Regarding the picture above, I’m sure there’s a reason that I prefer oblique views of rowhouses to straight-on views. I just don’t know what that reason is.
An architectural issue with rowhouses is that they are small buildings but, as a group, give a large appearance. On way for a designer to deal with that is to create details on a scale larger than an individual house. In the row below, the facade of each house has a projecting entrance bay that is one-third the width of the building, but the houses alternate orientation, so that there’s a sawtooth pattern that repeats every two houses. There are some rows in Manhattan where there’s detail that repeats at longer intervals.
Finally, and this is mostly a nineteenth-century phenomenon in New York, the browns, reds, and oranges of the brick and stone used in our rowhouses look really nice against the hard blue sky we get so often in the colder months.
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