In 1910 the New York architect Mott Schmidt designed a pair of Federal style townhouses in Brooklyn Heights, each consisting of a double duplex with two story service wings extending towards the rear of the lot. The lower duplex of one of these townhouses possessed a substantial unused rear yard.

By removing the back wall of the wing at ground level, demolishing the interior of the wing and extending the building out into the yard, a new wing was created which serves to connect the classic formal rooms of the house to a modern living area focused on a new garden and terraces.

The extension of the wing takes the form of a garden pavilion, which is ultimately derived from Louis Kahn's Trenton Bath House of 1959, but considerably classicized to continue the language of Schmidt's early 20th century Federal style. The pavilion speaks the urbane language of Robert Adam, rather than the classical primitivism to which Kahn was reaching back by way of Rome all the way to ancient Egypt.

Nonetheless, the geometry of the new room is abstract - a pyramid on top of a perfect cube of space - and its interior is concerned with modern ideas of spatial extension rather than with the classical definition of boundaries between rooms. The wing contains a vestibule, garden entrance, kitchen, dining room and fireplace, and living/garden room that are overlapped and spatially continuous. The upper terrace of the garden room also extends the interior space of the pavilion out into exterior spaces whose perimeter is defined by ornamental wrought iron fences topped with metallic birds.

From the interior of the pavilion it is possible to see all the way back through the new wing and through the formal rooms of the original house right out to the street. A conceptual connection can therefore be made between the traditional flat plane of the urban street wall, a condition of culture exemplifying the organization of the city, (which Schmidt's design develops with a taut underlying abstraction) on the one hand, and the tradition of the free-standing garden pavilion, inherently an abstract object placed in opposition to nature, on the other. The design uses the language of classicism and abstraction to examine the difference between culture and nature and to give architectural expression to a garden discovered within the city.