Not Just Whistling Dixie

Though his family has called Alabama home for generations, Jeremy Erdreich never expected to end up in Birmingham. He'd set his sights on moving to New York to practice architecture after completing undergraduate and graduate studies at Yale and Harvard Universities. But after living in Brooklyn and working at Buttrick White and Burtis and Kliment Halsbend Architects for two years, all told, he decided it was time to give back. In Birmingham, he founded Erdreich Architecture and focused his energies on revitalizing the city's historic but largely neglected downtown. His first major project, the mixed-income Phoenix Building apartments, was the conversion of a 1925 brick phone-company headquarters.

His portfolio has since expanded to include projects in China and Namibia, however downtown Birmingham remains a priority. When Erdreich completed his parents' new home on the site of a former parking lot last year, the town house was the first single-family residence to be built downtown since before World War II and also the first in town to have a green roof.

Are there similarities between Brooklyn and Birmingham?

The scale and feel of the Williamsburg neighborhood, where I was living, reminded me of parts of downtown Birmingham, and that helped give me the confidence to move back. I could see how things were getting redeveloped in Brooklyn, and I thought, Why not Birmingham? But the lesson I learned down here is that things move a lot more slowly. The challenges to development are uniquely Southern. The city is conservative in a way that I didn't grasp until I started putting projects together.


A computer rendering from the design phase for a pair of spec houses, EcoHousex2; image courtesy of Edreich Architecture.

Was that the case with the Phoenix Building?

Yes. We closed on the building in 1999 but didn't start construction until 2004. We first had to work with the state and the city to create subsidies for moderate-income units. It was one of the first mixed-income projects to be created in the state of Alabama. Sixty of the 74 lofts are subsidized, and it's stayed fully rented since it opened in 2005.

What challenges did you encounter working on your parents' house?

The property was a small lot in the middle of a block, accessible only from the sidewalk and the alley in back, so there was nowhere to park a construction truck without getting city permits. Also, we were building a structure that city inspectors were fairly unfamiliar with, so we had to conform to the strict zoning, building, and fire regulations of a dense downtown area, even though this was a 2,500-square-foot single-family residence. Construction took nearly three years.


Birmingham's Phoenix Building, a 1925 phone-company head-quarters converted into a 74-unit mixed-income rental, photo by Jason Wallis.

Was incorporating green elements also challenging?

Yes. We were doing something that Birmingham is way behind the curve on. Since a green roof has to be flat, finding a contractor was difficult. Most residential contractors wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Also, all the cabinetry is bamboo, but we couldn't find bamboo cabinets in Birmingham. We had to ship them from Seattle—which wasn't so green. Fortunately, local sources for bamboo have exploded since then.

Are you seeing more local acceptance of eco-consciousness?

We definitely see a desire in the marketplace for projects to be green on some level. I'm designing a house in the suburbs, and I suggested to the client that we pursue LEED certification. The response was, "Absolutely." A couple of years ago, it would have been, "Huh?" Our residential goal is either to get LEED certification or, if that isn't possible, make the house as eco-friendly as we can. We're always looking for creative ways for green and urban to meet in a manner that's also practical.

 
The bamboo stair landing in Jeremy Erdreich's parents' house; image courtesy of Edreich Architecture. The main hallway through Erdreich's 1,500-square-foot loft; photo by Jason Wallis.

Birmingham offers plenty of adaptive-reuse "recycling" opportunities.

We're blessed in downtown with a very large stock of historic architecture. History doesn't have to mean stuck in the past. It can mean fresh and exciting as well. That's what we've tried to do—preserve and rehabilitate.