AN May 2023

The Architect's Newspaper

Gods & Rats Rejoice?

Hammer Time Testbeds Architecture & Disability

“In the United States, people with disabilities in the architecture profession and architectural academia are statistically invisible,” disabled designer and New School professor of architecture David Gissen wrote in AN in 2018. “Neither the American Institute of Architects nor the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture collect data on the number of architects or architecture students in the United States who self-identify with physical or cognitive disabilities,” he wrote. While in the past few years the discipline itself has made strides in becoming more inclusive, Gissen argued then that “it is time that we let people with disabilities partake in this important transformation occurring in American architectural education and the profession.”

Five years later, Gissen’s new book, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access, marks a watershed moment in this ongoing struggle for disability equity. continued on page 81

Michael Maltzan Architecture completes two decades of work on the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Read on page 18.

Recycling building mock-ups in New York. Read on page 44.

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At the outset of her recent Aga Khan Program Lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Tosin Oshinowo defined the term àse as “the power that makes things happen and produces change.” The word, also the title of the architect’s presentation, comes from the Yoruba religion. (Oshinowo, from Nigeria, is Yoruba.) She related this force to the intention or contextuality of material in architecture and shared how the close study of environmental context is important in her work.

Oshinowo told the story of designing new structures for a village in northeast Nigeria whose residents had been displaced in 2015 after being attacked by Boko Haram.

(AN covered the project last summer.) Educated as an architect in London, Oshinowo worked there for SOM and in Rotterdam for OMA before returning to Lagos and eventually founding her practice, cmDesign Atelier, in 2012. For this project, she had to apply her skills to a new cultural context, as she had never been to northeastern Nigeria. The architect set to work understanding the familial structures, weaving practices, and traditional compound-house layouts of the Kanuri people. That research, joined with an attention to cost and the speed of construction, shaped the complex’s architecture.

The effort captures two ideas that are central to contemporary architectural practice: a close attention to local environments and users, and the deployment of design in response to crises. These ideas are valid everywhere; see, as one example, this issue’s Studio Visit with Duvall Decker on page 16.

Days later, Oshinowo was the leadoff presenter at The World Around (as seen in the image above), a one-day symposium in New York on Earth Day. Those two aforementioned ideas were on full display during the afternoon’s presentations, organized by curator Beatrice Galilee, about “architecture’s now, near, and next,” which had a consistent focus on the climate crisis. Additionally, winners of the group’s Young Climate Prize Awards were recognized. There were friendly New York faces, including Andrés Jaque (whose Reggio School won AN’s Project of the Year last year and was reviewed in AN’s previous issue), Dominic Leong (whose firm, Leong Leong, was named one of AN Interior’s Top 50 Architects and Designers in 2022), and Vishaan Chakrabarti (whose office, PAU, remains a part of shaping the fate of Penn Station; see page 12).

Other international speakers were less familiar to me: Ana Maria Gutiérrez presented a new bamboo building realized at Organizmo, a center for regenerative training and the exchange of intercultural knowledge in Colombia; Deema Assaf, of TAYYŪN, is attempting to rewild Amman, Jordan, through

the planting of new forests; Fernando Laposse, a designer based in Mexico City, is researching avocados, a conflict commodity as their production in the Mexican state of Michoacán is largely controlled by drug cartels; and Joseph Zeal-Henry, from London, shared Sound Advice, a platform for exploring spatial inequality, ahead of its curation of the British Pavilion at the fast-approaching Venice Architecture Biennale.

I was inspired by the day’s sessions. They made me think about the venue’s entanglement with larger issues. We were gathered on the Upper East Side in the basement auditorium of the Guggenheim Museum, an institution that has faced criticism for its handling of race and, earlier, the working conditions at the construction site of a new outpost in Abu Dhabi. Inspired by the day’s lessons and fatigued by their pace, my mind drifted upward into the museum’s rotunda. With ecology on the brain, I thought of how Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraled void summoned less the image of the Tower of Babel or a “concrete funnel”—as Lewis Mumford wrote in 1959—and more that of an open-pit mine, the kind of excavation from which the Guggenheim family extracted their fortune in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Ecological concern also powers this issue’s feature section (page 21) and in part the Focus section about facades (page 29).

Facade design matters because it largely establishes a building’s thermal performance and is often layered in specialized assemblies sourced from around the world. Continued innovation within this part of the construction industry will aid efforts to reduce architecture’s carbon emissions.

Planetary relations are top of mind as I prepare for this month’s Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Lesley Lokko with the theme of Africa as a laboratory of the future. AN will, of course, provide thorough coverage of the main exhibition and assorted national pavilions. (As a teaser, see my interview with the curators of the American pavilion on page 82). AN will also host an event on May 18 at Carlo Scarpa’s Fondazione Querini Stampalia to celebrate the life of William Menking and mark the importance of architectural criticism through a symposium with five critics: Erandi de Silva, Mohamed Elshahed, Davide Tomaso Ferrando, Inga Saffron, and Oliver Wainwright. Please join us if you will be in Venice this year.

One voice almost missing from the action is that of Aaron Seward, who departed his role as AN’s editor in chief last month. We at AN wish him continued success. But AN readers aren’t fully bereft of Seward’s wisdom: Turn to page 26 to read his swan song. Jack Murphy

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Vol. 21, Issue 3 | May 2023

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Corrections

An article about the St. Sarkis Armenian Orthodox Church misstated the provenance of the commission for David Hotson Architect. Rather than being won via competition, the office came to the project via Stepan Terzyan, an Armenian architect who had worked for him on projects in New York and Armenia. (Pre-2008, Hotson’s practice had a location in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital.) Terzyan’s family, with sponsorship from Hotson, immigrated from Armenia to Texas, where they joined a local Armenian church that was worshipping in a converted residence. Seeking a permanent home, the congregation began work on a new-construction complex. Terzyan worked with the effort’s lead donor and philanthropist Elie Akilian on early stages before subsequently inviting Hotson to head the design team. Additionally, the gaps between the panels are 1 centimeter wide, not 1 inch wide. Corrected article texts are available on AN ’s website and in the digital version of the March/April issue.

Due to an editorial oversight, a review included an incorrect abbreviation of its subject’s title. The publication, edited by Samia Henni, is named Deserts Are Not Empty Corrected article texts are available on AN ’s website and in the digital version of the March/April issue.

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6 Open News

Black Sands California’s Central Park

FÖDA and Gensler create a materially rich interior for chef Aaron Bludorn’s latest venture.

SWA Group shares a comprehensive master plan for Irvine’s unfinished Great Park.

Seventeen years after Ken Smith Workshop’s master plan for Irvine, California’s Great Park was approved, an updated scheme will envision a new era for the park.

SWA Group’s Laguna Beach studio has released its plans for the 1,200-acre Orange County park, working with local planning and urban design firm Kellenberg Studio.

Currently, the park features a visitors center, an outdoor agricultural classroom, a water park, extensive athletic facilities, an arts complex, considerable parking space, and 1.5 miles of pedestrian and cycling trails, which will soon be joined by an amphitheater, a museum complex, a botanical garden, and a public library.

Built on the site of the former Marine Corps El Toro Air Station, the park has been long envisioned as California’s Central Park. A 2006 design competition, won by Ken Smith Workshop, brought forth a new vision for the park. While some parts of the park came to fruition, including an often-photographed orange hot air balloon ride, the full plan was never realized.

The park has become a fixture in local politics. In a deposition, a worker from the construction management company MCK, which performed program and construction management and filled advisory roles on the project, described aspects of Smith’s design as impractical. This included a manmade lake that would have required the Navy to clean up contaminated groundwater and the redirection of water into a wildlife corridor. The Smith plan also included an artificial canyon.

Navy Blue

2445 Times Boulevard

Houston

713-347-7727

navybluerestaurant.com

Over time, Rice Village, an eclectic, tree-lined Houston shopping center that originated in the late 1930s and ’40s, has grown into a beloved (and periodically down-at-the-heels) destination for nearby residents, hobbyists, college students, home-goods shoppers, moviegoers, and diner patrons. Beginning in 2018, public space upgrades like covered outdoor seating, landscaping, and widened sidewalks have attracted new upscale shops and restaurants to open amid decades-old favorite haunts, bringing a renewed vibrancy to the district.

Navy Blue, a new seafood restaurant concept helmed by Aaron Bludorn, a veteran of New York’s Café Boulud and operator of his eponymous restaurant in Houston, opened late last year. The eatery represents the latest entry in the Village’s refashioning into a fancy Houston destination. Designed by Austin-based brand consultancy and design studio FÖDA in close collaboration with Gensler, the restaurant has transformed a former food hall into an expressive dining room. (FÖDA also worked with chef Bludorn on the design of his prior venture, his first in Houston.)

Upon entering, diners are greeted by an oyster shell–inspired reception area perforated with circular apertures, in accidental homage to Jean Prouvé. Curved bays of deep blue Japanese tile and tall white oak planks differentiate upholstered banquettes and tables in the dining room, which is served by a show

kitchen, from the seating areas around the bar; both are surfaced in white Japanese tile.

The design leaves the concrete structure exposed. Above, the ducting and concrete are offset by jellyfish-like wire lamps. Glimmering tiles on the exterior facade and glowing chartreuse tiles in the bathroom areas strategically animate the walls. Throughout, subtle elements (like hidden mirrors to accentuate handblown glass pendant lights in the booths) and discreet space planning (to ease natural circulation in the dining room and offer the servers view corridors while concealing them from guests) afford a refined dining experience.

“The working title for this project was Black Sands,” Jett Butler, founder and chief creative officer of FÖDA, told AN . (Prior to starting the office in 2003, he studied architecture.) “We used this prompt to avoid nautical kitsch; instead, we centered on that moment where the raw, visceral nature of the sea collides with the land.”

Butler continued: “The booths curl into one another in waves of tile, the frames of the oak center planes curve inward into themselves, breeze-blocks emerge as a cylinder with circular perforations that cast layered ellipses on the floor, the flowing script of the menus is hand drawn and spaced with nautilus shell ratios.... The room is simple, the gestures are spare. Yet Navy Blue is loaded with subtle symbolism.”

The concept—and the cuisine, of course— has already won over critics: Writing in Texas Monthly in March, Patricia Sharpe proclaimed that “Navy Blue is the best restaurant to open in Texas in the past year.”

After Governor Jerry Brown shut down California’s municipal development agencies in 2011, the city lost a potential funding source for the park. The city then negotiated with a development company, FivePoint, to construct high-end single-family housing around the park. FivePoint had already

been working with the city on the park’s development, and after the state-level changes were passed, Irvine allowed FivePoint to triple the number of houses being built in the area surrounding the park. The housing scheme was key to the plan not only in terms of the city relinquishing a degree of control over the larger project to a private developer but also in that homeowners in the neighborhood adjacent to the park pay additional taxes for infrastructure development through a Mello-Roos scheme.

In July 2022 the Irvine City Council approved a new plan for the park. Funding will continue to come from the Mello-Roos scheme and bonds, with some of the park’s original promises coming back into development.

SWA’s plan breaks the park into five sections: The Heart of the Park will include an amphitheater that could hold 12,000 seats, a farm, and lakes; the Cultural Terrace will convert existing hangars, alongside new construction, into a museum complex; a botanical garden and Veterans Memorial Park will include a public library and “living laboratory” for species native to Southern California; the Bosque will be “a sculpted linear park of naturalized landscape trails, playgrounds, and native California chaparral”; and a 200acre sports park will complete the plan.

SWA’s design for the lake system covers 22 acres. The forest reserve and botanical garden will cover an additional 40 and 60 acres, respectively. A large promenade will connect the park’s five components and will include tram stops and bike storage facilities. This is key, as the Irvine Transportation Center is located across from the southwest side of the park.

SWA managing principal Sean O’Malley described the park as an act of hope: “Planting trees and planning this endeavor is an investment in our future.” Chris Walton

Stephen Zacks is a journalist and project organizer based in New York City.

NICK SIMONITE

7 News News

Train as Theater

Gensler to renovate Baltimore Penn Station’s historic building and add a new facility.

Venting the Stacks

An archive at Yale University and a new website continue the legacy of architect Kevin Roche.

Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives department has acquired an archive of the career of architect Kevin Roche. Roche’s family donated correspondence, project documentation, interviews, drawings, and photographs from the architectural firm of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates (KRJDA) to cement the architect’s legacy. In addition to the newly housed archive at Yale, a recently organized legacy website for KRJDA has also launched.

Work on the archival project started in 2007. Robert A. M. Stern, then dean of the Yale School of Architecture, supported the project from the beginning. “The Kevin Roche archive is one of the most important resources for the study and appreciation of postwar architecture,” he noted in a press release. “International in scope and brilliantly occupying the crossroads of corporate postmodernism, it documents the work of a major talent.”

Roche, who was born in Ireland, launched his architectural career in the Michigan office of Eero Saarinen. After Saarinen passed away in 1961, Roche eventually founded a firm with John Dinkeloo in 1966 and completed many of Saarinen’s designs, among them the St. Louis Gateway Arch and the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport. Roche went on to win the Pritzker Prize in 1982. In 2021, following Roche’s death in 2019, the firm rebranded as Roche Modern, and it continues to operate from an office in Connecticut under the direction of Jerry Boryca and Eamon Roche, Kevin’s oldest son.

transferring them. Scinto began working at KRJDA in 1997 as an interior designer and worked as Roche’s executive assistant from 2011 to 2019.

“It was an honor to be chosen by Kevin Roche to be the lead archivist on such a monumental project and I am delighted that people will be able to study the collection today and in the future,” Scinto said in a statement.

Among the items in the collection are drawings and plans for several corporate headquarters designed by KRJDA, including those of the Ford Foundation, Cummins, and ConocoPhillips, as well as a number of museum renovation projects, theaters, and university buildings.

Items in the archive are listed online by project name. They are physically stored at Yale University’s archive locations.

In addition to the archive at Yale, the Roche family has produced an archival website that highlights the history of the firm, the people who shaped it, and information on how the archive was assembled. It also showcases KRJDA’s portfolio with project imagery and building models.

Gensler has redesigned Baltimore’s Penn Station (BPS) to be a multimodal hub open to the public. Set across the train tracks from the existing 1911 edifice, with its Beaux Arts features, the new station which will stage a “train as theater” concept that “sets the design apart experientially, putting the old station and the transit activity itself on display.”

BPS is Amtrak’s eighth-busiest station and the second-busiest in the Maryland Area Rail Commuter (MARC) network. The original station was realized for the Pennsylvania Railroad. It features a granite facade, terra-cotta and cast iron elements, arched windows, and Tiffany glass domes. The station hasn’t been updated since 1984.

As part of the renovation, the existing train hall will be expanded, and the addition will replace a parking lot across the tracks from the main building. The station’s two entrances will be joined by three others.

The expansion will be fronted with an all-glass facade and a low-lying, copper-lined roof that draws inspiration from the existing train hall’s three Tiffany domes. A covered passageway will connect the modern addition to the historic building.

In facing the addition with glass, Gensler has designed a “window to history,” meaning that travelers will be able to view the historic building from the new portion. Similar to the existing station, the expansion will be naturally illuminated by sunlight filtering through the glass elements.

“The expansion maintains clear views to the historic, offering levity and fluidity, where the historic headhouse is designed around ideas of mass and permanence,” Peter Stubb, the project’s design director, told AN

The addition will primarily house ticketing and baggage services for Amtrak, while

the old building’s main concourse will accommodate new retail and restaurant options. In a project that the developers hope to complete by the end of this year, upper floors of the existing Penn Station will house office space, for either a single tenant or as a co-working space.

Renderings of the expansion show a brightly lit, open lobby with tables and seating options where passengers can work or have a cup of coffee while waiting for their train. The glazing overlooks the train tracks below.

The reimagined train station is part of a larger plan to redevelop the neighborhood as a commercial destination. An office complex and adjacent residential development are planned for the area immediately north of the new station. Visuals shared by Gensler and Amtrak depict the office portion as a glass tower that is angular in form and faced with balconies. The surrounding sidewalks and landscape will be improved with new seating and plantings.

“Together, the station expansion and future commercial buildings amplify the presence of Baltimore Penn in the Station North neighborhood—literally bridging the tracks and connecting neighborhoods. By meshing with the city of Baltimore, it stitches it together, strengthening a tapestry that tells the story of a bright future,” Stubb said.

Construction is now underway. Improvements will be made to the existing building this summer, including the installation of a new roof, restoration of old windows, updates to stairs and ramps, and maintenance and updates to the aging mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Kristine Klein

The archive includes 789 boxes of Roche’s personal and professional correspondence, along with 954 drawing tubes, 64,000 four-inch-by-five-inch transparencies, and over 88,000 35-millimeter slides.

Archivist Linda Scinto has been responsible for sifting through the materials and objects, cataloging, packaging, and

“Speaking on behalf of my siblings we are delighted to have been able to fulfill our father’s commitment to form this comprehensive archive of KRJDA’s mid to late 20th Century architecture. We are so grateful for Bob Stern’s instigation of the effort in the first place, to Yale for their partnership and of course for the fifteen years of documentation and cataloging put forward by the team at KRJDA,” Eamon Roche shared in a written statement.

The completed archive and the new website follow an announcement last year that the architect’s family would reallocate the money received from Roche’s Pritzker Prize to launch a scholarship program in the name of Roche and his wife, Jane, whom he met while working for Saarinen. KK

COURTESY GENSLER

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Ahoy!

Designs unveiled in “artistic ideas competition” for new National Museum of the United States Navy.

Design teams led by five prominent architecture firms revealed proposals last month for what could lead to the next major museum in Washington, D.C.—a new home for the National Museum of the United States Navy. The selected schemes are by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Gehry Partners, DLR Group, Perkins&Will, and Quinn Evans.

The five teams were finalists in an “artistic ideas competition” held by the U.S. Navy and its historical and curatorial arm, the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC). The competition was meant to show “the full spectrum of possibilities” for creating a museum and ceremonial courtyard to replace the current 1962 museum, which is on the grounds of the Washington Navy Yard in the District of Columbia.

A location for the new museum has not been finalized, but the Navy has a preferred site at M Street SE and Sixth Street SE, just outside the security fence that surrounds the Navy Yard complex in southeast Washington. For the purposes of the ideas competition, the brief was “site-agnostic,” as one official put it.

The NHHC’s vision is to create a new, “public-facing” museum and campus that will “energize public awareness of the integral role the Navy plays in the defense of our country and in the protection of our interests as a maritime nation.”

Besides honoring service members and veterans, the museum is intended to “engage, inspire and educate civilians, active-duty personnel and future generations of Sailors by connecting cutting-edge interactive and multimedia displays to the Navy’s most important and enduring historic artifacts.”

The goal of the competition, according to planners, was to “share conceptual museum ideas with America” and find out what prospective visitors would like to see included in a new museum.

“The Artistic Ideas Competition is an effort to explore the full realm of artistic concepts that might be incorporated,” a fact sheet distributed at the event stated.

Each finalist received $50,000 for participating. A winner was not named. Organizers said all five submissions will be used to show the possibilities for the prospective museum and the renderings may be used to raise money to build it.

The project’s estimated budget is $475 million, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. Sponsors of the competition say their goal is for the museum to be privately funded. That makes it different from the museums planned by the Smithsonian Institution, which are owned by the federal government and rely on funding from Congress.

Now that the designs have been unveiled, the competition organizers intend to get reaction from the public to see what resonates with potential visitors. The NHHC plans to hold additional public showcases this summer. Charles Swift, the museum’s acting director, said the navy and NHHC hope to arrive at a design and secure funds in time to break ground on October 13, 2025, the Navy’s 250th anniversary.

DLR Group designed a building whose faceted form is meant to be “a dialogue of water and sky,” said principal Dennis Bree. Visitors would enter “through water” and “rise to the sky” via an “interpretive platform lift,” then descend through ramped walkways toward the exhibit galleries, where they’ll learn about the Navy and its history. The building would be clad in reflective metal panels so that its shape would reflect the water and the skies, “forging them together.” The preserved mast of the USS Constitution would be mounted on top of the occupiable portion of the museum, up to 170 feet in the air, making it a city landmark that’s visible from a great distance.

BIG designed its museum as a series of five elongated, gabled galleries that step up in height and represent the five branches of the Navy: Surface, Subsurface, Exploration, Aviation, and Space. The five “wings” merge in a “sinuous plan,” creating a “landmark” atrium space on the inside and a sculptural roofscape on the outside. The designers said the rising of the volumes references “the formation of naval fleets in the ocean and the sky,” while the gables are references to the gabled buildings elsewhere in the Navy Yard. Their copper cladding was inspired by overlapping wood boards or metal plates on a ship’s hull. The wings could be built in two or more phases, as funding permits.

Perkins&Will conceived of the museum as “a physical manifestation of endurance,” symbolic of the “resilient and flexible fiber of the Navy—shaped and strengthened over centuries of maritime power.” Sail-like volumes sweep across the site, expressing a sense of balance between forces “forged by the sea.” The arrival experience marks “the moment a visitor leaves the civilian landscape to join the team-oriented world of the Navy” and explore its history “from the depths to the stars.” The Honor Courtyard is a place where land, air, and sea intersect, and artifacts are displayed in settings that evoke the context in which they function.

Gehry Partners, with Craig Webb as project designer, proposed a large, simple volume with glass on three sides filled with naval artifacts and images that would be visible from outside the building. Inside, images, graphics, and video projections would be layered to tell a story about the different eras in the Navy’s history. Brian O’Laughlin, senior associate from Gehry Partners, said Frank Gehry didn’t propose a highly sculptural form for the museum because he didn’t want the building to overwhelm what the messaging is. The building is “meant to, on a subconscious level, not be so linear and to really convey the depth of who the Navy is.”

Quinn Evans conceived of the building as “Homeport,” a place

meets

community and the Navy

together.” The building’s long, linear forms “reflect the piers, ships and Navy Yard vernacular, providing a connection to the work of the Navy and a greater appreciation for its history and heritage.” With multistory window walls providing views of what’s inside, the design “metaphorically places the individual visitor at the threshold of land and sea, surrounded by immersive experiences and paths of discovery.”

Edward Gunts is a freelance writer and the former architecture critic for The Baltimore Sun

where the land

the sea and where “the

come

COURTESY QUINN EVANS

COURTESY DLR GROUP

COURTESY PERKINS&WILL

COURTESY BIG

COURTESY GEHRY PARTNERS

A Second Life

Saved from destruction, a rock installation by artist Elyn Zimmerman is relocated to American University and renamed.

Five massive boulders are arranged in semicircular formation, abutting a reflecting pool on the American University campus in Washington, D.C. This isn’t the first installation of the oversize granite rocks, which have a combined weight of 450,000 pounds. The five pieces compose a work by artist Elyn Zimmerman originally titled Marabar that was commissioned in 1984 as a landscape element for the National Geographic Society (NGS) campus in the nation’s capital.

Marabar was prominently installed in the public plaza at the NGS campus designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and landscape architect James Urban. Several decades later, a campus overhaul at the NGS called for the removal of the art piece. In 2017 the organization wrote to Zimmerman about its planned campus redesign, detailing in its correspondence the need for the installation to be located elsewhere. The letter gave the artist a deadline and asked her to decide what to do with the sculpture.

“If you do not let us know by then of your intent to move the sculpture, the sculpture will need to be removed by us,” the letter stated.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) stepped in to help Zimmerman.

TCLF is a nonprofit organization that educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards. It launched a campaign for Marabar

that designated the piece as one of its at-risk Landslide sites, and it gathered letters from landscape architects, architects, and journalists committed to seeing the work installed somewhere else. David Childs of SOM, who had worked on the original NGS campus, was among the supporters. To save the work, in 2021 the NGS agreed to relocate the sculpture and covered the cost of its removal.

The NGS suggested moving the sculptures to Washington Canal Park, but the idea was nixed by Zimmerman and Dave Rubin, landscape architect of Washington Canal Park. The artist explored several spots, ultimately settling on a location on the campus of American University. On the new site the positioning of the rocks was altered from its original iteration; here, the boulders are arranged in response to existing plants and trees. Zimmerman felt that with a new location, arrangement, and refurbishment the sculpture deserved a new title. She rechristened the piece Sudama

“Although reminiscent of Marabar, the new setting, and a thorough cleaning and repolishing of worn spots after 40 years made the piece look new and unique, so it needed a new title,” the artist said in an interview with TCLF.

In both locations the rocks are placed around a water element. Some faces of the rocks are left in their unaltered, rugged state, while others are cut and polished. These mirrored surfaces reflect their sur-

roundings, including other rocks, nearby buildings, and the landscape.

Both titles are references to the E. M. Forster book A Passage to India. In the novel, the author recalls a visit to the Barabar Caves in northeast India. In Forster’s dramatization, the name of the caves was changed to Marabar. Sudama is the name of another cave referenced in the text.

“Though we regret the loss of Marabar at its original location, we are pleased that

its creator, artist Elyn Zimmerman, with the support of National Geographic, retained the ability to control its reconfiguration and relocation to the American University campus,” TCLF’s president and CEO, Charles A. Birnbaum, said in a statement.

“Had TCLF not intervened beginning in March 2020, when the artist was resigned to the loss of one of her most important works, this acclaimed installation would likely have been demolished.” KK

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Side By Side

Grimshaw Architects designs a sustainable and community-oriented office complex in Los Angeles.

Copper Topper

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, affectionately nicknamed St. John the Unfinished, remains without a spire, its south transept, and fully realized towers. Construction on the cathedral for the Episcopal Diocese of New York began in 1892 but only two-thirds of the church was ever completed. Still, the complex is making progress. The cathedral, which by some measures is the largest in the world, has just completed a three-year, $17 million renovation to repair its dome.

Ennead Architects, alongside Silman, Building Conservation Associates, and James R. Gainfort Consulting Architects, has refaced and restored the dome, which was a 1909 addition by Spanish American architect and master builder Rafael Guastavino. The rounded top was a provisional design element that spans the church’s four granite arches, occupying the location of an unrealized spire.

providing necessary thermal insulation and preventing water entry. To start, waterlogged insulation was removed, and tiles were allowed to dry out. The original tile work was evaluated and damaged pieces replaced with new, custom-made ones from Sandkuhl Clay Works. The design team specified the installation of sprayfoam insulation on the exterior surface of the structure to aid in thermal regulation.

Grimshaw Architects is looking to transform a parking lot in Los Angeles’s Chinatown into a bustling creative hub. The lot, at 130 West College Street, is slated to be a five-story, 233,000-square-foot development massed as two office buildings separated by a central atrium. The design, which will be structured in mass timber, places a strong emphasis on sustainable methods and systems as well as occupant wellness.

The proposal to reimagine the site—currently a vacant lot wedged between College, Bruno, North Alameda, and North Main streets in an underutilized section of the mixed-use neighborhood—has been submitted for entitlement review. Grimshaw developed the design with Riboli Family Wines and development manager Granite Properties.

Initial renderings of 130 West College show the two rectangular buildings standing side by side with a midblock courtyard. At street level, landscaping wraps the perimeter of the building where restaurants and shops can be situated. Above a wood-clad podium, two two-story rectangular volumes are layered and shifted in plan. Expansive terraces on the south-facing facade give the building its tiered appearance.

The program for 130 West College is reflected on its dynamic facades: Along the shorter faces, large spans of glass open to public-facing outdoor deck spaces. Meeting rooms and other spaces for more concentrated or private work are placed within the building’s core. Upper floors of the eastand west-facing elevations are fronted with a vertical grid of narrowed windows, while at street level timber slatting crowns the glass storefronts.

“The design vision is to create a vibrant and flexible exterior environment to accommodate different types of occupation across all levels of the development,” Andrew Byrne, managing partner of Grimshaw’s Los Angeles studio explained in a press release.

The project is an important one for Grimshaw, as its Los Angeles offices are just a few blocks away.

“With Grimshaw’s studio located just down the street from 130 West College, we feel very connected to the Chinatown neighborhood,” Byrne added. “It is important to us that our design for the building complements the local architecture and contributes to the vibrancy of the community.”

Though the buildings occupy much of the site, this does not close it off to the public: A landscaped plaza and raised outdoor terrace sandwiched between the two buildings create an inviting meeting spot for the entire community.

The proposed building prizes sustainability. As a firm, Grimshaw has “publicly committed to design and deliver socially and environmentally regenerative buildings and assets by 2030.” According to the firm’s website, it strives to achieve net zero carbon/net zero carbon–ready in all its design work by 2025. With all-electric systems, an array of photovoltaics, and the use of carbon-sequestering mass timber within the building, Grimshaw is making headway toward those decarbonization goals.

Another project goal promotes wellness among tenants. In addition to office space and collaborative work environments, the buildings would house bike storage, showers, and lockers.

“Today’s workers prioritize wellness and social engagement in their everyday experiences, so it is imperative to design the modern workplace with purpose and intention to draw people back into the office,” Byrne continued. “Our design for 130 West College will provide a robust mix of flexible workspace, desirable amenities, and outdoor space to support new ways of working.”

Alongside Grimshaw and developers, the project team includes SALT Landscape Architects, with Holmes Structures as the structural engineer, Buro Happold as the MEP engineer, and civil engineering work from Langan.

An entitlements review will be the next step for 130 College Street. The next design stage is anticipated to begin in early 2024. KK

Guastavino’s recognizable tile-work designs can be found all over New York City: at the Registry Room at Ellis Island, in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, and on the underside of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. Guastavino designed the dome in the early 20th century as a temporary solution. Originally built in granite with a terra-cotta underside, the central dome defines an area known as the Crossing. The interior of the dome was never an ornate affair; rather, it was faced with concentric rings of tiles. In the years following its construction, several proposals circulated to replace the rounded volume with a completed Crossing, to be topped with a tower and spire.

As a structure built for short-term use, it wasn’t long after its completion that the dome required maintenance and structural upgrades. The landmark cathedral has been troubled with other issues for decades, as temperature fluctuations cause the dome to expand during hot weather and contract when the temperature drops. This seasonal (and daily) shift led to cracking and water infiltration. Beyond that movement, two fires caused damage within the church. In 2001 a blaze overtook the church gift shop and a part of the north transept, and in 2019 flames broke out in the crypt but were contained.

Renovation efforts have remedied these issues by improving structural integrity while

Working on the dome has required a careful balance between retrofitting for structural considerations and maintaining architectural quality and integrity. The tiled interior of the dome was recently restored and the new copper roof was added. This recent renovation is the first time in decades that the terra-cotta work has been visible. According to the Very Reverend Patrick Malloy, dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the tiles have been covered over by layers of “New York City soot, candle wax, and incense smoke,” blackening their appearance.

Ennead has a long history of working with St. John the Divine. The firm has overseen the continued upkeep of the building and property, collectively known as the Close. Its work has been consistently informed by the church’s mission and needs.

“Working closely to align with the cathedral’s priorities and concerns, we were privileged to have contributed to the enduring design within this magnificent landmark,” Charles Brainerd, senior associate at Ennead Architects, stated in a press release. “Our restoration harmonizes with the designs from a series of other architectural authors in the Cathedral’s century-plus existence, further enriching and honoring its history while reinforcing its integrity.”

Copper on the newly refaced dome matches the copper used on the cathedral’s choir and apse. The design utilizes a batten-seam copper roof construction, and the installation is laid out in a radial arrangement of rectangular copper sheets. The reddish-brown tone of the copper will patina to green over time, matching the color of the longstanding angel Gabriel statue on the apse roof.

The architects said that with the right care, the dome could last another 100 years. Whether a spire will ever rise atop the cathedral remains to be seen. KK

Ennead Architects restores the dome at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

COURTESY GRIMSHAW ARCHITECTS

The International Mass Timber Conference brought together architects, contractors, fabricators, and foresters.

Progress and Possibility Deborah Berke Partners rebrands as TenBerke

At the International Mass Timber Conference, held at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland from March 27 to 29, a mood of celebration filled the air as a series of overlapping communities came together to acknowledge and plan for mass timber’s growing (if still small) presence in mainstream construction.

While some industries may be struggling to attain pre-COVID attendance levels, according to Arnie Didier, cofounder of the International Mass Timber Conference and COO of the Forest Business Network, the International Mass Timber Conference “had just under 3,000 this year, almost double our 2019 numbers.”

The packed exhibit hall was a case in point. “There’s clearly a tide raising all ships,” said Dean Lewis, who directs mass timber and prefabrication for construction giant Skanska USA and has attended the conference since its outset in 2016, when there weren’t enough booths to fill the space. Now, however, “in this hall we’ve got fabricators, installers, suppliers. You’ve got people that sell the equipment, people that sell coatings. There’s even a glue booth.”

The opening keynote was a panel discussion about equity in mass timber and beyond hosted by Portland developer and U.S. Green Building Council board chair Anyeley Hallová. “Real estate development in the United States is almost exclusively white,” Hallová said, citing figures showing that less than 1 percent of U.S. real estate developers are Black or Latinx, only 2 percent of licensed architects are Black (just 0.4 percent Black women), and 0.2 percent of construction companies are Black-owned. Yet the mass timber movement’s relative newness in America means opportunity. “We can’t wait for something to move forward before we make it equitable,” panelist Chandra Robinson, LEVER Architecture principal, said. “We have to start with equitable practices.”

A keynote the following day featured Vancouver, Canada, architect Michael Greene, who presented “Buildings of the Future: The Next Evolution of Wood.” Recent work by Greene, long among the profession’s foremost advocates for tall wood buildings and skyscrapers, includes 2020’s Peavy Hall for the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, which featured the first cross-laminated timber (CLT) rocking wall system in North America—it’s able to move and self-center during an earthquake.

The conference brought together a constellation of architects and academics. Members of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Shigeru Ban’s firm were here to promote its new book Timber in Architecture. Though Ban may be best known for experimenting with paper structures or pursuing humanitarian design solutions, he is also a timber innovator. “It’s not wood for wood’s sake,” cautioned Dean Maltz, partner at Shigeru Ban Architects. “He’ll pick the appropriate material for the appropriate place.” Yet the book makes a point of highlighting process and collaboration: It shows how to work with structural engineers and other partners to stretch wood’s material capabilities.

Lindsey Wikstrom was at the conference for an event celebrating her book Designing the Forest and Other Mass Timber Futures

A founding principal of Mattaforma and a professor at Columbia GSAPP, Wikstrom calls for architecture, material sourcing,

and forest management to be considered together as a single design problem. She said writing Designing the Forest was “about inspiring young architects to know their worth, that they have agency in a climate emergency to do work that matters.”

Wikstrom spoke at Mississippi, a mass timber building designed and occupied by Portland firm Waechter Architecture, which recently won a 2023 WoodWorks National Design Award in the Commercial/Mid-rise category from the Wood Products Council and Forest Business Network. (The latter produces the International Mass Timber Conference.) The building was completed in 2022, and its CLT was imported from Europe, firm founder Ben Waechter explained, because local providers couldn’t handle its extra details, such as a CLT core and stairs. But were it constructed today, Waechter explained, Mississippi’s wood would be locally sourced.

That growing regional capacity can also be seen in larger-scale projects like Portland International Airport’s renovation, currently underway and designed by ZGF Architects, which includes a mass timber ceiling of some 380,000 square feet, or nine acres. The wood was sustainably harvested within 300 miles of the airport and can be traced back to 11 landowners in Oregon and Washington.

How much market share is mass timber—and CLT in particular—gaining? According to separate research by IMARC Group, the global CLT market is projected to grow 12 percent annually from 2023 to 2028, reaching about 45.7 million square feet. “There was a lot of work done on the codes for the 2021 code and the 2024 code. A lot of those hurdles are being cleared now with time and expertise, whether that’s in commercial buildings, tall wood buildings, or modular affordable housing and residential,” Didier said. “You’re starting to see some of those switches as well.”

Even so, IMARC projects that by 2050, CLT would represent only about 0.5 percent of new urban buildings—a still very modest

share of the market. That’s why another key community at the International Mass Timber Conference, the timber industry, has retained a healthy skepticism.

“Most folks are more than willing to be part of the mass timber solution. But it’s not actually [in] a place yet that it’s driving demand,” said Joseph Furia of Portland’s World Forestry Center, a nonprofit devoted to sustainable forestry. “There are a lot of pain points in the system that are making it difficult to scale. How do we change that math? I run into people who are saying, ‘Where’s the beef? Show me that you’re actually going to be able to do this project faster, cheaper than conventional products.’”

The 2023 International Mass Timber Report, released at the conference, says that while mass timber can cost up to 15 percent more than conventional construction, the median project premium is actually less than 2 percent. And, the report noted, these figures do not consider mass timber buildings’ “additional potential to capture more in lease rates and lower tenant turnover” or to reduce construction time by up to 25 percent.

“We still have a shortage of builders and projects looking at mass timber because it has to be fabricated in a factory, and that’s a very different way of building that most of the construction industry is not familiar with,” explained Greg Howes, a partner at Portland- and Vancouver, Canada–based mass timber manufacturer Cut My Timber. “They don’t know how that will impact the labor cost—so you have a lot of bidding that’s happening based on minimal experience. But that’s inevitable in a market where it’s a relatively new project. Essentially, we have a very, very limited supply chain. But a lot more is about to come online.”

Brian Libby is a Portland freelance journalist who has contributed to The New York Times, Metropolis, Dwell, and The Wall Street Journal

New York–based architecture firm Deborah Berke Partners is now TenBerke. “The number ten speaks of multiples and unity, a reflection of the creative collective who form TenBerke,” the firm said in a statement. The firm sees the name change as better suited for its goal of designing for “meaningful and sustainable change.”

The firm also announced two new partners: Aaron Plewke, an architect and design leader, and Damaris Arias, the firm’s comptroller. Later this year, TenBerke’s hybrid-CLT residential buildings at Brown University will be completed, and in 2024 the firm’s expansion to the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Campus is slated to open. The Editors

News

Rossana Hu named chair of architecture at Penn

Rossana Hu of Neri&Hu has been selected by faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design to lead the architecture department as chair and tenured professor. Hu’s appointment follows that of Winka Dubbeldam, who has held the role since 2013. Hu is a cofounder, alongside Lyndon Neri, of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an office based in Shanghai.

Prior to cofounding Neri&Hu in 2004, Hu worked for Ralph Lerner, Michael Graves, and The Architects Collaborative in San Francisco. She holds a master’s degree in architecture and urban planning from Princeton and a bachelor of arts in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

Hu’s recent appointment is not her first role as a leader in architectural education. In addition to running her architecture and design practice, Hu has served as a professor and chair of the Department of Architecture in the College of Architecture & Urban Planning at Tongji University in Shanghai. She has previously held lecturer positions at universities across Europe, Asia, and the U.S., including the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard Graduate School of Design; Yale School of Architecture; and the University of Hong Kong.

Hu will begin her new position and join the faculty as a tenured professor starting on January 1, 2024. In the interim, Andrew Saunders, associate professor of architecture and director of the master of architecture program at Weitzman, will serve as acting chair of the Department of Architecture for the fall 2023 semester. The Editors

SAMUEL GEHRKE

Ben Waechter (seated, far left) of Waechter Architecture hosted Lindsey Wikstrom (seated, left) of Mattaforma for a discussion about her new book Designing the Forest

The Latest Vision for Midtown

ASTM Group, HOK, and, recently, PAU join forces in an attempt to solve New York’s Penn Station while keeping Madison Square Garden in place.

The wicked problem called Penn Station may, at long last, have a solution. Recently, a proposal by Italy’s ASTM Group and HOK emerged as some observers’ preferred option. On April 17, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) joined the team. It is neither the optimal solution in all parties’ eyes nor the railroaded political fix that many feared, but it appears to value rail service and public space as its central priorities.

Penn Station and civic contention have been inseparable for six decades. The one point that commuters, architects, planners, activists, and oligarchs of real estate, entertainment, and sports agree on is that the station, the region’s infrastructural pain point, must change. Designed for fewer than 200,000 daily passengers and now subjecting over 600,000 travelers per day to conditions more suitable for scuttling rats than for civilized people, let alone the deities invoked by the oft-quoted Vincent Scully line, Penn Station is a magnet for revisions. On its site, the irresistible forces of design and transportation expertise meet an apparently immovable object: Madison Square Garden (MSG). With the Garden facing a Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) deadline toward the end of July, when the extension to its 2013 permit expires, a collision is inevitable. Yet the latest alignment of fixers could replace an unpopular scheme with one that is both infrastructurally desirable and politically possible.

The Narrative Changes, Again

The Penn Station situation has evolved rapidly since January 26, when a marathon event hosted by The Cooper Union offered several alternatives to the leading proposal at the time, the General Project Plan (GPP) associated with Governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, Empire State Development (ESD), and Vornado Realty Trust. That plan involved a combined station development and funding mechanism that included ten new commercial towers surrounding MSG and a neighborhood “blight” designation that opponents—particularly ReThinkPenn and the Penn Community Defense Fund, the event’s sponsors—viewed as spurious.

The event’s exchanges implied a Davidsversus-Goliath narrative that pitted community advocates and designers of bright, verdant, high-functioning civic spaces against private interests embodied by the Garden. MSG spans the tracks, its 261 supporting columns blocking redesigns that might improve circulation, admit daylight, and allow through-running rail service, which would convert the station from a terminal (where trains must reverse direction) to a more efficient station with two-way traffic. With an established preservationist narrative in full view but clumsily organized, one sensed that the public interest faced fierce headwinds.

A few weeks later, the winds changed. Vornado responded to the soft postpandemic commercial real estate market and high interest rates by putting the GPP on pause. This decision, combined with the impending July 24 expiration date for the special permit allowing MSG to continue current operations, opened a window for alternative plans. The three presented at The Cooper Union—PAU’s 2016 Penn Palimpsest, adapting MSG’s skeleton to create a new, light-filled hall; the Grand Penn open sta-

tion/park complex proposed by Grand Penn Community Alliance; and ReThinkPenn’s reimagining of the 1910 design, envisioned by Atelier & Co.’s Richard Cameron, that would update its materials, technologies, and seismic underpinnings to meet today’s codes—all would require the “World’s Most Famous Arena” to move, seeking the fifth address in its 144-year existence.

MSG Entertainment (MSGE) CEO James Dolan has framed that condition as a nonstarter. A comment by Executive Vice President Joel Fisher at a Community Board 5 (CB5) meeting on February 22, however, admitting the Garden might consider moving within the neighborhood if a suitable plan appeared, gave proponents of more ambitious visions a hint that the powers in charge might channel their inner Daniel Burnham and embrace plans with the magic to stir rail travelers’ blood.

On April 13, CB5 added pressure toward a move by approving a resolution by its Land Use, Housing & Zoning committee to give MSG three years to “pursue a permanent sustainable solution, including relocation.” There may be limits, however, to how much sway the special-permit decision allows the public sector over MSG, which owns the land, the building, and the air rights. The permit is not a lease, as some have described it, but a zoning provision that allows events with over 2,500 attendees; few expect it to expire outright, which would wreck schedules for the Knicks and Rangers and concerts scheduled far in advance for the 20,000-seat space. Likelier outcomes stand to include resetting a time frame and imposing conditions but not evicting the arena outright.

A “Mirror of a Mirror of a Ghost” Further complications appeared with the latest entry by Italy’s ASTM Group and HOK, covered in The New York Times on March 28, which is supported by former Metropolitan Transit Authority chairman and Port Authority executive director Patrick Foye and former U.S. Department of Transportation infrastructure adviser Peter Cipriano. This public-private plan would leave MSG in place, reclad it in aluminum and steel with a glass podium, wrap a new rectangular station around it, and replace the Theater at MSG (formerly Hulu Theater) with a new Eighth Avenue entrance. Further design and construction details will go public in June.

Though only three preliminary conceptual images were available by press time, ASTM Group/Halmar CEO Chris Larsen provided a statement: “Our team has developed a game-changing plan to fully deliver on Gov. Hochul’s new vision for a reimagined Penn Station that is iconic, spacious, accessible, and full of light and air, as well as improves the functionality for all users. We will continue to work closely with all stakeholders and community leaders to deliver a new Penn Station that uplifts the community and makes all New Yorkers proud while limiting risk to taxpayers through an innovative development approach.”

Another twist in the story arrived on April 17, when it was announced that PAU would join the ASTM-HOK team. PAU’s Vishaan Chakrabarti told AN that he was recently invited to view ASTM’s detailed plans.

“What I didn’t expect,” he said, “is at the end of the meeting, the ASTM leadership in-

vited me to join the team as a collaborating design architect.” After learning that ASTM and HOK had been working with various stakeholders for roughly a year, and finding their process “robust and deeply impressive,” he said was “gobsmacked” and lost sleep over the offer.

Decades ago, Chakrabarti had worked on a plan to move MSG to the back of the Farley Building, and as recently as the January event at The Cooper Union, he had been skeptical of other schemes that left the arena in place. It seems he found alignment between his values and those of ASTM, particularly the transit-function priority and the respect for Jane Jacobs’s four components of urban vitality: “density, mixed use, small blocks, and mixing old and new.”

In deciding to join the project, Chakrabarti said he “realized that it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. I really feel that the team at PAU and I can make what is a very good project even better.” He continued: “It’s the most public plan I’ve seen that leaves the Garden in place.” It’s not surprising that Chakrabarti, who was director of City Planning’s Manhattan Office when Hudson Yards was rezoned in 2005 (and later joined SHoP Architects as its seventh partner prior to founding PAU), sees a public-private partnership as a way to save Penn Station; one challenge in keeping a new Penn Station from repeating the Hudson Yards experience, which combined large tax breaks and luxury condo development, will be for the ASTM team to separate public costs from privatized benefits and keep the two in balance.

In the initial press release for the merger, Chakrabarti said that the current scheme “promises a light-filled public transit hub similar to what PAU has always envisioned.” He pointed out that since ASTM and HOK have worked with MSG and Amtrak engineers as well as Vornado, the team is in a position to offer what PAU has advocated for years: “a comprehensive, full-block vision for how the public moves through that block on all sides of it, and whether there’s dignity to all of that movement; whether that dignity then spills over into a great neighborhood.”

The Metropolitan Transit Authority’s plan, Chakrabarti added, “has a mid-block component, but it doesn’t have the Eighth Avenue component,” as it would leave the theater in place. ASTM’s scheme reimagines the midblock area and both long sides and continues Penn Station’s relationship to the Farley Building, across Eighth Avenue. “McKim designed the Farley Building to be a mirror of [Penn’s] original Eighth Avenue facade, so it’s a mirror of a ghost,” he said. “We are interested in how [one could] make a contemporary mirror of the Farley Building; it’s the mirror of a mirror of a ghost.”

Another strength Chakrabarti sees is that “this plan is not contingent on the GPP. So it does not rely on the demolition of all of those buildings, and it’s not looking for a funding stream from the GPP; it is an independently funded, self-contained entity within the superblock.” One potential avenue for funding is that ASTM, the world’s second largest toll-road operator, could finance the reconstruction of Penn Station through a model similar to that used in airports. The flows of public and private revenues are among the variables that will re-

quire public scrutiny when ASTM’s detailed plan emerges in June.

ASTM and HOK separate the question of station and superblock redesign from capacity expansion: A separate Penn South plan would replace Block 780 (between 30th and 31st streets and Seventh and Eighth avenues) and require cut-and-cover construction, disruptive displacements, and likely eminent-domain seizures. “One of the things that I like about the ASTM plan,” he said, “is it tries to solve one big piece of the problem here, independent of the issues of Block 780 and the GPP.”

In response to ASTM’s plan, an MSGE spokesperson noted: “As we’ve said, we are always open to discussions. As invested members of our community, we are deeply committed to improving Penn Station and the surrounding area, and we continue to collaborate closely with a wide range of stakeholders to advance this shared goal.” The spokesperson also offered a lightly revised statement, dated February 9, dismissing calls for a move as “misguided [and] completely unrealistic,” citing ESD’s estimate that moving would cost the public $8.5 billion and claiming that “no realistic proposal or financial model for moving The Garden has ever been presented,” including the 2007–2008 discussion of moving to the Farley Building before Moynihan Train Hall opened. The statement further argued that the special permit, extended for a decade in 2013 but required of no other local stadium or arena, should become permanent.

Willing to Be Convinced

The impasse could be temporary, say observers who have held that a station worthy of New York is attainable only after the Garden departs and that MSGE underappreciates its own incentives to do so. Chakrabarti is among those reconsidering that position. “I never believed that the only way to fix Penn Station is to move the Garden,” he said, “but what I’ve said is I have yet to see a plan that really fixes the station with the Garden in place.... If you can do all that without the Garden moving, it’s obviously a lot less complicated.” Now the ASTM-HOKPAU team must address key challenges, including loading-access problems (existing service areas cannot accommodate large trucks, which often block sidewalk space) and the question of through-running, an efficiency upgrade recommended in various forms by ReThinkPenn and the Regional Plan Association (RPA), among others.

Putting transit ahead of components that have grown disproportionate in other projects, Chakrabarti says, is essential: Penn Station “is not a shopping mall; it’s not a casino; it’s not the base of an office building. It’s a train station, and it’s got to have a great public space around it, and if we do that the right way, it will pay for itself 100 times over.” Bringing American intercity rail up to global standards, he added, would also create climatic benefits such as reducing the need for short commercial air routes. Chakrabarti revealed that the detailed plan will also improve ADA access. “Between what happens in the midblock train hall between Two Penn and the Garden and the Eighth Avenue train hall, it will be a radically different experience and station. I think that will mean enormous things for this neighborhood.”

Instead of battles over MSGE’s intransigence, Chakrabarti continued, there could be “a moment of enlightened self-interest for the Garden, where if they prove that they’re going to be great citizens and cooperate, then some of the pressure the Garden gets publicly about some of these issues will dissipate.” Discovering that MSG personnel partnered with ASTM for over a year and that “no one in government had approached the Garden about moving whatsoever” catalyzed his realization that the immovable object might not move after all. “Design advocacy isn’t about getting 100 percent of what you want,” he summarized.

Tom Wright, president of the RPA, which has campaigned for major revisions to Penn Station since 2005 and called for its overhaul in the 2017 Fourth Regional Plan, has also had a change of heart about moving MSG—a shift due in part to a previous proposal by FXCollaborative and WSP for the MTA and Amtrak and in part to the ASTMHOK plan. “For a long time, we were in the position that the Garden needed to move to make way for a great train station at Penn,” he said. “We’ve always known there are two parts of this puzzle: One is the renovation of the existing Penn Station, and the other piece will be the expansion of Penn Station. Those are working on parallel tracks and not necessarily on the same time frame right now. We’ve looked at this for years and believe that Amtrak and the MTA and New Jersey Transit will, through a separate process, conclude that they are going to need to expand Penn Station, most likely to the south, to create more tracks and platforms.”

Expansion to accommodate new trains from the proposed Gateway tunnel under the Hudson River will need to undergo National Environmental Policy Act review as well as negotiations with local residents, businesspeople, and advocates, who may find the project unacceptably disruptive.

Block 780 presents complications, as Penn South plans may include two levels of tracks and platforms beneath it, Wright noted, “essentially condemning the entire block.” Planning for the community that must endure the renovation and expansion processes, Wright adds, is thus a third and indispensable aspect of the overall effort.

In the renovation component, FXCollaborative’s design convinced Wright and colleagues that a better station could be created by eliminating one of the floors within Penn Station and relocating Amtrak’s back-office operations without moving MSG. “It would allow you to widen the concourses and create higher headroom,” Wright said. “We started to believe that it showed that you could create a good Penn Station without moving the Garden. And quite frankly, if you can do it without moving the Garden, you should do it without moving the Garden, because moving the Garden is going to be extraordinarily expensive.”

ASTM’s plan improves on FXCollaborative’s, Wright added, by removing the theater and opening the Eighth Avenue side: It removes many (though not all) columns from platforms, expanding egress at notorious pinch points. Seventh Avenue access, widened concourses, and exits and entrances remain to be addressed when the full plan is released.

Extricating design and planning considerations from financial details has been a conceptual challenge for both insiders and the public. The ASTM plan is “now being talked about as an alternative to the GPP, when in fact these are different plans doing different things,” Wright said. The GPP represented New York State’s planning process (as opposed to a city rezoning) to determine where density should go and how to coordinate public and private-sector investments so that “the state would have the ability to benefit from some of the increased proper-

ty values and use those revenue streams to help pay for the portion of the infrastructure that it needs to pay for.”

The general agreement on the Gateway tunnel is that the federal government would pay for 50 percent of it and New York State and New Jersey would split the remaining costs at 25 percent each, according to Wright. The GPP mechanism would allow the state to recoup some of its multibillion-dollar Gateway commitment. “If the GPP goes away, New York State will have to come up with other revenue sources to pay for its piece of Gateway,” he said. Whatever happens with Vornado’s office towers or any other parcels, Wright added, must still undergo public review, including a Public Authorities Control Board vote. “The GPP gave nobody any as-of-right development.”

“I think the GPP should be put on a shelf,” Wright continued. The focus, he said, should return to other questions: “What do we want Penn Station to look like, and how is it going to function, and are we going to need to expand it and, if so, how does that work and how does that connect with the renovation of Penn Station? And once those issues have been brought forward and understood, then I think the public understands what it’s getting for the money, and then it’s a different conversation. But it still needs public approval.”

ASTM’s proposal is “fully integratable” with these mechanisms, he added, and has benefited from proceeding collaboratively rather than “shooting in with a kind of a priori deus ex machina plan.”

As for the other plans that propose relocating MSG, “there’s not much realism in those conversations” about the economics of the different components of the work required,” Wright offered. Among other obstacles, he added, “nobody working in Washington believes that there will be federal funding to contribute to moving Mad-

ison Square Garden.” Although ESD’s $8.5 billion figure may not hold up, Wright estimates that at least $5 billion in costs would be borne by New York State, “and that becomes competition for other infrastructure needs and funding. If the Garden was interested in moving and came up with a proposal with one of the other major real estate developers in the neighborhood and said, ‘This is something we want to do,’ then I think it would make sense for the city and the state and Amtrak and others to all engage with them and talk about that. But there’s been no indication whatsoever that they’re interested in that.”

An MSG move remains a must for many citizens for many reasons, including the illogic of a private entity having so much leverage over a public process and an essential public good; the ways the organization has treated its critics and legal opponents; the rankling vision of hardball obstructionism rewarded; and the tabula rasa that its move could create for broader expansion of public space. Beyond those objections also lie visions of a newer, better, more profitable MSG at a different site, a potential outcome that might eventually attract the company’s attention. (Knicks fans, in particular, may take note of how new quarters have sometimes breathed life into snakebitten sports franchises.) MSG’s opponents have even offered designs for offsite facilities.

With the clock ticking on the Garden’s permit extension, there stand to be complications on the path to solving Penn Station.

For the present, however, the basic proposition, according to Chakrabarti, is: “If you accept the fact that MSG is not going to move, how do you make a great public station at Penn? What we’re working on now with ASTM and HOK is the way to address that problem.”

Bill Millard

Preliminary images of the ASTM-HOK plan showcase new entrances to Penn Station that include skylights.

Tripartite Timber

Construction finishes on a CLT pavilion designed by Rice Architecture students.

Despite being centrally located in Houston, Rice University falls along a major bird migration route, making it one of the most biodiverse universities in the country, with one of the biggest bird species lists of any campus in North America. The Harris Gully Natural Area is a restored watershed within the Rice campus that includes several microhabitats for the migrating birds, including prairies, open woodland, and dense shrubland. The Mass Timber Pavilion, an observation deck immersed within the landscape, represents a small step toward the long-term management of this ecosystem.

The pavilion itself is an abstract object, conceived and sited in the picturesque tradition. Like the ruin of a small temple, it invites and accommodates nature around it. In its simplicity, indeterminacy, and openness, it insinuates the lightness of touch that should guide the stewardship of Harris Gully in the future.

Made of CLT sourced from southern yellow pine, the pavilion is a carbon-negative structure and an essay on the possibilities of this sustainable construction technology. A didactic design, the building showcases the CLT panels in their purest form, like a giant piece of furniture that conveys the logic of its assembly. The immediate way in which the material is presented underlines its structural versatility, featuring CLT serving as roof, pillar, and capital.

The project was designed in Rice associate professor Jesús Vassallo’s wood seminar by a team including graduate students Pouya Khadem and Lene Sollie in collaboration with structural engineer Tracy Truc Huynh. Under Vassallo’s supervision, the students developed the construction documents and took the project from conceptual design all the way through permitting. Funding for the project was obtained through a federal grant from the U.S. Forest Service, with additional funds provided by generous gifts to the School of Natural Sciences and the Rice Arboretum Committee.

Jesús Vassallo is a Spanish architect and a writer and professor at Rice University.

Pouya Khadem is a recent graduate of the MArch program at Rice Architecture and currently works at SCHAUM/SHIEH in Houston.

Lene Sollie is a recent graduate of the MArch program at Rice Architecture and currently works at Dark Arkitekter in Oslo.

Tracy Truc Huynh is a structural engineer with degrees from Rice and Princeton and currently works as an expert in decarbonization of the built environment at RMI.

LEONID FURMANSKY LEONID FURMANSKY

Gold Among Green

In 2012, the Hoge Veluwe National Park, the largest nature reserve in the Netherlands, launched a competition for the design of the park’s new visitor center. The brief contained a surprising stipulation: Architects were kindly advised not to submit structures clad in wood. To many this must have been strange, since a facade mirroring the eco-identity of the building’s context, possibly even sourcing timber from the immediate vicinity of the building site, seemed to make a lot of sense. Yet that very environment was the reason for the provision: Previous wooden structures had deteriorated quickly in the park’s humid forests and required a large amount of maintenance to be kept free of moss and algae. The client, driven by a pragmatism often found in those whose relationship with nature extends beyond the romantic, simply wished to avoid costly upkeep of the structure intended to be the last one built within the park for the next 50 years.

Unsurprisingly the winning design, a submission titled Park Pavilion and designed jointly by Dutch offices Monadnock and De Zwarte Hond, does not have a wooden facade. Instead, the exterior, a dynamic composition that succeeds in making the building appear smaller than its actual size (about 35,000 square feet), features light yellow bricks and gold-colored aluminum mullions that make it stand out from its green surroundings. The clear separation of building and nature mirrors two notable predecessors located nearby: a hunting lodge designed by Hendrik Berlage and the renowned KröllerMüller museum by Henry van der Velde. All three buildings utilize a contrast in materiality and geometry to carve a sanctuary out of

the wilderness. Further, all three also evoke an interpretation of sustainability that favors durability over renewability

Now, three years after construction has finished and about a decade after the design competition was announced, Park Pavilion serves as a case study about the shifting tone of the debate around sustainability and ecology. Enough time went by between conception and inauguration for opinions to significantly change: Do we consider what seemed acceptable and sensible in 2013—a building made of brick and aluminum inside a nature reserve—to still be so in 2023?

Perhaps not, Job Floris, cofounder of Monadnock, told AN: Today, both client and designer would probably push for a more conspicuously nature-inclusive approach. However, he adds, that push would reflect not only an advanced understanding of the impact of buildings on the environment but a change in taste as well: Buildings that wear their modest carbon footprint on their sleeve are en vogue at the moment.

As an example, consider the resurgence of interest in using stone in construction, as explored in The New Stone Age, a 2020 exhibition curated by the London-based office Groupwork. The embodied carbon of a load-bearing superstructure in natural stone, the show claimed, is as much as 90 percent lower when compared with steel or concrete alternatives, depending on the type of stone and the distance it needs to be transported. This means that, for instance, load-bearing stone facades might be the most sustainable option in some cases—especially if we make sure the buildings they support last a very long time.

There is an argument to be made that the popular definition of sustainable buildings— structures in cross-laminated timber, green roofs, certification systems based on more or less arbitrary calculation methods—has become so narrow that it hampers thorough reflection on what sustainable architecture actually is or should be. This results in missed opportunities, Floris argues: To properly evaluate buildings, the conversation must include topics like usability, durability, and lovability, as those aspects significantly affect the environmental impact of a building over its life span. This observation puts a lot of responsibility back where it arguably belongs: in the actual design of a building. In the end, it’s up to the architect to make materials sustainable by assembling them into good buildings. Whatever that means, exactly, depends to a great degree on the context.

In the Park Pavilion, good means both durable and welcoming—think rugged industrial floors in between snug walls clad in wooden panels. The building hides its size well: It manages to resemble a forest hideaway, despite housing the bulky program required to receive about 300,000 visitors annually. An optical trick borrowed from baroque architecture does much of the heavy lifting: Most of the building’s functions are located in two elongated gabled sheds that curve away from the eye to make the building appear smaller from the outside. The curvature also divides up the enormous, vaulted space that contains the lobby, the store, and the restaurant, without a need for walls. Throughout the interior, the archetype of the hunting lodge inspires a playful game of references that reaches its climax

at the end of the dining hall, where two mounted deer heads flank an enormous turquoise fireplace.

This almost kitschy centerpiece marks a pleasantly straightforward moment in a building that brims with shapes and stories. From the insidiously simple scheme of the gabled shed sprouts an array of geometries applied to enhance the public’s experience or to overcome particular spatial challenges caused by the building’s curvature. In another nod to the baroque, the trajectories of interior and exterior contours are detached from each other, as outer walls do not always define the shape of the interior. The vaulted ceiling, for instance, is suspended underneath a gabled roof, creating a large cavity in between two differently shaped membranes. In baroque churches, solid stone defines shape; here the interior spaces are sculpted around cavernous voids filled with air ducts and cables.

Park Pavilion, it turns out, is a surprisingly weightless building. It consciously hides and occasionally reveals this fact, adding yet another layer to a complex web of references, meanings, shapes, and materials. The result of all this trickery is a mesmerizing composition that is full of carefully crafted inconsistencies, summing to a building that is fun to be in and around. Whether that is enough to make the structure durable, in lieu of the robust heaviness argued for above, only time will tell, but it is clear that the designers as well as the client intend for the building to be there for a very long time.

Had Park Pavilion been designed more recently, it would probably have had a wooden structure, Floris admitted, but the facade would not have been different. His office is currently finishing the Samen Bredius block in Amsterdam, a design that features a wooden construction clad in brick. In many ways this project can be read as an elaboration on themes present in the pavilion at hand, including working within a definition of sustainability that includes robustness, social relevance, and cultural durability. Again, the use of brick is a reaction to a specific context: The Spaarndammerbuurt, where the block is located, is home to some of the most notable and expressive examples of Amsterdam School brickwork. This time, however, the brick will cover a timber structure rather than a quirky hunting lodge where not all things are what they seem.

Clockwise from top left: The doubly gabled form bends in plan, a move which perceptually reduces its presence within the national park; the facade is lined with tall aluminum members; the vertical fins are continued inside and become wall finishes in wood at one end of the building; at the other, the park shop is topped by a barrel vaulted ceiling with a

Tim Peeters, cofounder of research and design studio FALSEWORK, is a Dutch architect and writer living in Brussels.

A visit to a park pavilion in the Netherlands designed by Monadnock and De Zwarte Hond renews questions about sustainability.

sawtooth configuration of windows toward the exterior.

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Deep Listeners

Working from Jackson, Mississippi, Duvall Decker leverages architectural skills to make change.

Anne Marie Duvall and Roy Decker quietly practiced architecture for two decades before they were propelled to national attention in 2017. An Emerging Voices prize from The Architectural League of New York led to a genial profile in The New York Times and too many press clips to count. Some journalists were quick to make comparisons between the couple’s namesake design office in Jackson, Mississippi, and Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio at Auburn University, mostly based on location and the imagined affinities linking “progressive” architects working in the American South. But Newbern, Alabama, and Jackson are not the same place, nor, for that matter, are Jackson and Greenville, where a U.S. courthouse designed by Duvall Decker is under construction.

“What we’ve learned in the South is to dedicate ourselves in the history, culture, and character of a place, no matter where it is. And not pay attention to clichés,” Decker told AN. “Our first commitment is to research and listen for everything from the soil to the political-social-economic structures of a place and its history.”

Nowhere is this dedication more evident than in Mississippi’s capital of Jackson. Duvall and Decker pride themselves on helping to create economic development opportunities in

one of the country’s most depressed markets, where poverty rates can be as high at 50 percent. Their tack has not always been straightforwardly one of design, often shading into consultation services ranging from planning and development to building maintenance. A master plan for the Midtown district commissioned by Habitat for Humanity resulted in some two dozen affordable housing units partly powered with sustainable energy, a commercial strip, public parks, and a school. A similar operation pursued for West Jackson established land-use guidelines that would benefit residents, nonprofit organizations, and business owners alike. Elsewhere in the city, Duvall Decker advised community representatives on reviving an after-school center and an old farmers’ market. All the while, they learned how to work with, and not fight against, tight budgets, stretching every dollar as far as it could go. Their most admired project, the headquarters of the Mississippi Library Commission, also in Jackson, is a deeply considered building that manages to be more spatially complex and sumptuously detailed than comparable institutional facilities in more affluent areas.

In the years following their hard-earned publicity, Duvall and Decker have broadened

their reach across the state of Mississippi. They have also pursued work in Arkansas and Texas. They try to involve themselves at the very beginning of projects, before outcomes and budgets have been set; an architect arriving too late on the scene is constrained to “decorating a solution,” Decker said. Still, he is somewhat surprised that the office’s unique selling point remains so under-monetized. “We realized a long time ago that we had consulting skills that many architects have and use, but they rarely isolate them and treat them as a service. You have to ask why.

Ego is one answer. Shortcomings in design education and professional preparedness are two more. But Duvall complicated the latter point: “Architecture teaches you how to leverage things. How to focus on the real issue you have to solve: the thing you can leverage into ten great things. We learned that in design school, but rather than apply it to architectural design, we apply it to strategic planning, to community planning, to activism, really.”

Samuel Medina is a writer and the editor of New York Review of Architecture

1 Cooperwood Senior Living 2022

Housing ranks high on Duvall Decker’s design priorities and admirably so. The series of affordable duplexes the firm realized in Jackson’s Midtown neighborhood evince a supple approach toward form, where modernist lines are resolved in deep porches. A more recent complex in a Greenville, Mississippi, suburb opts for a dense arrangement of multistory houses around interior courts, with an eye toward creating community. But while those projects made interesting use of convention, this senior living facility in Jackson’s metro region consciously breaks with the norm. “This is a relatively new typology in our country, and they are usually nostalgic facades with institutional interiors,” Decker said. Both he and Duvall had had to move their parents into such places. “We had seen all these small ‘misses’ in livability, particularly when it came to residents’ individual rooms,” Duvall recalled. Rather than concentrate the program in a single block, they arrayed the living units into two wings sited along a creek and connected by a “bridge building” containing shared spaces and amenities. Each room has large windows and walls that lean in and out, increasing sightlines and sunlight. The serrated edge of the plan is picked up in elevation by the butterfly roofs. “We think it dignifies senior living,” Decker said. “It opened last August, and it was filled by December.”

2 Springdale Municipal Campus 2023

It’s a 20-minute drive from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Springdale, and another 20 minutes from Springdale to Bentonville. Given the proximity of the three cities, an identity has attached itself to each one, Decker said. “People told us that if you want art, you go to Bentonville, home of the Crystal Bridges Museum; if you want education and debate, you go to Fayetteville and its 11 colleges; and if you want to get your tractor fixed, you go to Springdale. That’s just to say, the values of the community are very practical, and they were reflected in the brief handed to us.” He and Duvall came to the commission by way of the Walton Family Foundation’s Northwest Arkansas Design Excellence Program. But despite the implications of largesse that the Walton name suggests, the project budget was fairly tight, requiring a judicious hand. The architects devised a simple material palette: precast concrete and brick on the exterior, and CMU blocks, polished concrete, and painted steel inside. They splurged a little in the three “civic rooms,” which feature wood paneling and oak-lined trusses. These foci break through the massing bar, making them legible to passing cars and giving the 122,000-square-foot building (due to open later this year) an identity all its own.

3 U.S. Courthouse 2017–

Duvall and Decker had just received approval for their design for this Greenville courthouse when Donald Trump issued his Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture executive order. The project, while not fiendishly “modern” (it is sensitively scaled, and fluted precast concrete and regular openings create a reassuring play of light and shadow), didn’t exactly conform to the standards that the order laid out. Still, the architects weren’t worried. “We had already gone through a lot of options with the GSA [General Services Administration],” Duvall said. “We had already navigated certain stylistics expectations of a Southern courthouse. We had already gotten buy-in from everyone involved, and we were all committed to this design.” The parti inverts the traditional courthouse layout but does so in a “quietly radical” manner. Whereas a court is typically buried in the depths of a building, flanked by administrative wings, here it has been coaxed out from its shell and deposited in a public park visible from the city. “In a place like the Mississippi Delta, where people may not understand they have access to justice, we think that’s really impactful,” said Decker. “We balance importance with access, rather than importance with power.”

4 Arlington Center for Community Engagement 2022–

A rift within the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth over the national church’s views on ordaining women and affirming LGBTQ parishioners led to a break and a lawsuit that saw the conservative wing, empowered by the courts, evict progressive members from their own churches. St. Albans Episcopal Church rented out worship space in an Arlington theater for more than a decade before deciding to invest in a permanent venue. It was renamed All Souls, and then its leaders approached Duvall Decker about development consultation. The architects helped them identify their needs and eventually find a building: a former JC Penney in the Arts District that had been converted into a museum in the early 1990s. Only then did the team begin thinking about a design, which prompted the parish’s determination to become one of several tenants in a community center that will also include affordable housing, office space for nonprofits, and a restaurant. (Construction is anticipated to begin next year.) “As a church that didn’t have the asset of a church, it taught them that church was about community engagement more than anything else,” Duvall said. “On the other side of that, they realized that the asset of the building should be leveraged for more than just the church. What a church can provide to the marginalized is the asset of a building. That’s extremely powerful.”

ANDREW WELCH PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY DUVALL DECKER

Anthology

Slow Roll

Michael Maltzan Architecture wraps two decades of remaking the Hammer Museum.

Architect: Michael Maltzan Architecture

Location: Los Angeles

Landscape architect: Inside Outside with Mia Lehrer + Associates

Structural design engineer: Guy Nordenson and Associates

MEP/FP engineer: ARUP, Innovative Engineering Group

Lighting design: LAM Partners, ARUP

Specifications: AWC West

Building code consultant: Nate Wittasek

Graphics: Bruce Mau Design

Cost consultant: Directional Logic, C. P. O’Halloran Associates

Facility report: Cooper Robertson

Acoustics: ARUP, Charles Salter & Associates

Audiovisual: ARUP, 3G Productions, AVI-SPL

IT consulting: ARUP

Kitchen consultant: Laschober + Sovich, Cini-Little

General contractor: Matt Construction Corporation

Much has been said about how we live in a time of acceleration. We strive for fast and interconnected. And yet, a considerable body of discourse takes the counter position, arguing for rest, care, and immobility. In her 2019 book How to Do Nothing , Jenny Odell urges us to turn away from the churn, writing, “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”

Architecture, too, is caught in the thrall. Although buildings take time, we’re junkies for novelty. Museum buildings are particular eye candy. Supposed freedoms of art and culture push desires for formal inventiveness. But what would it mean to construct a museum in slow motion?

In late March, the Hammer Museum announced the completion of a more than 20-year transformation by Michael Maltzan Architecture. In 2000, Maltzan and designer Bruce Mau developed a brand identity and

master plan, and under the leadership of Hammer director Ann Philbin, the architect embarked upon iterative renovations.

Tucked behind the 15-story Occidental Petroleum tower, the original 3-story museum designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes opened to the public in 1990. While the high-rise is located along busy Wilshire Boulevard, the museum design was insular and anti-urban.

Armand Hammer’s collection of impressionist and old master paintings had no use for a populist storefront. Art—high art—was best appreciated in a temple, a citadel. When Philbin took the reins, she embarked upon a plan to make the Hammer more contemporary and accessible to Los Angeles audiences.

Slowly, and then all at once, Maltzan’s changes accumulated: a new theater and cafe, a revamped courtyard, and 10,120 square feet of new galleries (for a combined total of nearly 28,000 square feet of exhibition space). Every few years another acupunctural modification, often one that follows the general shifts in how

museums relate to their audiences. Maltzan Architecture carved out an education space under the stair leading from the courtyard to the third-floor gallery promenade. “We found there was an old, single-person escalator that Armand Hammer had put in when he was older,” Maltzan recalled. “Nobody even really knew [it] existed. It was like finding all the ghosts in the building.”

Across the courtyard, Maltzan reworked and upgraded performance and event spaces to better serve the art and artists, as well as to host a more public gala. Successive phases allowed the museum and the architect to develop a language and sensitivity around what was needed, and when. “Over the years we’ve touched almost 100 percent of all of the spaces, but because it’s rolled out over time, it’s very hard to see,” he told AN

A slow pace does something to memory, however. I can barely recall when the lurid, hotpink seats of the Billy Wilder Theater were new (2006, according to the press release). Or a time

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CRDIT TKTK

Facing page, left above: The most recent renovation of the Hammer took its awkward lobby, generally entered from the belly of the parking garage, and opened it up to the street.

Facing page, left below: A porch marks the new entrance, which is named the Lynda and Steward Resnick Cultural Center for their $30 million donation.

Facing page, right above: In 2015, the Hammer added the curvy John V. Tunney Bridge, which crosses the museum courtyard and connects the two flanks of the third-floor galleries.

Facing page, right below: When Ann Philbin took the reins as director in 2000, she embarked upon a plan to make the Hammer more contemporary and accessible to Los Angeles audiences.

Above, left: The two sides of the museum were previously disconnected; curators, museum staff, and visitors had to circumnavigate the courtyard to see the different exhibitions.

Above, right: Maltzan reworked and upgraded performance and event spaces to better serve the art and artists, as well as host a gala-going public.

Right: Successive phases allowed the museum and the architect to develop a language and sensitivity around what was needed, and when. The lurid, hotpink seats of the Billy Wilder Theater were added in 2006.

when the third-floor galleries weren’t universally minimalist with expanses of high white walls and pale oak floors. (They reopened in 2017 with twoto six-foot-higher ceilings and the old-fashioned moldings stripped away.) What was the material on the stairwell before the architects installed exposed-aggregate concrete on the steps and adjoining promenade in 2019?

Without the clear contrast of a “before,” the more cosmetic changes become naturalized into the daily life of the museum. According to The New York Times, under Philbin’s direction the Hammer has evolved from a provincial outpost to a “world class museum.” A grand total of $90 million was poured into improvements and expansions over the years to accomplish that goal, and yet many of the upgrades are understated, boosts in the quality of light and finishes that perhaps signal the trending “stealth wealth” aesthetic of a global art world.

But the more ambitious of Maltzan’s additions are, by his account, urbanist in their conceit. In 2015, the Hammer added the curvy

John V. Tunney Bridge, which crosses the museum courtyard and connects the two flanks of the third-floor galleries. The 33-foot-long, white, steel pedestrian bridge has a sinewy form like pulled taffy: narrow in the middle and wider where it attaches to the main structure, and its sides are made out of seamless, perforated steel. As an architectural gesture, it’s subtle, falling between folly and infrastructure.

“The life of the museum felt quite suburban,” said Maltzan, describing how the two sides of the museum were previously disconnected; curators, museum staff, and visitors had to circumnavigate the courtyard to see the different exhibitions. “By putting the bridge in, you have this immediate connection.”

In describing the bridge as a piece of connective urban tissue, Maltzan echoes sentiments he expressed around the opening of another bridge—the Sixth Street Viaduct. What is a span, if not a means to bring different parts of the city, different people together? Overall, the revamped Hammer has a similar

aspiration: to reposition the museum as part of the urban fabric. This is especially clear along Wilshire Boulevard, where the most recent renovation took the Hammer’s awkward lobby, generally entered from the belly of the parking garage, and opened it up to the street.

A bulbous porch marks the new entrance, which is named the Lynda and Steward Resnick Cultural Center for their mammoth $30 million donation.

Located across the street from the imminent Purple Line subway stop, the museum’s freshly expressive frontage hopefully will attract new audiences and signal a willingness to be in conversation with the city and its systems. Indeed, the formal character of that west entry is equally bodily and municipal. The muscular-flex-meets-quotidian-curb aesthetic continues into the lobby, where a new, streamlined info desk guides visitors up the stairs to the courtyard and galleries.

On the eastern corner, Maltzan created an outdoor sculpture terrace adjacent to a new

5,600-square-foot, ground-floor exhibition gallery. Currently on display is Oracle (2021), a monumental, 25-foot-tall bronze statue by artist Sanford Biggers that faces Wilshire traffic with an impassive pose. While it took the Hammer more than 20 years to boast such urbanism, it’s also the time it took Los Angeles to embrace its own.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles–based critic and curator.

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COURTESY MICHAEL MALTZAN ARCHITECTURE

Ecological

COURTESY

“Ecological issues are truly urgent, and if you think about them too hard, you can become really depressed and end up in the fetal position, or simply curled up in denial like a hedgehog,” Timothy Morton wrote in their 2018 book Being Ecological. Now “really cheap,” ecological awareness, they contend, is the “awareness of unintended consequences.” What we make still matters: Morton emphasizes that “the future emerges directly from the objects we design.”

This attitude inspired the following features: Kelly Alvarez Doran considers approaches to reducing carbon; photographer Virginia Hanusik photographs at-risk landscapes in Louisiana, and the resulting images are contextualized by writer Allyn West; and Aaron Seward links a showcase of birdhouses in San Antonio to the city’s wider development patterns.

Rather than a primary focus on energy efficiency, architects should consider more holistic assessments to reduce the carbon emissions of construction.

Thinking Through Material Flows

Kelly Alvarez Doran, a senior director at MASS Design Group, was the keynote speaker at AN’s recent Facades+ New York event. Afterwards, he spoke with AN about moving from the paradigm of sustainability to that of low-carbon sufficiency.

What does the phrase “Less is less” mean to you? Aside from the obvious nod to Mies, it’s a recognition that we must move past notions of sustaining towards sufficiency. This is a paradigmatic shift: It means advancing beyond mitigating and building resiliency to providing a built environment that is regenerative and circular. Sufficiency means living within planetary boundaries and working collaboratively to ensure everyone’s needs are met. Architecturally this could help us refocus the ways we conceive and construct. We can’t consume our way out of the problem. Adding more and more virgin materials to our buildings has exacerbated carbon emissions. In North America, how can we reconceive what we’ve already built—in terms of buildings, materials, and landscape reuse—and reconfigure the built environment to accommodate different, sufficient models of living? We have built enough floor area to house three to four times the current population of the continent. How we reallocate and reconfigure that floor area is where our focus needs to shift.

Above: A map shows where the various elements for a window were sourced to be installed in a home designed by Doran for a site in Ontario and completed in 2014.

Left: The curving facade of the Ilima Primary School includes woven screen doors and a roof shingled in wood sourced from a nearby forest. The creation of these elements can be seen in the left image below.

Below, left: A worker weaves what will become a screen door at the Ilima Primary School. Eighty-three percent of the project’s cost was spent on labor.

Below, right: A worker gathers wood that was used for roof shingles. The Ilima Primary School emitted 28 times less carbon than the global average for an education project.

Why is the weight of a building important? The question Buckminster Fuller famously asked Norman Foster of the Sainsbury Centre—"How much does your building weigh, Mr. Foster?”—is as relevant then as it is now, though I suspect his answer would be rather different 45 years later. The answer Foster gave in 1978 reveals the enormity of the blind spot typical of our industry. His accounting of the project’s weight is entirely on-site, leaving all issues of material provenance completely off the balance sheet—most obviously, the weight of the byproducts of mining and processing aluminum and steel that feature so prominently in his response.

The true “weight” of our decisions, socially and ecologically, is something I first experienced when I spent the early part of my career working on and around largescale mines across the world. I have seen the enormous holes, tailings ponds, and refineries where our aluminum extrusions and PVC window frames emanate from. I have also witnessed the scale of impact these extraction sites have on surrounding communities, cultures, ecosystems, watersheds, and the atmosphere.

How has your understanding of the role of the architect changed based on your experience in Rwanda with MASS Design Group? Working in Rwanda required a dramatic unlearning before being able to effectively practice. My North American training to source materials via catalogs and product reps left me ill equipped to design and build in a landlocked country with an 18 percent import tax. Working with local builders through projects like Munini District Hospital quickly revealed my blind spots, notably how simple design decisions have significant social, economic, and ecological impacts. Something as simple as the sizing of a windowpane could improve local livelihoods by enabling it to be sourced in-country or manufactured on-site.

This appreciation of a material’s provenance added an ecological and atmospheric dimension at the Ilima Primary School, where we worked with researchers at MIT to undertake a life-cycle assessment of our projects for the first time. The results shocked us. The building’s embodied carbon footprint (15 kgCO2e/m2) was 28 times lower than the global average for schools, due entirely to the reliance on locally sourced stone, earth, and wood. This small school, built of locally abundant and readily renewable materials in the middle of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, provided us our first glimpse of the potential for a regenerative architecture.

Munini and Ilima fundamentally shaped my appreciation of the profound responsibility and opportunity we architects and engineers have in addressing the series of crises in front of us. Through a collaborative, holistic approach that sees the entire scope of the challenges and questions the set of assumptions that currently govern our decision-making, we can make the changes required of us.

KELLY ALVAREZ DORAN

Above: The project is designed to work with the available material and constructive resources. Ninety-six percent of the campus’s materials were excavated, harvested, or sourced from Rwanda.

Left: MASS Design Group’s work takes into consideration a wide range of finishes and objects that can be made by local workers. Here, an outdoor terrace includes numerous locally produced elements.

Below: MASS Design Group’s campus for RICA is entirely off-grid. Ninety-eight percent of the building’s labor was sourced from within 100 miles of the site. In this image, weavers from Rwanda’s Kayonza district are pictured with items woven from banana fibers.

How did the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture (RICA) scale up this holistic approach? RICA is an architecture of wood, earth, and place premised on sufficiency and regeneration. Working with Arup and Transsolar, we invested in early–design-stage research to identify a material palette that could be harvested from the site itself. RICA’s total weight is sourced almost entirely from the project’s site and immediate surroundings. Our civil and structural engineers dug test pits to ascertain the ideal mix of compressed earth blocks and rammed earth to manufacture low-carbon, durable, thermally massive walls on-site. To place the buildings in a seismic zone, we used stone foundations, resulting in significant reductions of upfront emissions. RICA’s campus of 69 unique buildings is entirely off-grid, which optimized each space for daylight and passive ventilation, reducing power demand and the size of the solar array powering the campus. Our landscape architects worked with ecologists and agronomists to develop a “One Health” design approach that links biodiversity and agricultural yields. Working with Atelier Ten, we developed a silvicultural plan—sustainably managing the health of the school’s environment to benefit the campus and society alike, protecting wildlife habitats, timber and water resources, and recreation areas—to offset the project entirely on site. RICA could be Africa’s first climate positive campus within a decade.

There is a lot to learn about embodied, operational, and whole-life carbon. Where to start? For decades, our industry has been focused on energy efficiency. That’s only one part of the problem. Reducing operational emissions involves using less: less space, heat, and cooling and less emissive power sources. North American codes are the opposite. They require more layers of highly emissive materials— foams, membranes, sealed units, etc.—to wrap bigger and bigger buildings tighter and tighter, requiring more mechanical systems to pump in oxygen.

To get out of this vicious cycle of consumption, we should follow our European counterparts who have adopted a whole-life carbon policy that looks at embodied and operational carbon over time. What is a project’s total emissions from day one to year ten? What is the time-value of triple glazing or that extra inch of foam insulation from an emissions perspective?

What could architects do now that would have the most impact? One: Learn how to do a life-cycle assessment. It is simple and quickly reveals how simple material changes could avoid hundreds of tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Two: Get together. Collaborate regionally to develop databases and exchange best practices to help us all improve. Three: Challenge and change the codes and systems we’re currently working under. North America zoning bylaws and energy codes need a dramatic overhaul. Europe’s emerging policies, like the Greater London Authority’s Whole Life Carbon guidance and the Netherlands’ focus on material reuse and circularity, provide much-needed precedents at both municipal and national levels. Four: Share. Be generous with your knowledge. From teaching and mentoring to helping a colleague, this is not a zero-sum game but one where a shift to sufficiency will benefit us all.

What gives you optimism? The velocity of the conversation across the globe around these issues is incredible. Organizations like Architecture 2030, the Carbon Leadership Forum, and London Energy Transformation Initiative have brought life-cycle thinking into the mainstream. In a decade, I’m hopeful that architects across the world will be more connected to the people and places where they practice and will once again source the bulk of the weight of their buildings from regionally abundant sources.

Kelly Alvarez Doran is an architect, educator, and activist. He is the senior director of Performance & Provenance at MASS Design Group and the director of the Ha/f Research Studio at the University of Toronto.

IWAN BAAN

COURTESY MASS DESIGN GROUP

Lifted

You can’t see them coming, but you know they are. Maybe you’re still reeling from the last one. Maybe you get anxious now whenever it rains too hard. Maybe you’re living in a house you haven’t received the money to repair. Maybe you haven’t been able to replace your car, which was swept underwater. You know another storm is coming. The last one, the next one—they’re always with you.

What do we call it? This wary climate worry lingers on the Gulf Coast all hurricane season long, stretching from May to November. And it’s impossible for me not to see it—not to feel it, to be honest—just beyond the edges of the photographs that make up Periphery, the Louisianabased photographer Virginia Hanusik’s current show at MAS Context’s Reading Room in Chicago.

Looking at these photographs, I want to use the word “sublime” the way the Romantics used it. There is obvious, piercing beauty in Hanusik’s compositions—and there is hidden terror in the invisible context. For all the world, the photographs appear calm, but when you’ve lived on the Gulf Coast, that’s no consolation.

You can’t see the climate changing. What you can see are people, here persisting, projecting their lives into the future. Take Cameron Parish, Hanusik’s photograph of a church. The typology of a one-story building with a modest but unmistakable spire—sometimes no different from a pole barn—is recognizable in rural communities all over the country, but here the threat is both hell and high water. The stilts suggest a kind of preparation, a kind of earthliness, a

structural recognition of the need both to elevate congregants’ spirits—and, in case of disaster, their bodies.

This persistence is different from resilience, I think. That’s a word often assigned paternalistically to environmental justice communities like Cameron Parish (or St. James or Lake Charles) for making do without many resources other than their own. The parts of the Gulf Coast Hanusik shoots are the ones whose infrastructure is woefully dated and that exist closest to the pollution from the refineries that is making all of this worse. The show, taken as a whole, asserts a separation between the hard infrastructure we build and the landscapes where we spend our lives. Each, here, stands alone, as though it has nothing to do with the other—which is part of the

Virginia Hanusik’s photographs, now on view at MAS Context, study the front lines of the climate crisis.

problem, when climate adaptation fails to be specific to the conditions on the ground. Take Route 1 over Leeville, Lafourche Parish, which images the ingenuity it requires to vault a freeway over a bayou but appears simultaneously indifferent to what’s being vaulted over.

The seas are rising. The storms keep coming. The recovery never ends, and it is never equal. But one beautiful thing about the Gulf Coast is how much strength you can see. How much will to persist. Whatever tenuousness, whatever vulnerability you might identify in Periphery—the show’s title is a word often assigned to communities living in low-lying coastal areas or in the shadows of refineries and chemical facilities— is coming from somewhere else, brought down on people through no fault of their own,

because nearly all of those who have had the opportunity to act have ignored the consequences of more than a century of a polluting, extractive economy. It’s getting hotter. The storms are wilder. The consequences are coming closer, at the edges, now, at the back of your mind, a satellite image swirling at the periphery of your attention until all of a sudden you’re trying to stay standing one more time.

Allyn West is a writer based in Houston and rural Kentucky. You can find them on Twitter @allynwest.

Periphery, an exhibition by New Orleans–based photographer Virginia Hanusik, is on view at the MAS Context Reading Room in Chicago through June 3.

Facing page, clockwise from top left: Cameron Parish (2021); Route 1 over Leeville, Lafourche Parish (2020); The Great Wall of Louisiana #2 (2022); Lake St. Catherine, Orleans Parish (2020); Lake Maurepas (2015); The Great Wall of Louisiana #1 (2022)

This page, clockwise from top left: Grand Isle (2020); Powerlines over Lake Pontchartrain (2022); Grand Isle (2022); Houseboat on Lake Maurepas (2021); Isle de Jean Charles (2021); The Great Wall of Louisiana #2 (2022)

Bye Bye Birdie

Birdsong Brackenridge, a San Antonio rendition of For the Birds on view last summer at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, spins an ecological message where it’s needed most.

The drive on I-35 from Austin to San Antonio unfolds like a master class on suburban sprawl. Over the last couple decades, the two Texas cities, separated by some 80 miles, have grown to be nearly contiguous. Where before rolling farm fields and wooded river bottoms were but punctuated by the intervening towns—Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, New Braunfels, Schertz—today there is scarcely a break in the chain of gas stations, fast food restaurants, motels, shopping centers, subdivisions, apartment blocks, and industrial parks. The freeway offers many exits but no relief.

To alleviate the mounting anxiety created by this onslaught of development—the road’s billboards scream out for attention—I played Brian Eno’s Discreet Music on the car stereo. The music’s murmuring ambient strains vaulted my consciousness high above the rushing traffic, up to where a flotilla of fluffy white clouds sailed peacefully through the azure sky.

It was a poignant way to make my passage to Party in the Park: Birdsong Brackenridge, a fundraising gala for the Brackenridge Park Conservancy organized by Suzanne Matthews, director of the San Antonio–based architectural lighting manufacturer Lucifer Lighting. The event was something of a revival of For the Birds, which opened at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden last summer. As with that event, several prominent architects were invited to design birdhouses, and Grammy-winning movie music supervisor Randall Poster played cohost. Poster’s For the Birds: The Birdsong Project—a 20-LP box set containing more than 200 tracks of original bird-related music and poetry, the proceeds of which go to support the Audubon Society—served as inspiration for both parks’ birdhouse initiatives.

I met Poster, who was in San Antonio for the gala, along with several of the birdhouse designers, at an intimate gathering at the Matthewses’ Alamo Heights home. He said he conceived of the project midpandemic while reflecting on the fact that songbirds make the most beautiful music. Everyone loves songbirds, and yet their numbers are falling drastically due to ecological depredation. Discussions about the environment often trigger political reactions that derail any hope of reaching consensus on appropriate action. Maybe if we talk about songbirds instead, Poster thought, agreement will arise.

To expound on Poster’s thought: To protect songbirds, you have to protect their habitat, meaning you have to think differently about development, meaning you can’t go on repeating the sort of suburban sprawl that is making Austin and San Antonio touch each other, meaning you make and pour less concrete and drive fewer miles, meaning you’ve just reduced a region’s carbon footprint significantly, meaning climate change has been mitigated, meaning the flora and fauna that support songbird populations continue to flourish in place—and on and on.

Brackenridge Park was an appropriate setting for this rendition of For the Birds. Texas is the most bird-diverse state in the nation, with more than 540 species in residence—about two-thirds of the species found in the entire U.S.

At the same time, the state is also overachieving when it comes to destroying avian habitats. Around San Antonio alone, it is estimated that in the next 15 years there will be more than 450,000 acres of habitat loss due to interminable development, which arrives with its concomitant light pollution and increase in glass, pesticides, and invasive species. Sited just below the headwaters of the San Antonio River, Brackenridge Park is a 349-acre green space amid the city’s sprawl. The conservancy is currently fundraising to restore as much natural habitat and native vegetation in the park as possible, among other improvements.

Matthews invited ten architecture studios to design birdhouses for Birdsong Brackenridge: Marlon Blackwell; Angela Brooks and Larry Scarpa of Brooks + Scarpa; Roberto de Leon of de Leon & Primmer; Craig Dykers and Elaine Molinar of Snøhetta; Ted Flato of Lake|Flato; Everett L. Fly; Michael Imber; David Jameson; Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig; and Judy Pesek of Gensler. While the birdhouses were designed to provide homes for birds, the projects also address Poster’s ecological imperative in varying degrees.

Jameson’s project put a particularly fine point on things. A new “multifamily” habitat for bluebirds, it comprises a series of gables constructed of mirror-finish stainless steel, providing, as the architect said in his statement, “reflection for humans to realize that without taking care of our natural environment, we’ll only be looking at ourselves.”

1 Dykers and Molinar’s residence for the Carolina chickadee took a different, though still cheeky, take on being ecological. Called Huevo al Nido (“egg to nest” in Spanish), it’s composed of an upcycled ostrich egg found at a Brooklyn flea market attached to a piece of repurposed Douglas fir taken from a demolished commercial building in Queens and a perch made of a moss-covered branch of a 140-yearold catalpa tree. 2 “It’s a single-family adaptive reuse project,” Dykers said. San Antonio native Fly, an architect and landscape architect, also chose the upcycling route, reusing a chunk of a fallen heritage pecan from the park with a hole for nesting already in place.

Two of the architects designed houses for hummingbirds—or, really, nesting sites, as hummingbirds don’t favor human-made houses. De Leon’s, called Tapestry, is a framework of twisted copper-hued aluminum wire of the sort used for training bonsai plants. 3 Pesek’s is made up of two 3D-printed ovoids, the delicate forms of which are inspired by Fabergé eggs. 4 The purple martin, another bird that lives outside the nest, also received two architect-designed abodes, both of which are multi-unit constructions. Flato drew

parallels between the nation’s human homelessness epidemic and the destruction of purple martin habitat. His structure features an array of gourd-shaped nesting sites spaced on circular steel armatures. 5 Brooks and Scarpa’s nesting sites are also gourd shaped, though smaller in size and tightly clustered together. 6 Scarpa said they were inspired by the fact that purple martins enjoy multiple mates in their lifetimes.

Kundig also designed a multi-unit structure. Though the particular bird it’s meant for was not specified, it is a collection of four spheres from which extend very protuberant perches. 7 To this reviewer, the proportions appeared somewhat reminiscent of the geoduck clam found in the waters near Kundig’s Seattle home. Imber, a San Antonian, looked to the cultural history of Brackenridge Park, turning in a faux bois (concrete made to look like wood) sculpture he collaborated on with Carlos Cortez, a third-generation faux bois craftsman. 8 Blackwell’s submission, Casa de Ave, is a cross between a bird dwelling and a light fixture shaped like an abstracted bird’s head. 9 The entrance to the house is through the beak. “We had great fun researching and conceiving the Casa de Ave,” Blackwell said in a statement. “It’s not architecture, but certainly has an architecture… like the birds themselves.”

For the Party in the Park, the birdhouses were perched atop high poles beneath heritage cypress trees. The exceptions were Imber’s, which has an integral concrete pedestal that resembles a tree stump, and Jameson’s, which is set at eye level on stainless-steel legs so that revelers can catch a glimpse of themselves in its mirrored surfaces and receive its ecological message. After the party, the birdhouses were taken to the McNay Art Museum, where they’ll be on display for a time before being returned to the park and placed strategically where birds might actually use them.

But on that April evening, there they were, attracting admiring glances and words from conservancy members and other guests who attended the gala in “garden festive” attire, mingling beneath the dwellings/sculptures, cocktails in hand. In the distance, the boom of antibird pyrotechnics sounded at regular intervals, charges set off to scare away the many egrets who have roosted in the park since their traditional rookery south of San Antonio was destroyed by human encroachment. As the light faded, so did the explosions, and we sat down to a dinner of filet mignon set in a nest of raw vegetables while being entertained by musicians invited by Poster, who played bird-inspired music, and a local ballet troupe, who danced bird-inspired dances.

Aaron Seward works at Perkins&Will. He is the former Editor in Chief of The Architect’s Newspaper

Photographs by Josh Huskin

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Faces of Change

Local codes have improved the regulation of sustainability and energy efficiency in buildings but don’t yet fully address the sourcing of materials and their relative long-term energy costs. In this month’s Focus section, AN considers projects of various scales that rehabilitate damaged industrial sites, recycle construction materials, adaptively reuse existing structures, support landscape explorations, and design new possibilities for familiar elements.

Eight architects in London—Adam Khan Architects, Architecture 00, Mole Architects, SelgasCano, 6a, Barozzi Veiga, HNNA, and David Kohn Architects— have inserted a series of dynamic structures on the rehabilitated site of a former industrial natural gas plant. The stylized facades of Greenwich Design District create an engaging public space for offices, a food hall, and an experimental media center.

Testbeds is a project of New York–based firm New Affiliates with Sam Stewart-Halevy that repurposes mock-ups from construction sites to support community gardens. In Queens, they partnered with the Department of Parks and Recreation’s GreenThumb program to demonstrate how the mock-ups—normally thrown away after use in design and construction projects—can be recycled. The architects hope Testbeds, currently on view at MoMA as part of its New York, New Publics exhibition, can be adopted by developers and expanded to serve other community gardens.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, TenBerke’s adaptive reuse of the Lewis International Law Center at Harvard surgically rehabilitates Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott’s 1957 stone-clad concrete structure, adding square footage by expanding the top floor and reconfiguring the interior to accommodate more flexibility and social interaction.

The Four Rooftop Pavilion, by Los Angeles–based firms Found Projects and >Schneider Luescher, offers public programs within the recently completed Pingshan Children’s Park in fast-developing Shenzhen, China. The site preserves a landscape of banyan, eucalyptus, and lychee trees as a children’s play area to educate the next generation about the value of ecology and the natural environment. Grand Mulberry, in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood, uses custom-designed red bricks manufactured by Glen-Gary to preserve neighborhood character and history. The 20-unit residential building, designed by Morris Adjmi Architects, houses the Italian American Museum on its ground floor and takes inspiration from the 19th-century Italianate style, inflected with Adjmi’s contemporary flair.

In small ways, each facade-forward project makes a difference in its context.

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32 Case Study Creative Quarters

With buildings by Barozzi Veiga, 6a architects, and SelgasCano, among others, Greenwich Design District is an architectural playground.

Architects: 6a architects, Adam Khan Architects, Architecture 00, Barozzi Veiga, David Kohn Architects, Mole Architects, SelgasCano

Location: London

Developer: Knight Dragon

“When David Kohn first told me he was designing some workspaces for North Greenwich which would have giant nude figurative statues by Damien Hirst on the facade I thought he was joking,” said Phineas Harper, chief executive of Open City, a British charitable organization dedicated to making architecture and neighborhoods more accessible and equitable.

Open City moved into the Greenwich Design District when it launched in 2021. Back then some buildings in London’s first purpose-built creative quarter, realized on top of a former natural gas plant, were still

under construction, and they’ve steadily been opening since. A master plan from Allies and Morrison protects views of the adjacent Richard Rogers–designed O2 Arena, capping building heights at four stories. Studio HNNA laid out the circulation, creating a network of mini streets and squares with an array of plots to be filled on the condensed site.

The Design District in this sense is a big architectural experiment—and one that attracted big names. The developer, Knight Dragon, invited eight architects to design two buildings each, with the caveat that all offices work entirely independently. Adam Khan Architects,

Architecture 00, Mole Architects, SelgasCano, 6a, Barozzi Veiga, HNNA, and David Kohn Architects all stepped up, with the latter making good on its promise of nude figurines. The latter’s two buildings, A4 and B4, are laced with playful references. Kohn used the glowing green of James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie for window framing and oversized brick pillars to support the base of A4, which is topped by a Hollywood-esque sign that reads DESIGN DISTRICT. Headless female nudes courtesy of Damien Hirst adorn A4’s corners. Six niches in B4 display works from local artists.

TARAN WILKHU

May 2023

34 Case Study Creative Quarters continued

Previous spread: London’s Design District exhibits a museum surveylike variety of facade treatments, including window walls, extruded aluminum, metal mesh, diamond-shaped grids, and Cor-ten steel.

Top, left: Oversized brick pillars support the base of David Kohn Architects’ A4, topped by a DESIGN DISTRICT sign. Headless female nudes by Damien Hirst adorn its corners.

Left: A green grid referencing James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie frames glass blocks, masonry, and windows in A4’s facade.

Above: A corrugated aluminum facade meets the slanted diagonal roof of 6a architects’ twin A2 and B2 buildings.

Less colorful, but still just as fun, Architecture 00’s C1 boasts a basketball court on its roof and a metal mesh net as the building’s envelope, allowing floor-to-ceiling sliding windows to fully open without the need for a balustrade. From above, the orange basketball court makes for a good photo, in contrast to the proudly gray building, while at ground level, the mesh provides porosity, allowing the building to be easily read. With its corner plot, the bright orange makes C1 a handy portal to the area. D1, by contrast, also by Architecture 00, is much more understated, eschewing any netting but retaining a set of expressive concrete decks.

Unlike any other firm, 6a architects opted for two almost identical buildings, both easily recognizable by their dramatic slanting roofs.

“If you do two buildings and one is better than the other, shouldn’t you just do the better one twice?” Tom Emerson, cofounder of 6a, related to AN in 2020. The two buildings, A2 and B2, are in part inspired by the late American artist Richard Artschwager, attempting, as Emerson remarked, to turn his “graphic, Pop Art expression into a sculptural form.” Architecturally, this manifests as a pair of buildings that celebrate the layers of construction, with a diagrid imprinted onto

the slanted roof. “It’s not an explicit reference but allowed us to enjoy working with these architectural products and layers which are ordinary in themselves but together can be interesting and playful,” added Emerson.

Mole Architects takes the opposite approach. “Mole’s two buildings [C2 and D2] are different from each other—one compact and angular, the other stacked like a ziggurat,” said director Meredith Bowles. “[They] play one against the other, the larger one heavy and solid, the smaller one with changing colors, like the flame of burning gas.” Internally, however, the two share the same sensibilities:

Made entirely from timber, they evoke the qualities of an old warehouse. C2 features stepped sides and diagonal Cor-ten cladding, while D2 serves up a shimmering facade—or more precisely, pyramidal profiled cladding with a two-tone color that changes with the direction of the light. Fins surrounding the windows in dichroic glass refract colored light over the facades. “The colors are inspired by a gas flame,” said Bowles, who added that the buildings are a nod to Victorian gas holders that originally occupied the site.

Along with its layout of the district, HNNA contributed two buildings: D3, which remains

36 Case Study Creative Quarters continued

Left, above: Building C2 by Mole Architects features a ziggurat-like volume of stepped sides and diagonal Cor-ten cladding, while Architecture 00’s C1 has a metal mesh net as the building’s envelope.

Left: The colors of the two buildings by Mole are inspired by a gas flame, referencing the 19th-century gas plant that originally occupied the site.

Above: Extruded aluminum wraps around a timber and concrete structure in HNNA’s C3 building designed as a coworking space.

unbuilt while authorities finalize plans for a car tunnel beneath the district, and C3, whose tall, thin windows are fissures in an undulating white exterior inhabited by pocket-sized workspaces. Roz Barr Architects designed the interiors for Bureau, a coworking members’ club featuring a sumptuous lounge dubbed the Salon, dressed top to bottom with striking red furnishings.

Spanish outfit SelgasCano made extensive use of ETFE in the studio’s B1 and Canteen, the latter acting as the district’s central nexus. A bulbous, translucent, caterpillar-like food hall spans two levels, its giant doors swinging open,

displaying the mechanics celebrated through its bright yellow structure. B1, the most recent building to finish on site, retains the character of Canteen within its box plot. Working areas are connected by platforms and winding stairs that traverse a four-story winter garden.

Buildings A1 and D4 by fellow Spaniards Barozzi Veiga are comparatively orthogonal in form, adding delight through a polished aluminum facade. Cementing the district as a creative hub for the long term, A1 is entirely occupied by the Ravensbourne Institute for Creativity and Technology, a kind of university-sponsored experimental design-and-media makerspace.

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Finally, London-based Adam Khan Architects’ A3 offers a moment of architectural respite. Its subdued concrete facade uses awnings on the southern and eastern sides to add character and limit solar heat gain. B3, meanwhile, is on hold, also awaiting transportation infrastructure.

“Today, [the] Design District supports an ecosystem of 160 businesses, encompassing individual makers, ambitious start-ups, groundbreaking social enterprises, and industry leaders,” said Design District director Helen Arvanitakis.

“It’s not a template that should be rolled out everywhere,” Harper offered. “But as a playful and fully pedestrianized cluster of characterful pavilions, it is fantastic place to base the Open City team and has much to teach the po-faced bricky baldness which defines so much new London architecture.”

Jason Sayer is a writer and lecturer based in London. Previously at AN and later the London School of Architecture, he works for U.K. publication Architecture Today

Above: 6a architects designed A2 and B2, buildings whic are in part inspired by the late American artist Richard Artschwager.

Right, top: SelgasCano made extensive use of ETFE for Canteen, a bulbous, translucent, caterpillar-like food hall that spans two levels.

Right, bottom: Phineas Harper of Open City, headquartered in the district, described the area as a “playful and fully pedestrianized cluster of characterful pavilions.”

TARAN WILKHU

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44 Case Study Garden Party

Testbeds recycles mock-ups once treated as construction waste into investments in public space.

Project leads: New Affiliates and Sam Stewart-Halevy

Location: New York

Structural engineering: Silman Engineering

Contracting: Think Construction

Mock-up storage: AM Glass

Support: Cape Advisors, The Architectural League of New York, The Garden Conservancy, and NYC Department of Parks and Recreation’s GreenThumb program

Architectural mock-ups are curious creatures. Peeking over construction fences, the isolated chunks of facade often appear like sculptures. However, unlike a Rachel Whiteread cast, once the assemblies have been tested for durability or visual cohesion they are typically thrown away rather than sold at the Gagosian. Designers of the project Testbeds— New Affiliates cofounders Jaffer Kolb and Ivi Diamantopoulou and architect and PhD candidate at Columbia GSAPP Sam Stewart-Halevy— were inspired to test alternative afterlives of the mock-ups through reuse instead of waste.

Testbeds proposes the reuse of architectural facade mock-ups from many of New York’s construction sites as support structures for community gardens. The city owns over 500 locations, which are run by volunteers. Last year, the initiative, with support from the Department of Parks and Recreation’s GreenThumb program, completed its first pilot project in Rockaway, Queens.

The effort is also currently on view in the exhibition Architecture Now: New York, New Publics at the Museum of Modern Art as one of 12 projects that consider the city as a “fragile ecosystem in need of care.” In the exhibition, Testbeds exists as a built and speculative project through renderings, a board game, and a video of daily life at its first location. Hyperrealistic renderings of different mockups propel viewers into the near future, with a white speckled panel tilted to form a quasi-Aframe, a greenhouse popping out of one of its openings. Another facade stays upright, forming a theater. Flipped horizontally in another, windows become skylights. The circular board game imagines the city as a “reconfigurable space instead of a space of consumption” where the players negotiate matching architectural prototypes with community gardens across the boroughs. Tiny 3D-printed mockups crisscross their way to new green homes. In the video that flanks the corner, real volunteers work with the lush produce of harvest time while the first built Testbed, dubbed The Garden by the Bay, glints in the sun. StewartHalevy told AN that “the exhibition at MoMA seems to have captured the imagination of many different ‘publics’ in the city, and it has been wonderful to see the work of The Garden by the Bay gain visibility on this stage.”

I visited this garden on a misty spring weekday in Edgemere, a neighborhood on the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. Jackie Rogers and Laquetta Little welcomed me to share their

experience directing the site. The Testbeds project couldn’t have come at a better time. The garden’s president and a longtime Edgemere homeowner, Rogers said the structure “helped people imagine the space” and what it could be. She recounted how, after a couple of years developing the garden near the northern end of the peninsula, watching the structure get built was a very exciting time, from seeing its foundations poured in late 2021 to witnessing its completion in late 2022. Its largest wall is faced in ridged high-performance–concrete panels originally used in a mock-up for a new condominium at 30 Warren Street in Manhattan. The pieces enclose a massive gold-tinged aluminum window frame, with clear twin-wall polycarbonate sheets sliding within the frame that open for airflow and views. Each of the structure’s three rooms combines the programs of greenhouse, toolshed, and gathering space. Aside from the salvaged materials, off-the-shelf materials like corrugated aluminum, raw lumber, and plywood compose the other facades, while CMU blocks and steel columns anchor the pavilion to its concrete floors and footings.

The garden’s organizers are already planning for expansions facilitated by their new Testbed venue. Rogers remarked that it’s “not about working harder [but] about working smarter,” as the garden has already doubled in size to around 15,000 square feet with the acquisition of a neighboring lot. The garden now has about 35 members who regularly volunteer. With its growth in membership and

the Testbeds addition came an increase in visitors, including NYC City Council Member Selvena N. Brooks-Powers, and Girl Scout troops. Rogers and Little are already imagining architectural expansions to accommodate a range of functions from garden support services to a community center. The current wish list includes wi-fi, electricity, PV panels, bug screens, and water access beyond a public hydrant to quench the thirst of vegetables, flowers, grapevines, and fruit trees. Across the street, there are many city-owned vacant lots now destined to become affordable homes under the Edgemere Community Land Trust, and perhaps, Rogers and Little pondered, even more public garden spaces.

Through the first Testbed installation and projections of many to come, Kolb, Diamantopoulou, and Stewart-Halevy imagine that mock-up reuse could become a systematic part of the construction process in New York. When asked about the project’s future, Stewart-Halevy said the team is “now in the process of forming a nonprofit, with the counsel of the Lawyers Alliance for New York, that will lay the legal and financial groundwork for Testbeds to continue.” He also shared that GreenThumb remains a partner in the project, and together they look forward to matching future homes for Testbeds elsewhere in the city.

Angie Door is a writer and designer who lives in Brooklyn.

MICHAEL VAHRENWALD

ORIGINAL EXCEPTIONAL

Photo:

46 Case Study Garden Party continued

Previous spread: Clear twinwall polycarbonate sheets and CMU blocks enclose part of the Testbeds structure, which recycles panels from a condominium mock-up.

Top, left: Corrugated aluminum, raw lumber, and plywood constitute other parts of the facade, anchored with steel columns to concrete footings.

Top, right: The community garden organizers use the Testbeds spaces for greenhouses, toolsheds, and gathering spaces.

Left: Testbeds’ protagonists imagine that mock-ups reused from construction sites could become a systematic part of the construction process in New York.

Above: Once the assemblies have been tested for durability and visual cohesion, they can be more widely adopted as supportive community spaces for gardens and other programs throughout the city.

MICHAEL VAHRENWALD MICHAEL VAHRENWALD

Project

Archiproducts

Date 2022

Location Milan, Italy

Designer Carla Di Benedetto

This was the fifth time Kriskadecor clad the facade of the showroom during Milan Design Week. In this case, in addition to attracting the attention of both locals and visitors, the double-skin facade covered the imperfections of an old building.

Project Ecuador Pavilion

Date 2015

Location Expo Milano, Italy

Designer Zorrozua y Asociados

In the case of Ecuador's pavilion during the 2015 Milan Expo, the folkloric motifs that made up the composition of the façade were a universal reflection of Ecuadorian culture and were inspired by the traditional textile craftsmanship of the Otavalo region. The chain curtains offered the sensation of movement, simulating the flow of the fabrics themselves.

The façade is the only part of the building that can be seen from the outside and has the function of communicating a message derived from its design. It therefore deserves special attention in every detail. A façade that is well proportioned in terms of colors and materials, which facilitates the connection between the interior and the exterior, will generate an initial attraction for pedestrians, inviting them to enter.

Kriskadecor's exterior cladding combines design and functionality. Thanks to the versatility and lightness of the aluminum links, large surfaces can be covered with infinite creative possibilities, providing color, texture and presence with a system that allows the reproduction of patterns, logos and even images thanks to in-house technology and a dynamic palette of RAL colors tested under solar exposure.

From the outside, its solid appearance provides privacy. From the inside, the transparency of the chain links allows full visibility.

Technical Features & Sustainability

The system, designed and tested to guarantee a safe and durable structure, adapts to the shape of any building, is resistant, quick to install, easy to maintain and extremely light. The chains have been tested with wind gusts of 210 km/h.

In terms of sustainability, the open area of the chain links significantly helps to improve the thermal environment inside the building, reducing heat transfer from direct sunlight, thus allowing its ventilation. Furthermore, Both the chains and the profiles are aluminum, a sustainable and infinitely recyclable material.

The technical department develops ad hoc projects, providing technical, graphic, and artistic support throughout the process, from the conception of the idea to the completion of the project.

Project Kley Student Residence

Date 2022

Location Montpellier, France

Designer Archikubik

Finally, we refer to the Kley Group's student residence. Designed by Archikubik, the 11-storey building is in the heart of the new Port-Marianne district. The double skin envelope system provide an intimate filter that shields the view from the public space while screening sunlight. The chains also create a light veil that dematerialises the building, allowing subtle light variations thanks to their slight movement and the delicate, sparkling brilliant finish of part of them.

kriskadecor.com/en-US/cladding

MARCELA GRASSI

MARCELA GRASSI

MARCELA GRASSI

48 Products

Glazing Systems

Supported by decades of research and technical innovation, the following manufacturers present a range of new products. From curtain wall and window wall to storefronts and items with integrated solar energy arrays, these glazing systems implement the best engineering to both elegantly and sustainably meet the needs of any building envelope.

Sophie Aliece Hollis

YHS 50 TU Storefront System YKK AP ykkap.com

SLIMPACT Portal Faour Glass Technologies faourglass.com

UniVent 1375AW Series Therml=Block Windows Tubelite tubeliteinc.com

CW250P Curtain Wall GAMCO gamcocorp.com

TCR-225 Window Wall Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope obe.com

System ENVELON envelon.net

Building Distinction

Pioneering Products that Elevate Design and Efficiency. At Kingspan Insulated Panels, we’re pioneering better technologies and methods of building for a low carbon world. Kingspan insulated metal panels are the next generation of building envelope, offering an unparalleled combination of aesthetic flexibility, energy efficiency and thermal, air, water and vapor barrier performance.

Northern Arizona University Student-Athlete High Performance Center | Flagstaff, Arizona

KS Mini Micro-Rib

50 Products

Glass

Proper glazing is paramount to both the user experience and overall building performance. Whether the intention is to reduce solar heat gain, minimize bird strikes, or protect from the unexpected, these recently released products build upon decades of research and development in glass manufacturing to deliver top-of-the-line performance.

Sophie Aliece Hollis

Solarban R77 Vitro vitroglazings.com

Synergy VIG Thermglass thermglass.com

BirdSecure Pro Kuraray kuraray.com

SecureGlaze Agnora agnora.com

Spacia Pilkington pilkington.com

Viracon Identification Number Viracon viracon.com

52 Case Study A Surgical Intervention

TenBerke deftly blends new and old at Harvard’s Lewis International Law Center.

Architect and interior designer: TenBerke

Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Landscape architect: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates

Lighting designer: One Lux

Structural engineer & envelope consultant: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger

MEP/FP engineer: Altieri Sebor Wieber

Sustainability consultant: Atelier Ten

Civil engineer: Nitsch Engineering

Geotechnical consultant: Haley & Aldrich

IT, AV, and security consultant: Cerami

Code consultant: R.W. Sullivan

Signage designer: AFreeman

In spring 2022, Harvard University welcomed students into the newly renovated Lewis International Law Center, located on the northern stretches of the Cambridge campus, a stone’s throw from the Cambridge Common. The 50,500-square-foot project was led by New York–based firm TenBerke (formerly Deborah Berke Partners), whose expertise in adaptive reuse has helped it transform the midcentury structure into a learning center that emphasizes social interchange, shared teaching, and flexible office spaces.

The original building dates from 1957 and was designed by Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott as an annex of the existing law library’s stacks, accompanied by a reading room and independent circulation desk. Its high-modernist design, executed with concrete, stone, and a curtain wall, ultimately proved outmoded for contemporary pedagogical demands. The renovation keeps the original library functions in place while adding an array of conference and meeting rooms, private offices, study carrels, reconfigurable classrooms, and client consultation rooms.

Any adaptive reuse project requires a near surgical methodology. TenBerke collaborated with structural engineer and envelope consultant Simpson Gumpertz & Heger to analyze the

existing structure and enclosure. “A deep investigation by structural and envelope specialists revealed opportunities but also limitations. We realized we needed to be surgical with our interventions,” noted Ameet Hiremath, partner at TenBerke. “For example, we capitalized on the demolition of a mechanical penthouse to create a big opening to the top new floor and turned a blank facade into a transparent one that created a new front door and stitched pathways back into the campus precinct.”

Through subtraction and addition, the firm introduced new facade elements on the top-floor addition and at the entrance, using aluminum composite panels fabricated by Massachusetts-based Sunrise Erectors to secure the windows and provide shading. The replacement windows and the new high-performance glazing were treated with a pinstriped ceramic frit and placed over an insulated spandrel to optimize the window-to-wall ratio and mitigate solar heat gain and glare. The slenderness and depth of vertically oriented aluminum composite fins that shade the additions’ glazing also blend with the original structure’s tall stone piers. The result is not so much an addition as a melding of new and old.

Adaptive reuse is also an act of conservation that responds to present-day demands

for sustainability. The design team demolished just 20 percent of the existing building. TenBerke partnered with sustainability consultant Atelier Ten to develop a life-cycle assessment of the intervention to determine the project’s embodied carbon emissions and estimate total avoided emissions of the structure and enclosure.

“Overall, the adaptive reuse project saved about one million tons of embodied carbon emissions, which is equal to the annual energy emissions of 120,000 homes, according to the USEPA,” continued Hiremath. “The energy efficiency upgrades result in a 31 percent reduction in annual operational emissions, which is equal to 4.69 million kgCO2e cumulative emissions over the 60-year life cycle.”

With its refined and high-performance facade and newly public-oriented building program, the Lewis International Law Center will anchor this corner of Harvard University’s campus for years to come.

Matthew Marani, studying city and regional planning at Pratt Institute, writes about architecture and urban design.

CHRIS COOPER

54 Case Study A Surgical Intervention continued

Previous spread: The concrete, stone, and curtain wall of the Lewis International Law Center is supplemented by an expanded top floor and entrance clad in aluminum composite panels.

Above: “We realized we needed to be surgical with our interventions,” said TenBerke partner Ameet Hiremath of the adaptations.

Left: As seen in the circulation depicted in the exploded axonometric, he project "created a new front door and stitched pathways back into the campus precinct,” Hiremath said.

56 Products

Metals

A longtime favorite for facades, metal cladding seems to deliver in every category: It’s strong, lightweight, waterproof, easy to clean, and relatively inexpensive. Thanks to the efforts of the following manufacturers, it also can be easily manipulated and customized to create the perfect application for your next project.

Sophie Aliece Hollis

NOVA Fins Centria centria.com

Facade Wall Panels Drexel Metals drexmet.com

Linarte Cone Renson renson-outdoor.com

Ready to Ship Woodgrains Pure + Freeform purefreeform.com

3-Dimensional Rainscreen Facade System BōK Modern bokmodern.com

58 Products

Cladding Attachment Systems

Aside from their critical function within the building envelope, cladding attachment systems also significantly impact construction timelines. Complicated and convoluted attachment details can add weeks or even months to projects. For this reason, the following systems and solutions were selected for their structural strength and ease of installation.

Sophie Aliece Hollis

Hitch System Longboard Architectural Products longboardproducts.com ISO Clip Northern Facades isoclips.com

60 Case Study

Low-High Liftoff

The Four Roof Pavilion welcomes with angled canopies and public programming.

Design architect: Found Projects & >Schneider Luescher

Location: Shenzhen, China

Executive architect: KMCM

Landscape architect: WEi Studio, USA

Construction administration: China

Resources Land (Shenzhen)

Construction team: Shenzhen Sincere

Environmental Art Engineering, Guangdong Chengji Ecological Technology

Supervision: Shenzhen Qijun Construction Engineering Consultant

Engineering technical consultant: Lattice

Landscape

Plant design consultant: DENG Huijuan

Signage system design: WEi Studio, Shenzhen Direction Ecological Development

The city of Shenzhen straddles the border of Guangdong and Hong Kong and has undergone great change over the last half century.

The former fishing town, perched on the South China Sea, has grown from approximately 300,000 residents in 1980 to nearly 20 million today. Unsurprisingly, that growth has fueled a long-running construction boom that includes myriad civic institutions. One such project is the Four Roof Pavilion by Los Angeles–based firms Found Projects and >Schneider Luescher: Its airy design and public quarters act as a gateway for the recently completed Pingshan Children’s Park.

Pingshan Children’s Park, designed by WEi Studio, is located within a rolling landscape of Chinese banyan, eucalyptus, and lychee trees. The pavilion’s design team drew on that bucolic setting, as well as taking inspiration from 11th-century Chinese landscape paintings, to develop the pavilion’s foliage-like color palette and open-air form.

The 13,000-square-foot project dates to 2020, during the height of the COVID-19

pandemic, when the design team was brought on to determine a program and design the castin-place concrete structural grid, a system that had already been approved by the local planning authorities. Due to travel restrictions, the design team was unable to visit the site during the design or construction phases and had to conduct all of its work from its home base in California and over Zoom. Those relatively hands-off circumstances called for the introduction of a straightforward building system.

Simplicity is the name of the game here: The rectilinear structural grid is topped by two steel roofs on the north and south facades, while the roof garden is supported by concrete. “During the design process, our thinking was to make the details and materials very simple, with nothing customized except for the centrally placed spiral stairwells,” noted Found Projects cofounder Ted Zhang. “We introduced a 13-foot-by-13-foot structural grid with three stories, and we developed several public-facing programs, such as a library, coffee shop, and roof garden.”

The north-facing canopy is, for the most part, topped with perforated metal panels, while the south one alternates between solid metal and translucent polycarbonate. In both cases, the materials are arranged in a diamond pattern that mirrors and obscures the cross-framing that supports the canopies from below. A hinge-like bracket embedded within the cast-in-place structural grid holds the canopies in place. The glazing comes in the form of a modular window wall facade system composed of two different sizes of glass.

“In general, we always were concerned because it is one big gesture of lifting the whole facade, and we wanted the building to be translucent, transparent, and light, and grappled with how to do that with a concrete-frame building,” said >Schneider Luescher cofounder Anton Schneider. “Obviously, there are very few materials that can do it as well as glazing, but acquiring high-performance glass would have blown up our budget. This was, in effect, a low-tech version of a high-tech building.” MM

SCHRAN IMAGE

62 Case Study

Low-High Liftoff continued

Left: "We wanted the building to be translucent, transparent, and light, and grappled with how to do that with a concrete-frame building,” said Anton Schneider of >Schneider Luescher.

Above:

to make the details and materials very simple, with nothing customized except for the centrally placed spiral stairwells,” said Ted Zhang

thinking

Previous spread: The airy design and public quarters of the Four Roof Pavilion act as a gateway for the recently completed Pingshan Children’s Park.

Left, top: The two steel roofs are attached to a cast-inplace concrete structure, a system that had already been approved by the local planning authorities.

Above, top: The perforated metal panels of the roof are arranged in a diamond pattern that mirrors and obscures the cross-framing.

“During the design process, our

was

of Found Projects.

64 Products

Roofing Solutions

Often referred to as the “fifth facade,” roofs weather faster than other building assemblies due to its horizontal exposure to the sky. Here, thoughtful engineering and reliable products unite to ensure that this critical surface remains strong and sealed. To facilitate this act, these new products present innovation in varied forms and functions critical to the success of roofing systems. Sophie Aliece

Hollis

EnergyGuard Non-Halogenated Polyiso Insulation GAF gaf.com

Titanium FR Premium Self-Adhered Underlayment Owens Corning owenscorning.com

A-310 Finish Mule-Hide Products mulehide.com

TechShield Radiant Barrier LP Building Solutions lpcorp.com

Solstice Shingle CertainTeed certainteed.com

The David Rubenstein Forum project at the University of Chicago utilized 60,000 square feet of custom Versa-Lok and custom fabricated wall panels that were manufactured by ATAS in 1.0 mm grey zinc. The panels were used as exterior wall cladding on this 166-foot-tall building consisting of 10 stories (a two-story base, and an eight-story tower).

Vertical zinc panels were chosen to express the idea of connectivity on the facade. Zinc was favored because it is a natural and durable material that is timeless and creates its own patina which protects the material for a long time. Zinc is very flexible, which worked well with this building’s geometry, and the way it reflects sunlight was appealing to the design team. The vertical panels also accentuate the height of the building.

David Rubenstein Forum at University of Chicago

1st place winner in ATAS’ 2020 Project of the Year Competition

Wall Panels: Versa-Lok (custom) | Custom Fabricated Panel - Grey Zinc

Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro | Brininstool + Lynch

Contractor: Tuschall Engineering

66 Case Study

Dots on a Wall

The Grand Mulberry uses a custom-formed brick to animate a New York facade.

Architect: MA | Morris Adjmi Architects

Location: New York

Interior design: MA | Morris Adjmi Architects

Museum architect: op.Architecture +

Landscape

Structural engineering: RCM Engineering

Civil engineer: Sullivan Group Design

MEP/FP: ABS Engineering

Lighting: Delta Light

Facade consultant: Buro Happold Engineering

Masonry subcontractor: ARK Builders

Brick manufacturer: Glen-Gery

In 1932, 98 percent of the heads of households in the area of New York City now variously known as Little Italy, Soho, or the Lower East Side were Italian emigrants, The New York Times reported. This wave of immigrants, who largely arrived in the U.S. from the 1880s through the 1920s, were preceded by the Italianate, a mid-19th-century tripartite style of ornamentation and brickwork that changes as the building rises.

Almost a century later, the area’s demographics have changed. But for the facade of the Grand Mulberry, a seven-story, 20-unit building at 185 Grand Street completed last year at the corner of the area’s famed Mulberry Street, Morris Adjmi Architects (MA) looked back to the Italianate for its local resonance. “Emulating this tradition,” according to the office’s press materials, “the Grand Mulberry’s facade pattern consists of banding at the building’s base on floors one to two, pediment windows on floors three to five, and arched windows and a cornice on floor six.”

The zoning required the seventh floor to step back, an opportunity Adjmi seized to create an extensive terrace for the penthouse, then wrap the entire unit and bulkhead in gray metal panels. The metal intervention throws into relief the building’s main

feature: double-stacked running bonds of brick the color of old-fashioned red pavers. Manufacturer Glen-Gery hand-molded each brick, creating distinctive half-spherical bulbs that bring to mind sheets of fresh ravioli.

The swells of the bricks create patterns of light and shade across the exterior, while their arrangements seem like echoes of historical tenement windows. (The actual windows are large tilt-and-turns with extruded aluminum surrounds.) The brickwork creates “a spectral reference to the heritage of the neighborhood,” the office stated, a connection made through both pattern and hue.

The project’s extensive use of mosaics also has a vaguely Italian, if not Italianate, quality. They spill out of the lobby to form a brass logo on the sidewalk. Another series serve as elegant black-and-white wayfinding in the lobby and public hallways. Stacked white tile patterns define the primary bathrooms in all 20 units, and a custom mosaic floor details the penthouse’s powder room.

In an unusual development agreement, the project replaced a row of not-very-Italianate townhouses that previously housed the Italian American Museum. The museum sold its three buildings in 2013 for $13 million, along with a

covenant to house its expanded ground-floor space in the new building, rent free, with a distinct Mulberry Street entrance.

Bricks are the key to the discreet insertion of a defining new building into an old neighborhood. “We worked closely with our masonry subcontractor, ARK Builders,” Morris Adjmi himself said in an interview provided to AN . “The unique masonry pattern—chosen for its ability to provide relief and add depth— could have presented a challenge during construction. But the level of detail put into the development of MA’s drawings and the quality of work provided by the subcontractor allowed for a smooth construction process.”

The finished result gains resonance through reference to the neighborhood’s poor, immigrant roots, while its pricing—ranging from second-floor one-bedrooms selling for $1.295 million to penthouse units marketed for $7.35 million—is altogether contemporary.

The Grand Mulberry’s exterior is “an example of how modern concepts can be applied to traditional methods and materials to develop unique and intricate facade designs,” Adjmi said.

Jesse Dorris is a writer in New York City and host of Polyglot, a show on WFMU.

SELVON RAMSAWAK

68 Case Study

Dots on a Wall continued

COURTESY May 2023

GLEN-GERY

Previous spread: The new structure is set within the brick-heavy context of the Little Italy neighborhood. Upper levels are set back from the cornice line and remain invisible from the street below.

Above, left: The custom bricks are installed in a pattern which implies a grid of windows “interrupted” by the rectangular punches of the actual glazed openings.

Above, top: Curved custom brick units are used on the outer corner and at the residents’ entrance.

Above: The index od brick shapes manufactured by Glen-Gery for the building

SELVON

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70 Products

Paints, Coatings & Finishes

Avoiding costly and tedious additional maintenance requires selecting the proper paints, coatings, and finishes from the outset. With applications for a number of materials—wood, metals, composites—the following products use tested technologies to ensure that your facade will withstand the test of time.

Sophie Aliece Hollis

ICONICA Collection Axalta axalta.com

Acquaduro 2k Polyurethane Akzo Nobel chemcraft.com

BEHR DYNASTY Exterior Paint Behr behr.com

Woodscapes Rain Refresh with Self-Cleaning Technology Sherwin Williams sherwin-williams.com

72 Resources

Barriers & Sealants

3M 3m.com

DuPont Tyvek dupont.com

Georgia-Pacific gp.com Henry henry.com

Huber Engineered Woods huberwood.com

Huntsman Building Solutions huntsmanbuildingsolutions.com

Kuraray kuraray.com

LP Building Solutions lpcorp.com

Rockwool rockwool.com

Thermafiber thermafiber.com

Cladding Attachment Systems

Longboard Architectural Products longboardproducts.com

National Nail nationalnail.com

Northern Facades isoclips.com

SFS sfs.com

Strongwell strongwell.com

Composites

Abet Laminati abetlaminati.com

Alpolic alpolic-americas.com

American Fiber Cement americanfibercement.com

Elemex elemex.com

Fiberon fiberoncladding.com

Kingspan kingspan.com

Moistureshield moistureshield.com

Omnis omnisusa.com

Owens Corning owenscorning.com

Slenderwall slenderwall.com Sto Corp. stocorp.com

Glass Agnora agnora.com

Oldcastle BuildingEnvelope obe.com

Pilkington pilkington.com

Pulp Studio pulpstudio.com

Thermglass thermglass.com

Viracon viracon.com

Vitro vitroglazings.com

Walker Glass walkerglass.com

Glazing Systems

C.R. Laurence crlaurence.com

ENVELON envelon.net

Extech extechinc.com

Faour Glass Technologies faourglass.com

GAMCO gamcocorp.com

Glasswerks glasswerks.com

Gutmann gutmann-na.com

Kawneer kawneer.com

Tubelite tubeliteinc.com

YKK AP ykkap.com

Masonry & Concrete

Fabcon fabconprecast.com

Gates Precast gateprecast.com

Glen-Gery glengery.com

High Concrete highconcrete.com

Metals

Alucobond alucobondusa.com

American Metal Craft americanmetalcraft.com

ATAS atas.com

BōK Modern bokmodern.com

Centria centria.com

Drexel Metals drexmet.com

Hydro hydro.com

Kriskadecor kriskadecor.com

Longboard longboardproducts.com

Metl-Span metlspan.com

Pure + Freeform purefreeform.com

Renson renson-outdoor.com

Reynaers reynaers.com

Rigidized Metals rigidized.com

Mineral-Based Cladding

American Fiber Cement americanfibercement.com

Boston Valley Terracotta bostonvalley.com

Ceramics of Italy ceramica.info Cosentino cosentino.com

Equitone equitone.com

Exagres exagres.es

Fiandre granitifiandre.com

Florim florim.com

Neolith neolith.com

Porcelanosa porcelanosa-usa.com

Rieder rieder.cc

Shildan shildan.com

Swiss Pearl swisspearl.com

TAKTL taktl-llc.com

Terreal North America terrealna.com

Paints, Coatings & Finishes

Akzo Nobel chemcraft.com

Axalta axalta.com

Behr behr.com

PPG ppgindustrialcoatings.com

Sherwin Williams sherwin-williams.com

Valspar valspar.com

Roofing Solutions

CertainTeed certainteed.com

GAF gaf.com

LP Building Solutions lpcorp.com

Mule-Hide Products mulehide.com

Owens Corning owenscorning.com

We Design

June 12–14, 2023

The world’s leading platform for commercial design THE MART, Chicago

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Our Partners Make a Difference

We are so grateful for the support of our corporate partners. Without your financial support, material donations, and volunteer hours, AEC Cares wouldn’t be possible.

Architect’s Newspaper is proud to be the media sponsor for AEC Cares #projectSanFrancisco.

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TRADE SHOW: MAY 23-25 |

CONFERENCE: MAY 21-25

JAVITS CENTER, NEW YORK

Find the Blueprint for Innovation

Don’t miss LightFair, the global event connecting architects with the latest in lighting. With over 165 credit hours available, you can access 10+ courses providing AIA-HSW accreditation at the industry’s most comprehensive conference. Connect with industry leaders and explore innovation in a whole new light this May in New York City.

Presentations

THE

REGISTER

Presented by

Simone Leigh

Through September 4

The Last of Animal Builders

Edith Farnsworth House 14520 River Road Plano, IL 60545

Through November 26

The United States Pavilion at Venice’s Giardini della Biennale is a utilitarian building in Palladian—which is to say, Jeffersonian—drag. At last year’s art biennale, artist Simone Leigh called attention to this fact by proposing an outfit change of her own. She concealed the boastful cornice under a bushy thatched roof, superimposed rustic wooden pilotis over all that redbrick, and installed a large bronze resembling a West African ritual mask in the forecourt. Leigh’s Gold Lion–winning intervention reveled in an “over-the-top Blackness,”

as she described it. The sculptures she exhibited are now featured in a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Perhaps because Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s museum building is less ripe for appropriation, Leigh avoided architectural statements here. No matter: Her brilliant bronze and porcelain works—monumental but also mournful, splendidly crafted yet tinged with despair—stand on their own. If you can’t make it to Boston, try to catch the show at its future stops in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. SM

Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City

Through August 13

This small exhibition makes no attempt to conceal the origin of its evocative title (taken from an unpublished manuscript of the architecture critic Sibyl Moholy-Nagy), but what the citation means isn’t entirely clear. Does curator Alberto Ortega Trejo intend to rub modernism’s face in the muck? To return to the bestial realm the capacity for designerly invention? Or, rather, to acknowledge that this capacity always existed, despite our inattentiveness? To disabuse architects of their fantasies of autonomy and inculcate an ethos of interspecies

collaboration? The likely answer, as these things often go, is “all of the above.” The Last of Animal Builders features new work by Chicagoarea artists and pieces borrowed from the Thoma Foundation. Inside the Edith Farnsworth House, sculpture and drawings attend, in some fashion or another, to the assorted myths of anthropocentricism, while video installations call attention to the pitiable vulnerability of the Miesian dream. The challenge of all house museums is to resist becoming decrepit. Shows like this help keep the cobwebs away. SM

Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue

Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, CA 90049

Through July 9

For most of her long life, fame eluded Evelyn Hofer, though she was appreciated for a few years before her death in 2009 at 87. Hofer is mostly characterized using the words of her advocate Hilton Kramer, who called her “the most famous unknown photographer in America.” But this ascription says next to nothing about her pictures, which approached modern urban life with a classicizing eye. Luckily, the High’s exhibition affords visitors the chance to luxuriate in the details. Hofer was capable of many moods, moving between

portraiture (Andy Warhol in his Factory), city scenes (1960s New York and Dublin), interiors (a particularly theatrical salon), even deadpan landscapes (a French garden lost in the mist). As Kramer himself noted, Hofer’s lens is roving yet always precise, conferring “a high dignity and an exalted character” onto its subjects. Take, as one more example, the exquisite framing of Queensboro Bridge, New York, 1964 , in which a young Black man gazes at Hofer with the self-possession of a European monarch. SM

After meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem in the 1970s, photographers Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems developed a lasting connection. This traveling show—it originated at the Grand Rapids Art Museum— marks the first time their work has been exhibited side by side. What makes this surprising is the thematic commonality between Bey’s and Weems’s photography, which negotiates Black life in America as well as its claims on the universal. Many of the portraits here are delineated by place,

whether it’s a single neighborhood (Harlem, in Bey’s case) or the multitudinous region of the American South (Weems’s Louisiana Project ). Where Bey clings to the street, Weems resides in interiors—that is, until you see her absconding to far-flung locales (Rome and Fiji, part of her Roaming series) and him to haunted landscapes ( Underground Railroad ). Theirs is a compatible vision, but not without their differences, as can be seen in a pair of enigmatic self-portraits: Bey, seen in silhouette, and Weems with her back to the camera. SM

PHOTO BY TIMOTHY SCHENCK © SIMONE LEIGH © THE ESTATE OF EVELYN HOFER

COURTESY EDITH FARNSWORTH HOUSE

DAWOUD BEY. COURTESY STEPHEN DAITER GALLERY

80 Review More City than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas

Edited by Lacy M. Johnson and Cheryl Beckett University of Texas Press | $39.95

Seen by developers as a flat plane, despite a rolling topography, three distinct ecologies, and 22 bayous, Houston houses some six million inhabitants and counting. It is obvious that despite floods, Houstonians love their city. Although we have all lived through the same floods, we are separated by certain distances—social and economic, lateral and vertical. The idea that each flood is my flood is clear in the 18 essays: The writer is the subject, and the offerings become a set of first-person narratives. Memories are tricky: Do I remember the event, or how I felt with the water rising, or is it an elaborate reconstruction? Is my story in focus, or the water’s? The stories are personal—Johnson herself shines as a memoirist—and show how the flood entered each life story. “The living water” of Johnson’s memory invades and settles, becoming part of our existence and adding complexity. Johnson writes that “flooding reinforces the inequalities that surround us every day” and further accentuates how intimate and familial floods are, while simultaneously reinforcing the social striations seen in the city’s population. Could the experiences of flooding create a new community with political power? Such opportunities fade when Houston dries and returns to complacently boasting about being the most diverse city in the country.

like each hurricane is personified. The issue isn’t really a technological one. As Daniel Peña writes, “This is a socioeconomic/race/ class problem, not a climate change problem,” a necessary declaration for those concerned with climate change. Portrayed by media as a “disaster-porn-freak-show,” storms are entered as “evidence” by those who accept climate change, rather than devastating occurrences, and for those who deny it, Peña suggests it’s merely a TV show with no lasting effect. His James Baldwin–inspired text shows how painful and multipronged climate disasters are. The failures behind are not just climactic but embarrassingly human, exposing our centuries-long hubristic relation to nature.

Johnson’s interviews are effective. She speaks with Grace Tee Lewis about air pollution and with editor Raj Mankad, who argues that “Houston is in denial of its history of flooding.” The reason has a lot to do with the fact that it is an ever-expanding city with no time for reflection. Since inundation is part of the workings of a delta and mostly affects those with less power, it is kept in the background.

The water is rising along America’s coasts. Places like New Orleans, Naples, Siesta Key, and Captiva Island (where Robert Rauschenberg worked) all have flood stories to tell. How long will it take before all littoral cities will forge atlases of inundations?

For Houston, a city separated from the coast and not properly “coastal,” the topics of concern in the national conversation are either “energy markets” or “no zoning.” Ocean rise does not come to mind— Houston is 50 feet above it all! But since it is linked by a long waterway and a delta of bayous that unite in frequent deluges— alternately the result of intensive rainfall or surges up from the Gulf of Mexico—waters have and will come. The bayous have been expertly reconfigured and buried; they now serve as paved runoffs. In addition, the wealthier parts of the large agglomerations are hidden under a zoohemic tree canopy, which covers the wet prairie. Yet almost as a surprise, hurricanes sweep water across the expanse, which invites the actual intentions of More City than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. When those monsters rage, the city’s inhabitants rise above.

Editor Lacy M. Johnson—writer, associate professor of creative writing at Rice University, and founder of the Houston Flood Museum—reminds us that Houston is not all tranquil subdivisions, crowded baseball diamonds, and frenetic oil derricks, tucked under a “faux-forested” canopy. It is also wet. Too often and too dramatically, too many wade waist-high in a “rank contagion of human and industrial waste,” she writes.

Johnson created the Houston Flood Museum after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Its online collection about the storm showcases the state just before the physical city is projected to disappear. Twelve graphic maps, illustrated in watercolor-like washes and edited by the coauthor Cheryl Beckett and a staff of graphic artists, run side by side with

the chapters. Beckett’s core team of three illustrators—Ilse Harrison, Jesse Reyes, and Manuel Vázquez—is in turn supported by almost 20 map designers. The maps are inventive, often beautiful, and contribute to the poetics of the whole project. They possess the contradictory fusion of graphic beauty and actual terror, a reminder that when humans experience disasters there can be positive consequences and hope.

As expected, the atlas is full of Houstons. Essay contributors, activists, poets, and fiction writers include author Bryan Washington, environmental anthropologist Dominic Boyer, and climate anthropologist Cymene Howe, with the essays grouped under the themes of history, memory, and culture. Within the atlas’s pages, we are on dry land. In Washington’s text, the high ground is the ultimate resort of a flooding city, which sends folks back to bed. That is until a hurricane climbs the bed legs. Houstonians do prepare for storms, but it’s the generic storm we have in mind, not this one, the storm that is mine or, as in Washington’s case, his family’s. The question remains: How long will we have to rely on the fickle high ground as a pacifier? Especially since the sky is the limit.

The section on community is broad, deep, and multidimensional—the word alluvial comes to mind. Ben Hirsch, codirector of organizing, research, and development for the Harvey relief organization West Street Recovery, speaks of community power, listening, and responding, what my old sociology professor instilled in me: When in doubt, go out and look. Boyer’s powerful depiction of “A Whole City on Stilts” communicates how the sound of water lapping inside the house is never forgotten. Community complaints of “too little, too late” join hydraulic jacks and flood insurance, leading Boyer to lose faith in stilts and conclude, “I wonder whether Houston might eventually become the first ghost megacity.”

In too many houses during too many storms, too many families watched the waters rise. The murk swallowed walls, minute by minute, destroying with varying effect everything in its rise. Captured in photographs, these views sit frozen and museum-like, while in motion, the observer drowns too. The common sense of sinking must be the source of the instant community that Johnson and many of the writers often refer to. Here, images of hell are interspersed with kindness: We see a young man guiding a floating inner tube carrying an elderly person and a cat. Suddenly everything is on the move. We see a house afloat or tilting radically, drifting across a flooded plain. Eighteen-wheelers majestically afloat on their side in a sunken freeway, drivers missing. Kibitzers on the bridge above look dazed, transfixed, staring. Everything has become unmoored.

There is a synthetic, all-inclusive quality to the atlas’s entries. Its disciplinary origin is worth highlighting: The atlas is largely charted by members of language faculties, not environmental engineers, and this shapes the remedies. For example, the atlas offers no solutions, such as filling the low-lying large “hog hollows” that poor people live in without flood protection. Instead, it documents “a story of sacrifice and resilience, of working together for the common good.” In the face of a hurricane that drops 60 inches of rain, a curious transformation takes place. In normally physically and socially separated populations, hardy communities bloom, revealing a dormant public just waiting to excel under duress.

There are surely ways to redesign the city that can help reduce flooding. City governments know this, but economic interest mixed with politics gets in the way. Communities of resilience are painfully aware of this, so the atlas shows us where spontaneous democracy appears behind the official facade, floating in rubber boats, grand trucks, kayaks, and inner tubes. Meanwhile those of us who live several feet above, and many yards away, are watching the drama on television. To view hurricanes as an oft-repeated, yearly phenomenon makes climatic sense and must be elected officials’ position. But rather than a unified response, each experience is individual, just

Today, the building of low-income housing in the outdated floodplains continues. As insurance companies get real about the climate crisis, flood insurance, one of those much-loved instruments that for years has given free rein to developers, comes into focus. How many times can you rebuild a flooded house? Well, it depends. Particularly for those who now live in areas that repeatedly flood. The answer should be that developers cannot build where flood insurance cannot be obtained, but such simple solutions are politically impossible. Somehow strangely imbedded in the thirsty real estate enthusiasm is a Houston whose magnificent bayous and ecologies endure, if you know where to look.

A next volume of the atlas may need to chart how folks accommodate the evolving climate and make room for water. Already some communities have no legitimate hope for change. In that case, the adjective resilient lands as a pejorative rather than a compliment. Still, Houston’s future may “go Dutch” via construction dikes, barriers, boosted by pumps: Last year, the federal government approved the start of work on the Ike Dike, a massive, $31 billion effort planned to regulate Galveston Bay through large gates at its opening to the Gulf of Mexico. Here, public works à la Rotterdam and its Maaslantkeering will be built, supposedly protecting residents and, importantly, the working bits of much of the country’s oil economy, lodged along the perimeter of the Ship Channel. Two contrary worlds are in the making: a water-tolerant Houston that survives and a laissez-faire Houston that disappears.

One thing the atlas confirms is that flooded Houstonians, when facing the inevitable next storm, will again gather to make good on their alliances. Never failing their orientation, the band of Houstonians featured in this book eloquently prove the power of the pen by offering a realistic climate poetics. If persistently and repeatedly applied to densely inhabited flood zones, atlases like this one may lead to a global wake-up call whose alarm may even reach the politicians.

Lars Lerup is a Houston writer whose latest book, The Life and Death of Objects: Autobiography of a Design Project, was published in 2022. When the Center No Longer Holds, a book on motorized urbanization, is in the making.

81 Review The Architecture of Disability: Buildings,

Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access

David Gissen | University of Minnesota Press | $24.95

paradoxes,” he continues, with emphasis. For Gissen, “a disability critique of the city must also address other forms of circulation and exchange” beyond functionalist upgrades, “particularly the dynamics of property and real estate,” he writes, as well as “sound housing, guaranteed access to food, and the demilitarization of urban space.”

Against Regimes of Ableism

Vitriolic disdain for human bodies and minds that deviate from heteronormative European beauty maxims and Protestant work-ethic standards permeates architectural discourse. Gissen’s work directly confronts this trajectory. He notes that in the 1920s the German art critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg associated Cubism with “human maladies” because of the way in which it rejected the ideal physique in its rendering of human beings—an idea about bodies later championed by Leon Krier in his own attacks on modernism. Though Gissen doesn’t mention it, the prior examples recall the instance when Dutch modernist Aldo Van Eyck derided postmodern buildings as “transvestite architecture” in the 1970s.

industrialization, thereby rejecting “the belief that norms and averages should define the character of an environment within which people are immersed.”

Toward an Architecture of Disability

At its best, critical theory does more than interpret the world around us. It can also confront us with our own unconscious biases and unchecked assumptions, which alters our subjectivity and the way we navigate the world. The result can be a vision of what a better, alternative world may look like. In a clear and succinct manner, Gissen’s The Architecture of Disability achieves the former goals while not elaborating on the latter imagination. Articulating precisely how this awareness could be applied in practice is not the main intent of the volume; perhaps that will arrive in a forthcoming offering.

continued from cover Part manifesto and part memoir, Gissen’s book upends centuries’ worth of dogmatic thinking in architecture by inserting “impaired” and “disabled” bodies into focus, an overdue act, as they have been excluded by the Western canon with very few exceptions to date. The Architecture of Disability takes on some of architecture theory’s most widely read (meaning white, able-bodied, male) intellectuals, such as Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Pierre Patte, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Leon Battista Alberti, Heinrich Wölfflin, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Gottfried Semper, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Lefebvre, and Vincent Scully. Gissen’s scholarship reveals how deeply entrenched ableism is within Enlightenment and modernist thought.

Upending the Canon Gissen’s thesis is in part that disability has historically been rendered largely invisible in famous architectural critiques about the city, race, gender, and class. In doing so, prior arguments alienate those who aren’t physically capable of rising “above the boulevard” and climbing “to the rooftops of Paris,” as Guy Debord and Jacques Fillon once called for in the revolutionary summer of 1968. Or, in Gissen’s own words: “As with race and gender, the integration of a disability perspective reveals key problems with the original premises of this critical tradition.” For instance, in his critique of the flâneur and Situationism—two hallmarks of urbanism postulated by Walter Benjamin in the 1920s and Guy Debord in the 1960s, respectively—Gissen reminds us that “only certain people can simply wander within a city in such a dramatic fashion to engage in this critical act of disobedience (which may not really be that critical at all).”

But Gissen’s ruminations go far beyond close readings of prolific thinkers. He launches epistemic critiques of how

monuments, preservation, nature, cities, architectural form, physiology, anthropomorphism, the sublime, aesthetics, functionalism, environmentalism, and history itself have been theorized since Immanuel Kant, tracing these subjects back to their ontological roots in order to cast a spotlight on how ableism is deeply nestled within these lineages. Moreover, Gissen does justice to contemporary antiracist, postcolonial, postmonumental, and critical museum studies scholars, showing the interconnectivity between disability activism and broader struggles being faced down today. References to theorists of disability such as Jos Boys, Aimi Hamraie, Raymond Lifchez, Joel Sanders, and David Serlin are placed alongside contemporary figures like Nikhil Anand, Irene Chang, Julien Chapuis, Maurice Chebab, Charles Davis, Hassan Fathy, Mario Gooden, Georgina Kleege, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Tobin Siebers, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, and Mabel O. Wilson, to collect some of Gissen’s erudite references.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable about Gissen’s work is how much ground he covers in just 142 pages, not counting the introduction, acknowledgments, or endnotes. According to Gissen, however, this wider political and philosophical purview is essential, which is arguably what bifurcates his text from those of previous disability scholars. Or, to put it simply: It is not enough to advocate for more curb cuts on sidewalks, although the author certainly pays his respects to groups like the “disability liberation activists” of Berkeley, California, in the 1970s, who have historically struggled to make the built and natural environments more accessible.

“Disabled people and their architectural advocates have often wrestled with this functionalist legacy,” Gissen writes. “Treating access as the sole form of disability representation and activism in architecture is the source of innumerable limits and

Today, architects such as Thomas Heatherwick and Steven Holl design buildings like the Vessel in Hudson Yards and Hunters Point Library in Queens, respectively, that “express their inaccessible elements as central aspects of their formal meaning,” Gissen states. The lack of access is a slap in the face to anyone who isn’t physically capable of ascending these buildings’ highest peaks. Moreover, many professors and practitioners continue to stress the notion that to make good architecture, students must “suffer” by putting their bodies and minds through Promethean ordeals before they complete a design to the level of desired aesthetic or conceptual satisfaction, an expectation riddled with ableism and other problematics related to class, race, and gender.

In short, Gissen’s informed prose attacks this chauvinistic legacy. Citing historian Sarah Rose, Gissen notes that “disability” itself is a relatively new concept dating back only to the 19th century, a time when industrialization was taking hold in cities throughout Europe and the U.S. “To put this more simply, a blind person, an amputee, and a traumatized veteran do not necessarily have anything in common with one another,” he writes. “But such people, with an array of impairments, began to coalesce into an identity as governments and industries evaluated such people’s capacities or incapacities to work.” Against these protofascist regimes of usefulness, Gissen’s book highlights the narrow interpretations of being human that emerged during

Gissen anticipates and responds to the question of good examples to emulate by highlighting a few precious moments in architecture’s history as inspiration for those of us in the present. He gives kudos to Stanley Tigerman’s Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (1978) for employing a “postmodern” and “postfunctional” architectural approach “that subverted and in some cases ridiculed the literalness of anthropomorphic and functionalist aesthetics.” Gissen also points readers toward Austria’s “Red Vienna” period in the 1920s, during which impaired war veterans and widows built semiautonomous communes on the Austrian capital city’s outskirts after World War I, creating new innovative buildings and construction methods along the way.

The Architecture of Disability is an open invitation for us to collectively imagine what a new, better world could look like while at the same time offering readers a chance at their own introspection. Within minutes of opening the book, I was thinking about my own shortcomings as a critic and, specifically, instances in which I reviewed a new building or park and accessibility wasn’t on my radar. Like with other liberatory struggles, whether it is for greater racial, gender, or LGBTQ+ equity, Gissen reminds us that the most effective way to right these wrongs is by having impaired people at the vanguard of fixing the broken world they occupy. In his impassioned coda, he notes that the task at hand requires a group effort and communal creativity: “How can we (you and I) reimagine practice to relate it to those marginalized by it?”

Dan Jonas-Roche is a lecturer at Kean University School of Public Architecture. He lives in New York City.

Stanley Tigerman, model of Garage Building, Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Chicago, 1976.

Everlasting Plastics

Ahead of the opening of the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, AN speaks with the curators of the next American Pavilion.

Lauren Yeager, a sculptor based in Cleveland, has been creating assemblages of plastic refuse using Midwestern Americana like Coleman coolers and Little Tikes play sets that embody another aspect of our relationship to plastics: There is a veneer of nostalgia with a cynical undertone. You see that these objects were waste, and now they are being repurposed into sculptural assemblage. It raises questions about waste, value, and production streams.

AN: How will these works be arranged in the pavilion? What will the exhibition look like?

lifesaving medical devices and there are gender-affirming and body-affirming uses. Aguirre’s work will address the relationship between queer futures and plastics. How do we critique the topic through a lens that is not dismissive or derisive of these experiences and ways of being? We’re working through this multiplicity of narratives. One of the authors included in Sketches on Everlasting Plastics talks about giving birth in a hospital and how much plastic is involved in that. Another considers the nostalgia for the shape of a bottle that used to be made out of glass.

us, so we get to be more experimental, bold, and daring in our ways of thinking and get to define what things are in ways that more visible parts of the country don’t get to. There’s space for experimentation and interrogating what it means to bring together art, architecture, and design.

These four pavilions—from The Architectural Imagination in 2016 to Dimensions of Citizenship in 2018 to American Framing in 2021—all work with a heartland mentality that this region is the most American America gets. How do we engage with that? How do we start to exploit that and expand its definition?

Last fall, Tizziana Baldenebro (left) and Lauren Leving (right) were announced as the curators of the next iteration of the United States’ contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale. Their proposal offers a close look at the material possibilities of plastic for architects, designers, and artists. In the midst of finalizing the pavilion’s offerings, Baldenebro and Leving spoke with AN’s executive editor Jack Murphy about their efforts.

AN: Why plastic?

Tizziana Baldenebro (TB): We live in Ohio and are surrounded by plastic. Petrochemical polymers are one of the state’s leading industries. Especially after events like the Norfolk Southern derailment, the presence of plastics is something that everyone understands. The ideas for Everlasting Plastics started to develop from living in this region. A lot of artists connect plastics to systems of waste and waste production and are interested in thinking deeply about this region’s relationship with the material.

AN: What can you share about the exhibitors who will show their work as part of the pavilion?

TB: The pavilion’s five participants all bridge architecture, design, and art.

Simon Anton is a Detroit-based designer who has been working with plastic waste and makes works with locally sourced material.

Xavi L. Aguirre, who is an architecture professor at MIT, has been thinking about larger metaphors of plasticity in relationship to aesthetics, reproduction, and modular systems.

Ang Li is an architecture professor at Northeastern who has been working with waste systems, extrapolating from the scale of bales of waste into conversations about materials like EPS foam, which often isn’t perceived as being plastic.

Norman Teague, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is working with the idea of creating sustainable workforces, which is a big conversation in the Midwest. We wanted to exhibit someone who hadn’t worked with plastic, so we are challenging him to research and learn new skills and methods and apply them to his existing working methods.

Lauren Leving (LL): We‘ve been working with two exhibition designers who are drawing from factory aesthetics inspired by sites of industrial production to support the flow of the exhibition. We will be opening the doors of the rotunda, which haven’t been used as an entrance in quite some time, to think about a circulatory system that parallels industrial versus individual waste streams. People will be able to navigate in their own ways, but each artist or architect has their own moment for visitors to engage with the work.

AN: How will you share these efforts with wider publics beyond the attendees in Venice?

TB: We are at work on a book project undertaken with Columbia Books on Architecture and the City titled Sketches on Everlasting Plastics. For the first iteration, we invited 20 or so writers to write texts in response to the themes of the exhibition. There are poems, heartfelt letters and conversations, critical thought—it’s a robust way of expanding ways of thinking and ensuring the dialogue doesn’t end with the five featured exhibitors. We plan to have a first run of this publication available when the Biennale opens and then it will be more widely available alongside a catalogue. We will also add these texts to the website so everyone can read them.

AN: What kind of feedback have you received in Cleveland about the project?

LL: We’ve received a lot of positive feedback, and everybody is excited. We’re working with an art history professor at Case Western Reserve University and her upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, who are reading and conducting research about environmental practices in arts and plastic. The students are helping to develop programs alongside Everlasting Plastics in Cleveland to engage local audiences who are unable to travel to Venice. Petrochemical plastic polymers are the largest industry here, so we’re situating a critical discourse here, even though the artworks won’t be present. These conversations are now rippling beyond our work into local design schools and architecture programs, which have huge influence on the city and the state’s architecture culture.

AN: When working on waste and the Rust Belt, where do you locate hope and strength?

TB: It’s important to think about altered relationships to plastic, even positive ones: There are applications that are

LL: We’re talking about the sustainability of jobs here too, as plastics producers are the leading employer in the region. As we’re thinking of uses and reuse for material and waste streams, we’re also considering the resources that plastic manufacturing offers to workers. There are dire downsides, but at the same time it is employing many people and supporting their families.

AN: The last four American pavilions have been led by Midwest-based curators. Why is that? Have you been mentored by past curators for this project?

TB: The mentorship has been tremendous. We spoke early on with Ana Miljački, Ann Lui, Mimi Zeiger, Iker Gil, Paul Andersen, and Paul Preissner. There has been an outpouring of support, and it is special to receive that “whatever you need, just text away” response.

The region offers an expansive place to think about architecture and design. There’s so much industrial design going on, and there’s a strong connection to postindustrial landscapes. There’s this flyover mentality, which imagines that people aren’t watching

AN: What else should readers know about the upcoming American Pavilion?

TB: We’re trying to establish the ability to extrapolate from plastics our expectations for other materials. Plastic creates expectations for other materials, and these ideas can change over time. How do we go back to the genesis of the word plastic as a good way of being, a flexible and adaptable way of being?

We’re also trying to make a connection between our region and Venice. We’re connecting with Venice Lagoon Plastic Free, an organization that collects plastic waste in the Venetian lagoons. We’re working on partnerships that start to resist the typical biennial/triennial mindset and instead build longer relationships that impact ways of operating and thinking. Hopefully, these become institutional and infrastructural changes.

Tizziana Baldenebro is the executive director of SPACES in Cleveland.

Lauren Leving is the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

Simon Anton, After the Federal Reserve, 2023, plastic and steel

MCKINLEY WILEY

and present

May 18, 2023

Symposium 5:30–6:30 | Aperitifs 6:30–9:00

Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice

RSVP for drinks in the garden preceded by an insightful conversation. Invited critics include Oliver Wainwright of The Guardian; Inga Saffron of the Philadelphia Inquirer; Davide Tomaso Ferrando of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano; Mohamed Elshahed of Cairobserver; and Erandi de Silva of Loké Journal.

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