Terracotta’s traditional place in the urban landscape—adorning classic, turn-of-the-20th-century towers—gives it a sense of history, of being handcrafted, and of heft. But today’s use of architectural terracotta has seen the clay bricks find a new aesthetic life as streamlined and sleek.

Terracotta has seen a slow resurgence over the past decade, but it has accelerated in recent years for a variety of factors. The design profession’s focus on sustainability has made this natural material more coveted for those looking to cut emissions. It’s much more energy-efficient than glass, which allows more heat to collect inside buildings, and it’s also relatively light compared to other exterior cladding options, meaning less strain on the foundation and less need for load-bearing concrete.

“Terracotta is 100% recyclable, and very lightweight, so you can get a lot of variation and expression,” says architect and Pelli Clarke & Partners design principal Craig Copeland. “It really allows you to leverage beauty in a sustainable way because you can make beautiful buildings that are going to be beloved and . . . cared for.”

New tiled facades can be found across New York City in particular. The 74, a residential tower by Pelli Clarke & Partners on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was designed with striking textured, and grooved off-white terracotta, to look like folding fabric, says Copeland. At 363 Lafayette, designed by Morris Adjmi Architects, earth tones contrast with white bricks. Cloud-colored spandrels decorate the sides of One Vanderbilt by Kohn Pedersen Fox, and the obsidian exterior of 28 & 7 by SOM gleams.

[Image: Elad Group]

Cities across the country have begun to adopt laws cutting building emissions and trying to limit the use of glass facades. In New York City, a suite of rules—including Local Law 97, which fines buildings with high carbon emissions; prescriptive building codes that limit glass curtain walls; and incentives like Zone Green—help make a case for using the material. Shildan, which imports clay tiles made in Germany, says the factory furnaces and kiln will soon be powered by hydrogen made sustainably by wind power.

There have also been manufacturing innovations that make it easier for architects and builders to use the material. Some manufacturers, including Shildan and Boston Valley Terra Cotta, specialize in extruded and machine-pressed terracotta that can increasingly be molded to a variety of shapes and reflect countless hues. Boston Valley even hosts an annual Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop to help promote creative uses of clay in and on buildings.

[Image: Elad Group]

Shildan’s founder Moshe Steinmetz says that in the last decade, there hasn’t just been a resurgence in more classical design and uses of architectural terracotta, but also new explorations of highly customized, 3D shapes as well as hanging panels on high-rises. His firm has seen 10% growth in orders for the past few years, as well as bigger and bigger projects. He expects these trends to continue.

Its material qualities, long central to the appeal of classic buildings by architects Louis Sullivan and Cass Gilbert, have also been reappraised and rediscovered by today’s architects. It helps that the clay-based substance insulates, reducing heating and cooling costs, and requires less energy to produce than steel, glass, or cement. Starting in the ‘80s, Thomas Herzog, a German professor, devised a system to hang the panels on the wall exteriors of modern buildings that made it more cost effective (older buildings tended to be built with thick, heavy, and labor-intensive brick walls). In 1994, starchitect Renzo Piano utilized a similar system for his work on the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, which ignited more contemporary explorations of the tiles.

“As architects today, we’re certainly more familiar with it,” says Toh Tsun Lim, an architect and partner at PEI Architects who has finished multiple terracotta projects. “It’s definitely come around. And again, there’s the ecological and sustainability issues.”

Steinmetz says the variety of building types that terracotta is being used for has multiplied in recent years, including public schools, where it can help cut energy costs, as well as high-end homes and hospitality projects. It’s not just a New York phenomenon either: The Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California by Morphosis as well as 100 Stockton Street in San Francisco by Gensler, an adaptive reuse project that utilized terracotta skin, utilized the clay material. Google even used a terracotta sunscreen on its recently finished Sunnyvale office building.

“People see this beautiful building, and at the end of the day, it becomes sustainable,” he says. “Nobody wants to take it down in five, 10, or 50 years”. 

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