to Brooklyn's masonry streets, though nobody involved has claimed that intent on record. The metal is plainly industrial and does not apologize for it. Fifteen recessed bricks, one for each apartment, are the only flourish, and it is quiet enough that most passersby will miss it.

The entry is where the building starts to talk. A recessed, semi-open lobby is closed by CLT gates punched with circular openings, reportedly filled with round cast-glass blocks. The perforated timber hints at what sits behind the brick before you see any of it. It is a confident way to tell the street that this is a wood building, without putting wood on the facade, where it would weather badly.

A Courtyard Doing the Work of a Corridor

Past the gate, the building opens into a stone-paved courtyard with young trees, bicycle racks and exposed glulam columns. Descriptions of the project call it central European in spirit, and the comparison fits. It recalls the shared yards of Vienna or Berlin blocks more than the airshaft courts of New York tenements. The difference lies in proportion and in use: this void is wide enough to bring daylight and cross-breezes into every unit, and every resident has to cross it.

This is the project's most consequential decision. A corridor is pure overhead: conditioned, lit around the clock, and socially dead. Moving circulation outdoors cuts conditioned volume, which helps a Passive House target. It also gives each apartment exposure on more than one side and turns daily movement into something residents can see. Over winter, the building gives up some comfort on the walk to the front door. We think most residents will accept that.

Spiral Stairs as Social Infrastructure

Two steel spiral stairs anchor the north and south ends of the courtyard and double as code-compliant egress. Looking up from the pavers, you see a stack of balconies, timber soffits and stair treads, with strands of globe lights strung across the void. At dusk the courtyard reads as a lit room, closer to a piazza than a light well.

The stairs could easily have been hidden in enclosed shafts. Leaving them out in the courtyard is a choice about how people meet in the building. Two reinforced concrete elevator cores handle accessibility and freight. The spirals carry everyone who chooses to walk, and in a five-storey building that will be a meaningful share of residents.

Thresholds, Benches and the Shared Rooms Below

The entry passage is lined in timber with round perforated panels that pick up the gate's motif. Two heavy benches made from reclaimed barn beams sit against the walls. It is a small gesture, but it gives the threshold a place to pause, which most apartment lobbies never offer. The brick end wall brings the street's material back inside.

Below grade, the former garage use survives in reduced form, with parking for nine vehicles alongside e-bike charging and a gym under a timber ceiling. The amenity program is modest, which suits a 15-unit building. The communal yard at the rear of the lot carries more of the social load than any fitness room could.

Timber Left in Plain Sight

The structure is a post-and-beam frame of Douglas fir glulam columns, beams and rafters, with columns spaced almost 14 feet apart. Floors and roof are five-ply spruce, pine and fir CLT slabs, each panel about 10 by 26 feet, 7 inches thick and up to two tons. The timber is left exposed at a visual-grade finish, so the knots stay visible. A steel diaphragm wraps the courtyard over several storeys and works with the concrete cores to provide lateral stability.

The construction photographs show what mass timber offers on a tight urban lot. The frame went up and topped out in November 2023, and the brick and metal skin was installed afterward. Prefabricated panels lifted into place mean fewer deliveries, less wet trade work and a quieter site, which matters on a residential block. Custom uplighting washes the frame at night, so the structure stays legible long after the cladding has closed it in.

Apartments Organized by the Frame

Inside the units, averaging around 1,249 square feet, the timber ceiling and beams set the rhythm of every room. White oak floors pick up the tone of the structure without trying to match it. Partitions are metal stud, so the glulam columns stand out as clear anchors in hallways and corners. The column grid quietly shapes the layout, and the plans accept that rather than hiding columns inside walls.

The result is calm without feeling precious. Dining areas sit beneath a beam that defines the zone with no need for a soffit or pendant cluster. Bedrooms gain the warmth of exposed wood overhead, which plasterboard rental interiors rarely offer. Exposed timber has acoustic and fire implications, and the project has absorbed those through code compliance instead of covering the material.

Passive Performance Without Spectacle

The environmental strategy is thorough and deliberately unglamorous. It combines triple-pane windows, a high-performance insulated envelope, electric heating and cooling, and rooftop solar that covers much of the building's demand. Being fully electric puts the project ahead of Local Law 154, the city's phased ban on fossil-fuel combustion in new buildings. Sheer blinds and deep timber reveals temper daylight in rooms like the study, where a yellow metal desk sits against the wood.

From the upper floors and private terraces, residents look across brick rooftops and winter trees toward the Manhattan skyline. That view is a quiet reminder of the scale this building works at. It does not compete with towers. It shows that a five-storey infill block on a former garage lot can carry a serious carbon and performance agenda.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings confirm how strict the parti is. On the ground floor, the paved courtyard sits at the center with apartments on either flank, and the stairs and elevator cores are placed symmetrically at each end. The upper floor plan repeats this around an open void, with curved stairs reaching each landing. The section shows the courtyard running the full height to the sky, with pitched roof volumes on top. Read together, the drawings make clear that the courtyard is the building's organizing principle, with circulation, light and ventilation all depending on it.

Why This Project Matters

Frame 122 is useful because it is ordinary in the right ways. It is a 15-unit rental building on a standard Brooklyn lot, built for a developer with commercial goals. It shows that mass timber, Passive House performance and an all-electric system can be delivered together under the current New York code at this scale. For a city where these were exceptions a few years ago, a working precedent is worth more than another one-off showcase.

The more lasting lesson is the corridor. By moving circulation into an open courtyard, Brent Buck Architects shows that efficiency and sociability need not pull against each other. The same move that cuts conditioned volume also gives residents a shared room they cross every day. If New York housing borrows one idea from this building, we hope it is the courtyard, not just the CLT.

Frame 122 by Brent Buck Architects, Brooklyn, United States. Area: 30,725 sq ft. Completed: 2025. Photography: Christopher Sturman.

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