People in the A/E/C community have a mixed view of architectural terra cotta. Most of what we have in New York is now between 90 and 120 years old, and it most often is discussed in terms of failure. The Facade Inspection and Safety Program (FISP) of the Department of Buildings – AKA Local Law 10, AKA Local Law 11 – has some rules specifically about terra cotta, and in my experience people at the DoB are suspicious of the material. The tragic 1979 failure that eventually led to FISP was the collapse of architectural terra cotta trim. So any discussion of the material now, even discussion of its beauty, also involves discussion of its failure.
The pictures above and below, taken by Tim Michiels, show the Lucerne, a 1904 apartment hotel on the upper west side. The picture above gives a general sense of the architecture of the upper floors; here’s a close-up:
To give a sense of scale, that window is about three feet wide and five feet high, although obviously the bottom of it is blocked in the angle from the street. (Also, this is probably a good place to say that OSE is not working on the building. Tim liked it enough to take a picture; I thought it was good for this discussion.) And this picture shows you why architects and builders used so much terra cotta. There was literally no other way that level of detail could be applied to a building in 1904 in New York. You could get that detail by carving stone, but that was simply too expensive for speculative buildings like this one. You could maybe get close to that detail in cast iron, but cast iron was on its way out after 1900, as too unwieldy and as no longer considered to be acceptable for structure. Not every building with terra cotta had so much ornament, but quite a few did. It was mass-produced by the manufacturers and was surprisingly cheap back then.
A good starting point to discuss the failures is that buildings with terra cotta trim generally had few problems in the first fifty years of their existence, even though there was generally not much maintenance on the masonry. The failures now are most often the result of rust-jacking from embedded steel supports (secondary outrigger beams and the like) that were waterproofed with nothing but paint. That doesn’t mean the failures aren’t a real problem, but it’s a mistake to associate them with terra cotta’s fragility. No material is going to survive decades of poor maintenance without failures. We see so much failing terra cotta because so much of it was used. If all that ornament had been carved limestone, we’d be endlessly discussing failures of carved limestone today. The obvious comparison is brownstone, which fails faster and worse than terra cotta, but there’s so little of the original material left that we don’t see a lot of failures. If we replaced all the terra cotta with new material and stucco, as we have with brownstone, we’d be worrying about it less.
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