Aesop Park Slope

Handcrafted bricks in geometric permutations

Designed with Aesop’s long-standing collaborator Frida Escobedo, Aesop Park Slope is the company’s fifth project with the Mexican architect, and third Brooklyn store. The neighbourhood’s mid-nineteenth century brownstone residences, with their repeating, angled facades, and intricate brickwork, inspired the design. These rhythmic patterns are likened to the twentieth-century textile artworks of Anni Albers—Escobedo has devised a kind of brick ‘weaving’ technique as a contemporary take on the traditional Brooklyn typology.

A corner entrance gives way to interior walls that weft in brownstone formation. Alcoves and corners emerge as areas of inhabitation and display; the negative space behind the walls becomes a place of repose for staff. In this way, the space’s choreography simulates the meandering experience of walking through the neighbourhood.

Rammed earth from Oaxaca, Mexico, has been handcrafted into auburn bricks with rich imperfections, variations of tone and texture. Created in a workshop near Escobedo’s studio in Mexico City, the bricks draw connections and contrasts between the architect’s home city and the store’s site. They tessellate in diagonal rows that reiterate, at a smaller scale, the angling brownstone streetscapes. Two narrow, powder-coated metal troughs overlap and diverge, repeating the formal language.