Frame 122 Makes Mass Timber an Everyday Part of Brooklyn Housing

Brent Buck Architects turns a former Clinton Hill garage into 15 courtyard apartments, pairing exposed timber with an unusually open circulation plan.

Frame 122 / Brent Buck Architects — Image: Christopher Sturman. Source: ArchDaily.

Frame 122, a five-story apartment building by Brent Buck Architects, introduces a consequential new type of mass-timber housing to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Completed in 2025, the 30,725-square-foot project replaces a former parking garage with 15 rental homes organized around an open-air courtyard. More than a material demonstration, it is a compact argument for treating circulation, daylight and structural expression as connected parts of domestic architecture.

The project is the first mass-timber building approved and constructed under New York City’s 2022 Building Code, according to Brent Buck Architects. Its structure combines glulam posts and beams with prefabricated cross-laminated timber panels used for the floors and roof. That regulatory distinction matters: Frame 122 did not depend on the prolonged project-specific negotiations required by earlier local timber buildings. It instead tested what the revised code could support as a repeatable urban construction method.

A courtyard in place of the corridor

The plan rejects the familiar double-loaded hallway, in which apartments face outward from either side of an enclosed internal passage. At Frame 122, homes line the perimeter of the site and open onto a central courtyard. Two exterior staircases rise through this space, connecting open walkways that lead to the apartment entrances. The courtyard and walkways therefore operate not as secondary amenities but as the building’s principal spatial system.

This arrangement gives every apartment three solar exposures, a deliberate move intended to bring daylight deeper into the plans and establish visual relationships between the homes, street and courtyard. Kitchens and bathrooms receive windows rather than relying entirely on mechanical ventilation or borrowed light. The open circulation also makes weather, planting and changes in the sky perceptible during the ordinary movement between street and front door.

Such openness does not guarantee a close community, and the social claims attached to courtyard housing should be treated carefully. Architecture can provide occasions for recognition and informal contact; it cannot determine how residents will use them. Frame 122’s achievement is more precise. It moves shared space into the path of daily life while retaining complete, private apartments around it. The building creates conditions for encounter without making interaction compulsory.

Timber as structure and interior finish

The structural frame remains visible inside the apartments. Glulam columns establish a measured rhythm, while five-ply CLT panels form grained ceilings above white oak floors. According to Architectural Record, the columns are spaced at intervals of nearly 14 feet, and the prefabricated timber frame was assembled at an average pace of roughly one floor every week and a half.

Leaving the frame exposed gives the apartments a material character that is unusual in speculative multifamily construction. The wood is not applied as decorative cladding after the technical work is complete; structure and finished surface are largely the same element. This directness reduces the visual distance between the building’s construction and its domestic atmosphere. It also makes the precision of panel joints, service coordination and acoustic layers more important, since there is little applied finish available to conceal them.

The exterior translates that construction into the language of its Brooklyn setting rather than presenting the building as an all-timber object. Variegated brick grounds the street elevation, while corrugated metal clads the upper stories. At the entrance, carved CLT panels fitted with circular cast-glass blocks offer a controlled glimpse toward the courtyard. The composition acknowledges nearby masonry housing and the industrial legacy of the Brooklyn Navy Yard while allowing the timber system to become most legible at the threshold and inside.

Performance behind the visible grain

Frame 122’s environmental case extends beyond the renewable origin of its primary structural material. All apartments underwent blower-door testing, and the design incorporates energy-recovery ventilators, triple-glazed windows and a high-performance envelope. AIA New York reports that the 15 units meet Passive House standards. A 16.1-kilowatt rooftop photovoltaic array offsets part of the building’s daytime load, while the all-electric design reflects New York’s broader movement away from fossil-fuel systems in new construction.

The apartments contain two or three bedrooms and measure at least 1,100 square feet, a notably generous provision in a city where new housing is often optimized around smaller units. The layout therefore supports households that need more than one bedroom, though describing the result as inherently family-oriented remains an expression of intent rather than a measured social outcome. What can be assessed is the architectural provision: larger plans, multiple orientations, windowed service rooms and access to shared exterior space.

What the precedent changes

Frame 122’s wider significance lies in the convergence of code, procurement and residential design. The timber supplier Element5 identifies the building as a glulam post-and-beam structure with CLT floors and roof, fabricated as a coordinated kit of parts. Prefabrication shortened structural assembly and reduced the amount of intensive work required on the constrained neighborhood site. Concrete was still used for the elevator core, demonstrating that the project is a practical hybrid rather than an argument for material purity.

One building cannot establish the long-term economics, durability or carbon performance of an entire construction sector. Those judgments require transparent life-cycle data, supply-chain scrutiny and evidence gathered through years of operation. Yet Frame 122 advances the discussion by moving mass timber away from exceptional civic halls and boutique workplaces into ordinary rental housing. Its most persuasive qualities are not spectacular. They are encountered in a ceiling left structurally legible, a window in a bathroom, daylight on an exterior stair and the short passage across a planted court.

For New York architects and developers, the project shows that the 2022 code can support a substantial timber apartment building within the physical and regulatory constraints of a dense neighborhood. For housing design, it offers a second lesson: technical innovation becomes more meaningful when it improves the spatial routines of home. Frame 122’s timber frame is important, but its enduring contribution may be the way that frame supports a clearer, more open model of collective urban living.