A Rooftop Garden Completes This Urban Pastoral Home

On a lone residential block in a neighborhood triangulated by the Gowanus Canal, a concrete plant, and an elevated subway line, a starkly modernist home sits between two nondescript residential buildings. From the exterior, one would hardly guess that the double-facade structure—a sleek, cypress-clad box overlaid with a grid of perforated galvanized-steel shutters—conceals fragments of salvaged cinder-block walls. But it’s here, on the site of a former parking garage in the heart of South Brooklyn, that architect Philippe Baumann created a home for his family.