Out of Practice The Monacelli Press
Kimberly J. Holden Gregg Pasquarelli Christopher Sharples Coren Sharples William Sharples Introduction by Philip Nobel The Monacelli Press
Contents Introduction Philip Nobel
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Dunescape
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Does architecture need style?
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Virgin Atlantic Upper Class Clubhouse
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What classifies architectural practice?
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Hangil Book House
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What is the form of finance?
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The Porter House
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What is the economy of optimization?
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Mitchell Park
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What are the rewards of risk?
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Pedestrian Bridges at Ground Zero
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Does bureaucracy kill innovation?
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East River Waterfront
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Practice, Politics, Finance, Technology, Sustainability Fashion Institute of Technology
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What makes construction intelligent?
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South Street Seaport
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Can buildings evolve?
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Media Company Headquarters
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Does size matter?
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Supertall Mixed-Use
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Can we go beyond green bling?
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Botswana Innovation Hub
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Are computers the answer?
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Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards
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Projects
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Introduction Philip Nobel
So you’re an architect. Cool. What kind of architect? If you’re in the profession yourself, you’ve heard that question. Perhaps you hesitated, winced, not sure precisely why. You may have indulged in a stir of annoyance, thinking, Well, it’s not that simple . . . not at all. Still you answered politely—I design x kind of building, or y; my firm designs z—and moved on, knowing something deep was amiss. If you’re not an architect, you may have asked that question once or twice in earnest, meaning no harm. It is natural enough, of course, innocent, uncontroversial on its face. Even logical: there’s a world of buildings out there, we see and visit and live in them all the time; it follows that there must be an equally diverse world of architects, grading into specialization to produce each type. That’s how every profession works today, after all, each in its atomized efficiency, no one practitioner capable of mastering the complexity to which his or her field has evolved. Architecture, for the most part, is no different. There’s no shame in it. But what was that pause when you asked the question of your new acquaintance, that hollow wink of fear, that passing darkness in the eyes? There’s nothing in your query that could be offensive, sure. Nothing challenging there at all. Certainly nothing that might trigger a crisis of self-doubt. What kind of architect are you? It is never a question that architects ask each other, knowing, perhaps, that it is not something they wish to ask themselves. Of all our professions, every one
fractured to meet the demands of a fractured world, architecture is the most beholden to an ideal of unity, to a sense of its own special, indivisible purpose. In a field that counts its history in centuries, it was not so long ago, seven or eight decades, when an architect could yet be a master of the whole—space and systems, materials and engineering, poetry and use— when a critic might occasionally satisfy the urge to capitalize that leading A without ridicule, when Frank Lloyd Wright could bandy the idea of architecture as “the Mother Art” and it might still ring true. The fracturing is more keenly felt than it might be in medicine, or law: all architects, in their private hearts, are generalists. You see the world, a place where it is broken; you dream a fix; you make it work, make it real. Every day, as a child, the future architect may solve or critique a thousand problems of form and function that have nothing to do with buildings. It is a birthright, coded into the soul of the profession— Vitruvius applying his mandates equally to sculpture and villas and streets, teachers at the Bauhaus suggesting that their system could guide the design of everything from a city to a spoon. The habits of thought that lead to good design—smart design, independent of style—must be scalable, it’s true, viz. the many architects who strive to develop sidelines in furniture, housewares, jewelry, fashion. You may judge each by your taste. But compare those efforts to the often empty travesties produced when artists first aspire to architecture, unable to manage that
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other factor—not function alone, but the effortless assimilation of function—that gives a building (or a necklace, or a teapot) life. In schools today, students are still sometimes asked to work through problems from the object to the urban scale, to find the special points of concord between the demands of art and action—taught, if only quietly, to exalt beauty by use. But in practice, professional practice, the architect’s creative orbit tends to shrink, miserably, inexorably, limited not only by chance—which jobs come first, which they can handle—but by willful participation in an economic division that amounts to a self-imposed exile from the essence of the craft. In this taxonomy, the first cut is the cruelest. What kind of architect, indeed? Are you the kind with whom I can share my dreams, the client asks, can trust to give them form? Can you apply your lifetime of poetic intuition to the problem of making my life (or my home, my store, my skyscraper, my museum) into a concrete expression of the good? The beautiful? An object of desire? Of transcendence? Can you fix in stuff, as the program demands, gorgeous or terrible, the ephemera of the mind? Can you make my building a work of art? Or are you the kind of architect I can trust, really trust, with my money? Will you get it done, on time, tight and cheap? Exploit the zoning? Finesse the codes? Keep the rain out? Do you understand the systems that will make it work? Make it last? The engineering that will make it stand? Can I trust you with the math to make it pay?
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In truth, every job needs both modes of thinking, poetic and technical, simultaneously and in equal measure. It’s what clients and the public deserve, what the title Architect promises. But by forming themselves into hostile parties on opposite scarps of that first great rift—“stars” or “geniuses” or “artists” on one side, “corporate architects” or “businessmen” or worse on the other—by limiting practice to a dualistic stereotyping that has proven effective in the marketplace, by choosing a strategy that flatters clients’ vanities or eases their fears, architects only reinforce an insidious divide. Insidious and increasingly hoary, now, its genesis lost in the traumas of architects seeking to make do during the lean years of World War II, seeking to benefit from the boom in monumental modern construction afterward, seeking to fend off challenges from emerging professions adjacent, seeking to manage unprecedented material complexity, seeking to conceive novel types of buildings—types of building—to secure a place in that new, broken, systematized world for a very old, whole, organic way of thinking. A very human way of thinking, one that proves its vulnerability in loss. That’s when the compromise was made, the devil’s bargain. That’s when the model of the big technical firms was born and set—corporate architects capable of matching the corporate priorities of their corporate clients with corporate scale. That’s also when the model of the star architect alternative solidified, in reaction. They may give you space, the artiste’s
sales pitch might have read, but we will give you art. In an era when the evils of money became part of the popular script, it worked. Louis Kahn and his disciples made a religion of it. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill ground out graceful solutions, oblivious. Philip Johnson made his special place by planting one big foot in each camp. But he was a singular talent at compromise, and it’s no accident Kahn never worked for IBM. The great divide is normal now, as if it had always been, the possibility of fuller-bodied practice all but forgotten. We now expect that stars and only stars will build the glamour buildings. We now expect big firms and only big firms will get the serious jobs done. But architecture is architecture, as any child knows. In all jobs, a design, a building, is the result of an enormous effort of synthesis. The factors at work—gravity, money, effect, use, albeit in different proportion—are shared by all built things. Very often a “bad” building is one that doesn’t try to do enough. And architects don’t always face the difficulty of what they must ideally do. It is complicated, strangely romantic, a bit arcane, a hard sell on a good day—so some architects never try. There are easier ways to conduct business. Slip into one of the tropes there waiting: the corporate firm, solving art last, protects the client’s bottom line; the artist, eschewing business, protects his own. The physical world suffers: its spaces, its citizens, its builders, too, inside. And along comes that inspired naif, the friend of a friend, who dares to ask you which shortcut you prefer to sell your soul.
Is it possible to be marginalized by being too general? In architecture it is. That was a lesson taught every day in the design studios at Columbia University in the early 1990s. I felt it, and I know many other students at the time did, too—among them four of the five who would convene SHoP in 1996, shortly after their graduation. (The fifth, Chris Sharples, finished at Columbia four years earlier.) In recognizing and applying the moral of a story we share, they have all of my respect, and my empathy. It was a funny time to be taught, to be learning, a hard time if you found yourself in possession of out-of-fashion ideas—that architecture was a serious pursuit in service to culture; that buildings should not just mirror but embody the complexity of the world; that architects should build. The artist/technician tension in the profession was very much in play at Columbia in those years, as it was and is at many schools, a component of our confusion even if no one knew to name it. Naming itself was a perilous enterprise then. The Deconstructivist Architecture show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York had opened in 1988. The largely unbuilt work celebrated there betrayed a narrow vision of architects as composers of broken volumes, masters of surfaces (of buildings on paper and of the paper itself), amateur philosophers, cynics, and even sometimes (carrying forward the animus of other postmodernisms) winking ironists. All of that lingered in Columbia’s studios as an
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Dunescape New York, New York, 2000
This urban beach installation, winner of the first MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects competition in 2000, manipulated the idea of promenade to blur the distinction between art and the viewing public. Visitors lounging, socializing, sunbathing, wading in pools, or being cooled by a spray of mist could be considered “on display� as part of the installation. Museumgoers, who observed this activity on the way to the main building, were themselves observed, much like bathers strolling along a beach. The installation was configured as a landscape in which structure, program, and enclosure were collapsed into a singular form articulated by triangulated frames of twoby-two-inch cedar sticks. The angle, depth, and locus of triangulation within each frame spoke to changes in surface and use. Typical architectural drawing methods could not analyze or convey this complex geometry for construction purposes; instead, we exported full-scale color-coded templates from the digital model. The frames were cut and assembled directly on the template sheet and then joined with wood screws to the ever-growing structure. Templates and materials arrived on the site each day as required. This simple system allowed us to build the project on a low budget, with relatively unskilled labor, in a short time. 45
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What is the form of finance? Architects are often relegated to the aesthetic and formal aspects of a project even though architectural knowledge is uniquely capable of effecting financial feasibility. By introducing financial instruments and parameters into design, architects can fundamentally alter the rules of the game.
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Territories Claimed The cantilever we designed for the Porter House required a complex restructuring of the existing building—an expensive proposition most developers considered impossible. Yet in the end, the nine thousand square feet generated by the cantilever created a profitable economic structure, making it possible to secure financing and build the project.
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Twelve developers proposed using the existing building for condos.
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Nine developers proposed a transfer of the adjacent air rights.
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Three developers proposed modestly cantilevering the new floors.
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Only we, the architects, proposed a six-floor cantilever.
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What is the form of finance?
height limit
new
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setbac
setback
ights transfe air r r
air ri
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The Porter House
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New sites for ground-up towers in New York, the densest city in the United States, are not easily located. While master planning the East River Waterfront, we discovered that the FDR Drive was overbuilt by two lanes. Removing these lanes would produce 750,000 square feet of sellable development rights. The resulting revenue would pay for the construction of a new esplanade and park for the residents of Lower Manhattan. Slender residential towers maintain the river views of the commercial buildings behind them. The direct relationship of unlocked potential and public amenity drives the design.
Height of private development
Potentials Invented
Public promenade and water frontage
70-foot tower = 140-foot promenade
120-foot tower = 240-foot promenade
180-foot tower = 360-foot promenade
Available footprint
20 .25 .30 .45 b b b b
20 .25 .30 .45 b b b b
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20 .25 .30 .45
.6 .75 b b
.6 .75
b b What is the form of finance? .6 .75
Public promenade
East River Waterfront
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East River Waterfront New York, New York, in progress
The design for this two-mile stretch of park at the edge of the East River seeks both to embody the site’s long history as a working waterfront and to embrace its many urban anomalies, such as the elevated FDR Drive, which materialized as maritime industry disappeared, and the South Street Seaport Historic District. A systematic approach to revitalizing an area once overflowing with activity, the proposal focuses on connecting the city to the water’s edge, completing the pedestrian greenway that encircles Manhattan Island, and activating the waterfront year-round with new cultural, community, commercial, and recreation nodes. Pavilions inserted beneath the FDR reconnect the city and its streets to the perimeter of the island and regenerate the former density of the waterfront with concentrated areas of community activity. Reconstructed piers extend this activity and provide views back to the city. Construction details—traditional waterfront materials interpreted via contemporary fabrication techniques—reinforce the unique character of this area and its maritime past.
Manhattan
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East River
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Practice
The beginning of our firm preceded the beginning of our firm. By the time we five founding partners started graduate school, we had accumulated a wide variety of experiences in areas other than architecture. These disciplines—political science, marketing, investment banking, real estate development, art history, fine arts, photography, structural engineering, and even waiting tables, selling vacuum cleaners, and working in retail—allowed us to view and critique the art of architecture, the industry of architecture, and the profession of architecture from different perspectives: philosophical, aesthetic, technical, financial, and administrative. The seeds of the firm were planted at Columbia— we learned the importance of critique and debate as applied not only to design but to business, practice, and industry—and then cultivated at our yearly birthday gathering—three of us were born on October 29. Every year we had lengthy soundingboard conversations about the problems facing the profession. We were disillusioned with the choices before us but felt that there was no practice model that we were drawn to, that was satisfactory, useful, or relevant: the corporate firm, the angst-ridden Howard Roark–esque solo practice, the boutique atelier. While we had a lot to learn, we recognized a shared entrepreneurial spirit. In thinking about the kind of firm we did aspire to be, we looked outside the industry, to the management consultant McKinsey & Company and Lockheed Martin’s in-house Skunk Works.
McKinsey, historically, has favored fresh graduates over seasoned veterans of the corporate world and assembled multidisciplinary teams to gain fresh insights into problem solving. Skunk Works’s fourteen operating rules espoused keeping teams small but strong and stressed the importance of collaboration, communication, and mutual trust between clients, designers, and contractors. We often spoke of wanting to run our firm “like a business generating ideas and beauty,” not like an atelier for starving artists. But this attitude was not shared as we began our post-graduation job searches. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between a student’s design talent and drive, and his or her expectations regarding financial compensation. The most talented designers were expected to “suffer for their art,” not “sell out” for a steady paycheck. It seemed to us that the opposite should be true, that gifted prac titioners should be paid for their aptitudes and that architects should compete based on talent and expertise. Obviously, young designers, with little expe rience and slim portfolios, would have to charge less than those with lots of experience and work to show. We often accepted low-paying commissions in the early days in order to build our portfolio, but to us this was a necessary marketing cost, not a surrender to the standard economics of the profession. We guarded against extending the cost of developing business to taking advantage of our staff. At the time SHoP was founded, many firms, notably boutique studios headed by professors at
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Ivy League schools, were staffed by unpaid interns. These internships were almost an extension of graduate school, where young designers—those who could afford to—developed their résumés and portfolios. This practice cheapened the profession, reinforced the impression of architecture as an elitist occupation, and made it more difficult for firms that paid their employees to compete on a fee basis. SHoP has never used unpaid interns. SHoP originally stood for Sharples (Bill, Chris, and Corren), Holden (Kim), Pasquarelli (Gregg). (The “o,” we joked, represented our collective bank balances.) In 2007 we changed the name of the firm to SHoP Architects, removing the founders from the title and recognizing the value of the collaborative efforts of everyone who works here. The change coincided with the formation of SHoP Construction, with Jonathan Mallie as the sixth partner and managing director. As we grew, the types of work we did and the way we went about doing it tested, and at the same time reflected, our beliefs. Some things emerged out of necessity. As young designers, working with tight fees, we wore many hats. We prepared our own grading plans, performed our own zoning analyses, did our own graphic design, made our own fullscale lighting mock-ups, and even built some of our own installations. Today, our project budgets and associated fees have room for all the specialists needed to service a job. We benefit from working with others, gaining exposure to their ideas and bodies of knowledge. But we still maintain and constantly
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expand our in-house expertise. These skills make us more informed as designers, more strategic as coordinators, and more confident as team leaders. In the architecture world of 1994, there was a disconnect between buildings, produced by contractors, and working drawings and models, produced by architects. This disconnect reached its zenith with the paper architecture trend. Avant-garde designers behind the iron curtain could not build their work, and so for these architects, published images became an end in themselves. After the recession of the late 1980s/early 1990s, the same fate befell architects emerging from graduate school in the United States, since there was very little being built. The most talented students, rather than go to work for corporate firms designing dreary office parks, went directly into teaching. They rejected practice, which for them held no promise. We were cautioned, in so many words and by more than one professor, not to let the purity of our work be sullied by the compromises required to build it—programs, budgets, and the realities of construction. We rejected this course. We wanted to build. We wanted to teach. We also made a conscious decision, at the outset, to use technology both to strengthen our capacity as designers and to differentiate ourselves from other firms. The architects of the Renaissance were master builders who worked directly with guilds to create great works. In our time, the computer, if used in a new way, could bring us closer to this model. Computer-aided design was
then in its relative infancy, and three-dimensional modeling was used only as a very expensive rendering tool. While larger firms had adopted CAD, most boutique offices were still paper-based. However, the automotive and aviation industries were using threedimensional modeling to design, analyze, prototype, and fabricate their products. Rather than treating our drawings and models as an end, we could work on the architectural components themselves via digital models that would go directly into fabrication. This technology would not replace the architect’s hand but would rather extend and empower it, and it would become the method by which we could compete with the large firms while staying small and focused. Frank Gehry, a pioneer in bringing digital technologies to architecture, was a huge inspiration. (And not just in our development of the computer as a tool: Gehry opened a 1999 lecture at Columbia by noting that his office had never had an unpaid intern.) At the time, he was looking for ways to reproduce in digital form what he had already sculpted in physical materials. We wanted to take the next step, to use the computer to generate and build the complex geometries that had entered the popular lexicon of architectural theory. Technology invented by the film industry made it possible to visualize complex shapes. But there was no way to extract these geometries into two-dimensional working drawings, to analyze them structurally, or to build them efficiently. We directed our efforts toward developing forms that were complex but that responded precisely to
program, site, environmental or other conditions, and the demands of structure. The use of digital technology fit the philosophy of our office in many ways. It introduced into our work data from numerous sources, making us problem solvers as well as form makers. It helped us collaborate and communicate with clients, consultants, and builders. And it kept our teams small and strong, prioritizing intelligence and creative thinking over body count. For us, this path has never been a compromise; it has always seemed the best way to push the profession forward. And our commitment to a collaborative, multidisciplinary work environment and our investments in technology have been validated as the profession slowly moves toward integrated design and delivery.
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Are computers the answer? Software is a powerful tool for architects. Computers don’t design buildings, but software protocols and capabilities affect the direction of a design, for better or worse. Understanding the technology of computing is just as important as understanding the technology of construction in allowing architects to design and manage complex projects.
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Find the Right Tool . . . Solving a problem requires the right tool. An all-encompassing software solution is generally no more effective than using pliers to drive a nail. We use many different types of software throughout the design, fabrication, and construction phases.
Excel/ Access
Strand/ Robot
Complex Geometry Workflow
Generative Components
Analys
Ecotect
Radia
Parametric Software 3D Max
Rhino
Custom Scripts
InDesign
Revit
Drawing
Photoshop
PowerPoint
Vray
AutoCAD
Docum Presentation Workflow
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The S-Word
How can we move beyond sustainable bling?
SHoP Architects
Illustrator
Co W
Generative Components
4D/5D Workflow
Project/ Primavera
Parametric Software
Building Explorer
3D Max
sis Workflow
Custom Scripts
ance
Navis Works
File Management Workflow InDesign
PowerPoint
Outlook
3D Max
Geomagics
Rhino
g Documentation
3D Printer
Presentation Workflow
Physical Model
Laser Cutter Fabrication Workflow
SHoP Architects SHoP Construction
mentation Workflow
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. . . or Invent It Architects are often asked to investigate what can be built on a specific site. SHoP has developed a program called Envelope that can take any address in New York City and analyze the site for the designer, developer, land owner, broker, or neighbor. It prompts the user with a series of questions and quickly develops the massing and other data necessary to begin to design the building.
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The S-Word
How can we move beyond sustainable bling?
Envelope zoning analysisEnvelope program
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Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards New York, New York, in progress
Our office is part of the design-build group for Barclays Center, also known as the arena for the Nets basketball team, in Brooklyn. The design of the facade, plaza, and public areas strives to achieve a balance between formal identity and performative engagement. Integrated into one of the busiest urban intersections in New York City, the center sustains a strong dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood. At sidewalk level, the public concourse is predominately glazed to ensure optimum visibility through to the arena’s interior spaces, and a thirty-foot-high cantilevered canopy, with an oculus that frames the view of the arena from the plaza, announces the entrance. A major component of the arena’s design is its intricate metal latticework. We began working with the facade contractor to ensure accurate crafting of the flocking pattern and details. A direct-to-fabrication process enables the manufacture and sequenced delivery of 11,499 unique metal panels.
DIAGRAM // ABSTRACTED FORM
DIAGRAM // PROGRAMMING Loading entry
Views Entry Retail
Entry
Views Entry
DIAGRAM // CIVIC GESTURE
Entry plaza
Retail
DIAGRAM // CIVIC GESTURE
Canopy
Oculus
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Halo: 5,666 unfolded panels
Lower band: 5,086 unfolded panels
Canopy: 747 unfolded panels
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