AN June 2023

The Architect's Newspaper

Let the Biennale Begin!

SPACES OF

INCLUSION

SOM’s Baxter Under Threat Powerhouse The (W)rapper Vitruvius in Circulation

As a young architect with SOM in 1972, Richard Tomlinson saw something special in the Baxter International suburban office campus, which was already underway when he joined the firm. “It was conceived as a dynamic campus that made flexibility a fundamental principle,” he told AN. “What fascinated me about Baxter was its application of flexibility principles from high-rise office buildings for corporate and commercial clients to a campus environment.” It wasn’t one of his assigned projects, but he took it on as a “hobby” anyway. “I basically volunteered to help out after hours, weekends, whatever the firm needed, and I did that with Baxter,” Tomlinson recalled. After the 600,000-square-foot development for a medical equipment giant opened in 1975, he stayed on, working with the client through an expansion in the ’80s and beyond, making it one of his longest-term clients at SOM, from which he retired in 2014. continued on page 14

Walls & Doors

All arts and crafts have a history, and histories must start somewhere. Around the end of the Middle Ages scholars of ancient literature—first in some Italian cities— began ruminating on the idea that architecture was born on the shores of Greece and Italy (and not in the ancient Near East, as the Bible claims); they also concluded that Greek and Roman architecture built during the age we now call classical was the best of all time, which in turn prompted architects to imitate it—or “revive” it, as they claimed. This was the beginning of the classical tradition that has since held sway over the architecture of Christian Europe, with some interruptions, almost to the present day—in Europe and elsewhere. When Renaissance humanists started their studies of antiquity, they stumbled on a book on architecture written around the end of the first century BCE by someone named Vitruvius—apparently a military engineer—and they thought that book could help them continued on page 64

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Vol. 21, Issue 5 | June 2023

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The first official architecture biennale in Venice was held in 1980 and curated by Italian architect Paolo Portoghesi, who recently died at the age of 91. It was during this event that the long, dark expanse of the Corderie within the city’s Arsenale, or shipyard, was brightened by the architect-designed storefronts of the Strada Novissima exhibition. A “critics’ corner” at one end was anchored by a large, “giant stubby pencil, as if worn short from use, and slightly aslant, apparently in tribute to the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” as Glenn Adamson described the scene in an essay last year.

But there were prior architecture efforts as part of the art biennale. These, led by another Italian architect, Vittorio Gregotti, were more directly concerned with the plight of Venice itself. The first was unveiled in 1975, when Gregotti organized a competition about the Molino Stucky, a large, abandoned flour mill on the island of Giudecca. The results featured proposals from artists, architects, and local representatives.

Gregotti later directed two more shows in the ’70s for the biennale before Portoghesi arrived: Werkbund 1907 in 1976 and Utopia and the Crisis of Anti-Nature in 1978.

This first show was “very political,” as Gregotti remarked to Aaron Levy and Bill Menking when they interviewed him in Milan in 2009 for their book Architecture on Display: On the History of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, published in 2010 by the Architectural Association. Gregotti wanted “to make a clear and certain declaration that the biennale was open to the public, to Venice and to non-specialists.” The move responded to “the problem of 1968,” when, at the 34th art biennale, students protested in Piazza San Marco and the Giardini, causing some artists to refuse to show their work in solidarity. (“At least we have an interesting Biennale again,” one “jaded art dealer from Rome” declared, according to The New York Times.) It’s inspiring to think of these humble, socially responsive origins for architecture’s participation in the biennale, as it shows the progress made by this component of La Biennale di Venezia. In a short time, architecture’s portion became widely influential as the celebrations grew in footprint, popularity, and spin. This arrives alongside the thorough commodification of Venice as a museum

of itself. Today, the Molino Stucky, once the subject of Gregotti’s instigations, is a Hilton hotel.

We have our own contemporary provocations, many of which surface in the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Lesley Lokko, which opened last month. Among them are the current iteration of the (very unofficial) Unfolding Pavilion, curated by Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando, which adopted the theme of #OPENGIARDINI. The organizers criticize the near-total controlled access to the Giardini, which began as a park. Currently, only a third of the grounds are open to the public without purchasing a ticket to the art or architecture biennales, and the green space’s edges are hardened “by the system of gates, walls, fences, CCTV cameras, metal spikes, barbed wire, and armed guards,” according to Munteanu and Ferrando. Still, there are two locations where the barriers break down and people can slip by, so the pavilion highlighted them with signage, stairs, protective caps for the aforementioned spikes, and ladders, all painted red, plus red carpet. Vernissage attendees were able to see the interventions for a few days before the biennale removed them and life returned to business as usual.

The act’s ideals of open access relate to the official biennale’s effort, led by Lokko, to display work by a broad set of architects whose work largely went unseen in prior versions of the exhibition. Turn to page 16 to read my review of the results.

Inclusivity also powers this issue’s features, which include texts that explore the topic through urban landscapes, designing for HBCU campuses, and reshaping the classroom to be one of broader operational awareness for architecture’s new top talents. Dig in on page 33.

Of course, the issue has much more to offer. Check out its ample spread of news, crits, and reviews, and don’t miss the Focus section, which begins on page 41. AN’s coverage hits whether you’re seeing these words on a screen or printed on paper. However you receive AN these days, the point is that you’re reading what we’re writing. What happens next is up to you.

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Corrections

The WoodWorks National Design Award is produced by Woodworks. The 2023 International Mass Timber Conference was co-hosted by the Forest Business Network and Woodworks.

Duvall Decker’s principal is Anne Marie Duvall, not Ann Duvall.

The director of Lucifer Lighting is Suzanne Mathews, not Matthews.

Comments about Testbeds published in the case study about the project are attributable to its three organizers—Jaffer Kolb and Ivi Diamantopoulou of New Affiliates and Sam Stewart-Halevy—not solely Stewart-Halevy, as listed in print.

A Place to Gather Change of Hands

Lina

The 22nd Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Lina Ghotmeh, opened to the public on June 10. The annual pavilion commission, organized by the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, has hosted international projects since 2000. This year’s pavilion, which will be open through October 29, is again supported by Goldman Sachs with AECOM providing technical advisory services and David Adjaye returning as an adviser.

Titled À table, the wooden structure was designed in line with its natural surroundings and is encircled by a series of wooden stools and tables. Ghotmeh’s design was inspired by the architect’s experience growing up in Beirut and living and working in Paris, along with her long-standing focus on sustainable materials through her firm Lina Ghotmeh—Architecture. Her past projects include the Estonian National Museum, Stone Garden in Beirut, and Ateliers Hermès in Normandy, France. A series of 25 tables snake around the perimeter of the circular pavilion, complete with 57 backless stools, designed by Ghotmeh in collaboration with The Conran Shop. Ghotmeh hopes that this setting will encourage people to gather, serving as a place to “eat, work, play, meet, talk, rethink, and decide.”

The 300-square-foot pavilion rises 14.4 feet (4.4 meters) at its peak and was constructed with glulam timber columns and rafters. A central steel ring supports the structure, and the rooftop deck was installed with plywood and an applied membrane for waterproofing. The facade was built with plywood panels placed between the columns, which were stained and treated for fire resistance. Foundations were poured with precast concrete designed to be “removable and reusable.”

Ghotmeh likened the resulting form of the pavilion to toguna huts built by Dogon communities in western Mali and the canopy-esque roof to “echoing the structures of tree leaves,” emphasizing the use of low-carbon materials and formal moves that resonate with the site’s surrounding park. Ghotmeh summarized the approach: “While rooted in its place and welcoming the space of the park with its open gallery-like envelope, the Pavilion invites us into its intimate interior where light shimmers through the fretted panels enveloping its heart. Growing as an adaptable system, À table is a lightweight structure that can easily be disassembled and reassembled. It will live beyond its Serpentine site all while holding the memory of its original ground.”

The modular system was prefabricated by Stage One Creative Services in York, United Kingdom, with residual waste timber chipped for use in the manufacturer’s biomass energy facility. AECOM said that the larger design team also performed an audit to ensure that the timber was sustainably sourced and that all products in the building’s construction were sourced from sustainable supply chains. The straightforward bolt-and-screw assemblies will allow for the structure to be easily dismantled and reused.

Bettina Korek, chief executive of Serpentine Galleries, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of Serpentine Galleries, said: “We are honored to unveil Lina Ghotmeh’s first structure in the U.K. À table continues Serpentine’s mission of building new connections between artists, architects, and society. Drawing on natural elements that reflect its local surroundings, Ghotmeh’s design promotes unity and conviviality in its form and function.”

Designed in 1966 by architect Marcel Breuer as a storage location for the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue—the boxy Brutalist structure situated near Manhattan’s Museum Mile—has quite the provenance. Tenancy of the Breuer Building has changed hands a number of times in recent years, including with the announcement on June 1 that global auction house Sotheby’s would purchase the building.

Breuer won the commission to design the building, beating out more established architects of the time including Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, and I. M. Pei. His design is often likened to an inverted ziggurat, featuring several cantilevers and a notable lack of windows. The Whitney Museum used the building until 2014, when it moved downtown to a new (also boxy) building designed by Renzo Piano.

Upon the Whitney’s departure from the Breuer Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art signed on to take over the lease and launched a renovation led by Beyer Blinder Belle. In its short tenure on Madison Avenue, the Met Breuer housed the museum’s contemporary art collection. It closed down in June 2020, with plans in the works to hand the lease over to another Upper East Side art institution, the Frick.

In 2021 the Frick occupied the building, using the exhibition space as a temporary location for its collection while its building on Fifth Avenue, between 70th and 71st, undergoes a renovation

Itsy-Bitsy

Earlier this month, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced the 2023 Small Project Awards winners. In its 20th iteration, the Small Projects Awards have stayed true to their original purpose recognizing small project practitioners and the high quality of their work, while highlighting the value and design excellence that architects bring to any project, regardless of its size or scope.

Typically the awards are organized into four categories: Category 1, recognizing small project construction, an architectural object, a work of environmental art, or an architectural design element that costs up to $250,000 in construction; Category 2, consisting of small projects costing up to $2,500,000 in construction; Category 3, awarding small project construction, an architectural object, a work of environmental art, or an architectural design under 5,000 square feet; or Category 4, acknowledging any unbuilt design that fits any of the categories above and will not be built, such as a speculative, conceptual, competition, or student work.

This year’s awards named only nine winners, with recipients in only Categories 2 and 3. Many themes arise in the projects honored this year, including activation of public space and a focus on residential projects.

Geographically speaking, most of the recognized projects came from the southern or

led by Selldorf Architects. The art museum will bid farewell to Breuer in 2024 when the overhaul of its mansion is slated for completion.

With the June 1 announcement, the fate of the Breuer Building is sealed again. Sotheby’s plans to make the former museum and art facility its main headquarters, relocating its gallery spaces, auction room, and offices from its current location at 1334 York Avenue, which was recently revamped by OMA.

“The iconic Breuer Building will always be a beloved part of the Whitney’s rich history,” said Whitney director Adam Weinberg in a press release. “We are pleased that it will continue to serve an artistic and cultural purpose through the display of artworks and artifacts. Most importantly this architectural masterpiece—thanks to its status in a landmark district—will be preserved.”

When Sotheby’s occupies the building in 2025, it plans to renovate and will name an architect to “review the building with an eye to renewing and restoring its internal spaces and key elements—especially the striking lobby.” Like its York Avenue predecessor, Sotheby’s new location will also be free and publicly accessible.

Just how much the global auction house paid for the architectural marvel has not been disclosed, though The New York Times reported that two individuals involved in the deal stated a figure around $100 million. Kristine Klein

western United States, with three projects from Austin, Texas. As in last year’s competition, only one recipient came from outside the United States, hailing from Costa Rica.

The winners of the 2023 Small Project Awards are:

Category 2

Liberation Coffee House, Los Angeles | ORA Jade Alley, Miami | Daniel Toole Architecture Mini Mart City Park, Seattle | GO’C Kingsbury Commons at Pease Park, Austin | Clayton Korte

Category 3

The Perch, Austin| Nicole Blair Pima Dynamite Trailhead, Scottsdale, Ariz. | WEDDLE GILMORE black rock studio Costa Rica Treehouse, Santa Teresa, Costa Rica | Olson Kundig

Henry Island Guesthouse, Henry Island, Washington | Bohlin Cywinski Jackson West Campus Residence, Austin | Alterstudio

The jury for the 2023 Small Project Awards included Chandra Robinson (LEVER Architecture), Madhubala Ayyamperumal (Gensler), Chris Baribeau (Modus Studio), David Corban (David Corban Architects), and Katherine Hogan (Katherine Hogan Architects). Charles Gebbia

Prime Design Looking Backward, Then Forward

Perkins&Will to design the Smithsonian’s Bezos Learning Center. Emerging Ecologies at MoMA will showcase 60 years of architectural efforts engaged with environmental issues.

A model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, a protest on Indigenous land over the construction of a dam, and Buckminster Fuller’s 1967 World Game are among the objects and research that will be presented at the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) upcoming exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism this fall.

Perkins&Will has been named as the architect of the Bezos Learning Center, an education and cultural center for the Smithsonian Institution that will rise on the site of a former Gyo Obata–designed restaurant pavilion demolished earlier this year in Washington, D.C. The selection of the firm follows a Request for Qualifications that solicited responses from 23 firms. Last September, five conceptual schemes from the shortlisted firms were revealed—sans the names of the architects who designed them.

According to a press release, Perkins& Will was chosen for its “ample experience designing cultural and education spaces, the composition and credentials of its management team, and the strength of the team’s aesthetic approach.”

“Having worked with the architects behind the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I understand how important a building’s design is to its mission, its functionality, its character, and its ability to engage the people who enter its doors,” said Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III in a statement. “We look forward to working with the architects of Perkins&Will on the design of the Bezos Learning Center to produce another unique Smithsonian landmark on the National Mall that will expand and enhance our educational impact.”

As previously reported by AN, the Bezos Learning Center will occupy the site of the former restaurant pavilion, designed by Gyo Obata (of HOK) as an addition to the National Air and Space Museum, built in 1976. The forthcoming center will be three stories high and span 50,000 square feet to house science, arts, and technology programming and activities—supplementing the offerings of the adjacent museum—and a restaurant.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, previously donated $200 million to fund the project; of this sum $70 million was used for renovation work at the National Air and Space Museum, while the remaining $130 million is allocated for the Bezos Learning Center.

Perkins&Will’s design proposal for the center was “inspired by the shape of a spiral galaxy.” Each of the five shortlisted firms took galactic inspiration for their proposed building and interior designs.

Other shortlisted proposals took cues from nebulae and the honeycomb forms of the International Space Station and James Webb Telescope.

“The spiral galaxy—our source of creative inspiration—is all about infinite possibilities,” said Ralph Johnson, design director for Perkins&Will and lead designer for the Bezos Learning Center, in a press release. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with the Smithsonian Institution, the National Air and Space Museum, and other key stakeholders to create a design that will inspire the next generation of air and space explorers while honoring the historical context of our National Mall.”

While the five shortlisted proposals were open for public comment, Smithsonian staff from the Planning, Design and Construction, Contracting, and Administration departments, as well as the National Air and Space Museum, weighed in on the decision to name Perkins&Will as the winning firm.

As design and construction progresses, the Smithsonian will coordinate and oversee historic preservation consultation in line with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA) and obtain required approvals from the National Capital Planning Commission, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and the National Park Service.

The National Air and Space Museum also launched a challenge inviting students and young designers to work alongside Perkins&Will on an “architectural element” that will be installed on the exterior of the Bezos Learning Center. Like the center itself, the piece will incorporate elements of aerospace, astronomy, and aviation. To participate, each team had to submit its academic and professional background, a work portfolio, and draft essays in response to two prompts. The challenge is now in its second phase as the shortlisted teams, comprising two to three individuals, await final selection. Upon selection, the named team receives a paid position with the National Air and Space Museum for up to three years.

Construction is slated to begin on the Bezos Learning Center in 2025, with completion planned for 2027. KK

The forthcoming show will be the first exhibition curated by the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment, an entity within MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design established in 2020 to organize curatorial programs and research initiatives on topics related to the built environment, including cities, landscapes, sustainability, and environmental justice. (Recent programming includes the speaker series Material Worlds.) The show will collect prior work on ecological and environmental concerns spanning from the 1930s to 1990s, including models, photographs, diagrams, sketches, and other archival materials like posters, flyers, and articles.

Emerging Ecologies is organized by Carson Chan, director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute and curator within the Department of Architecture and Design, with Matthew Wagstaffe, an Ambasz Institute research assistant.

“The ambition of the show is different for the various audiences I imagine would see it,” Chan told AN. “For the general museum audience, the aim is to inspire them with the knowledge that architects have been deeply engaged with environmental and ecological issues for at least a century, and that the incredibly innovative work architects are doing today to confront our current climate crisis has a rich history.”

“For architects and scholars, the show proposes what we’re calling Environmental Architecture as a countermovement, or anti-movement, to the aesthetic and ideological dominance of modern architecture,” he continued. “Though there is no formal or aesthetic consistency amongst the work of the contributors to the show, they all hold environmental and ecological issues at the forefront of their practices.”

The exhibition’s objects and research will be presented under five thematic headings: Environment as Information, Environmental Enclosures, Multispecies Design, Counterculture Experiments, and Green Poetics.

In the Environment as Information section, Buckminster Fuller’s World Game, a simulation for understanding the distribution of raw materials, and Beverly Willis’s Computerized Approach to Residential Land Analysis (CARLA), a software program developed to analyze land for its development potential, function as case studies for how technology has played a role in taking on challenges related to the built environment.

Environmental Enclosures will present drawings from NASA’s Space Settlements: A Design Study, a research project from 1975 that studied resource consumption and availability on Earth through testing programs performed in outer space. Work by the New Alchemy Institute on a series of off-grid structures built on Prince Edward Island, Canada, will be featured as part of Counterculture Experiments to demonstrate alternative ways of living.

In Multispecies Design the research will look toward animals, with a focus on Ant Farm’s project Dolphin Embassy, a floating research lab conceived as a place to study human and aquatic mammal interactions. And in Green Poetics, the focus will be less on the practical elements of environmental design, presenting works by James Wines and Emilio Ambasz that showcase its beauty.

Beyond built works, Emerging Ecologies will exhibit the power of resisting construction, as exemplified through archival materials from the 1981 Orme Dam protest, when the Yavapai Nation, located near present-day Phoenix, opposed the construction of a dam that would have flooded Yavapai land.

Alongside archival materials, Emerging Ecologies will also present seven newly commissioned audio pieces from some of today’s leading architects and researchers: Mae-ling Lokko, Jeanne Gang, Meredith Gaglio, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Amy Chester, Carolyn Dry, and Ambasz. The recordings will center on what architects can do to face climate change and address topics such as resource depletion, overpopulation, and pollution.

“In many ways, we see this exhibition as part one of larger discussions about architecture’s historic, present, and future engagement with the environment,” Chan said.

“This show, a necessarily selective survey which focuses on American practices from the 1930s to 1990s, helps establish the historical efforts made by architectural practices to address humanity’s impact on natural systems, and only after this can we look at present and future efforts in an informed way.

“Part of what I want to do with the Ambasz Institute is to remind the architecture community that architecture is already an environmental discipline,” he added. “The current interest in sustainability does not mark an ecological turn as some might say, but a return to architecture’s fundaments.”

Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism opens on September 17 and will be on view through January 20, 2024. KK

Dancing on the Table An Influential Life

A ten-story mass timber tower by LEVER Architecture underwent a shake test to investigate its seismic resilience.

Last month, dozens gathered to watch as a ten-story tower in northeast San Diego juddered and swayed under the forces of back-to-back simulated earthquakes. The building, an experimental mock-up of a mass timber tall building, was built atop the Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table at UC San Diego. The so-called table to which the building is bolted is a 3-footthick, 25-by-40-foot steel honeycomb platen mounted on hydraulic actuators. It moves with six degrees of freedom to accurately simulate earthquakes according to seismic records. At the test that day, it ran simulations of the major earthquakes in 1994 in Northridge, California (6.7 magnitude), and in 1999 in Chi-Chi, Taiwan (7.7 magnitude). Both times, after a frightening bit of wobbling, the building righted itself back to its initial form and position, with no apparent damage incurred from the shaking.

During testing, in addition to visual inspections, some 750 sensors recorded data throughout the building. The tests were a notable demonstration of resilient construction and a major milestone for the TallWood Project, a broad collaboration under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI).

NHERI’s TallWood Project, which investigates the seismic resilience of timber high-rise construction, is led by Dr. Shiling Pei of the Colorado School of Mines and involves researchers from academic institutions around the world and many industry partners. Among those is Portland, Oregon–based LEVER Architecture, whose role as the architects on the project continues the firm’s deep engagement with mass timber construction. The test building can be seen as a modification of LEVER’s unbuilt Framework project, which won the U.S. Tall Wood Building Prize in 2015. At the core of both designs is what is called a rocking-wall system: mass timber sheer walls anchored by posttensioned rods or cables running down their centers. Thomas Robinson, LEVER’s cofounder and principal, explained the concept on-site: “A typical sheer wall is anchored at the two corners of the base. On these walls, only the cables are anchored to

the foundation. That allows the whole wall to rock back and forth, and then the cable pulls it back to center.”

Owing to the high strength-to-weight ratio of wood, the structural strategy here is not simply to resist seismic force but rather to design means of moving with and dissipating that force across a less massive structural system. The idea is that such a system would suffer minimal damage in an earthquake and be immediately occupiable and quickly repairable. As Robinson put it, “We’re always thinking, ‘What can timber potentially do that other materials can’t do as well?’”

With the resilience strategy of movement at play, different types of mass timber—cross-laminated (CLT), veneer laminated (VLT), nail/dowel laminated (NLT/DLT), mass plywood panel (MPP), glue-laminated (glulam)—are used throughout the tower to maximize the conditions under evaluation. The design also incorporates an array of nonstructural systems intended to move in concert with the rocking walls, including a fire-rated stairway that accommodates drift, expansion joints and nested deflection-head tracks at interior partitions, and unique curtain wall systems with expansion-joint panels hung on the lower levels of each of the building’s four corners.

The tower is the tallest full-scale building ever to be tested on a shake table, a fact that indicates the scope of ambition of the project. While the evidence and data already produced by the TallWood Project will probably increase the visibility and implementation of resilient mass timber, the project team’s goal is to codify the knowledge it has produced. “That work has been in progress,” explained Pei. “We’re trying to work with the USDA, the Forest Service, and practitioners to try to go to that next step, to introduce this into our building code in the next updating cycle. Hopefully we’ll have a rocking-wall system in our code by 2028.”

Rafael Viñoly completed the Tokyo International Forum in 1996. It became an immediate success and put Viñoly’s name on the global map of architecture. In that same year, I started my undergraduate studies at the School of Architecture at Universidad de la República Uruguay, now known as Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo (FADU). As this was obviously at the dawn of the internet, I remember vividly being mesmerized by the first photos I saw of the Forum in numerous architectural publications. Viñoly, who was born in Uruguay in 1944, immediately received the kind of attention normally reserved for our soccer players who emigrated to Europe to play in the English Premier, Spanish, or Italian Leagues.

Relatively speaking, Uruguay is a small country in population and size. The country’s population, about 3.5 million people, is equivalent to 0.04 percent of the total world population, and the nation ranks number 134 on a list of 235 countries by population. For a visionary, talented professional to emerge in 1996 in the global arena from such modest roots verges on myth and impossibility. And it was this outsize impossibility that resonated so profoundly within the professional, academic, and cultural circles of Montevideo.

Fast-forward to 2005. I was a graduate student at Columbia GSAPP. Viñoly was giving a lecture along with Kenneth Frampton. I unexpectedly bumped into him outside the auditorium after the lecture and had the courage to introduce myself. He invited me to his office the following week to continue the conversation. More than just being hospitable to a fellow Uruguayan and enthusiastic graduate student, his invitation was rooted in a genuine sincerity and interest in conversation and sharing ideas.

I remember arriving early at his office on Vandam Street and waiting in a conference room surrounded by large models of the World Trade Center competition for which his firm had been a finalist. After a few minutes, Viñoly showed up smiling and wearing one of his numerous pairs of glasses. We discussed the role of the architect in contemporary practice. He stressed the importance of being functional and practical and having a deep understanding of construction methods. Without it, he told me, “architects will not have a seat at the table.”

In 2007 I moved to Boston to work with Machado and Silvetti Associates (now Machado Silvetti). Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti were classmates with Viñoly at the Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo at the University of Buenos Aires. As Latinos from Argentina, they were also paving

a path in the U.S. for young Latino architects like me. Our shared connection with Viñoly was an additional, beneficial layer to our rapport, and once again I found myself inspired by the possibilities of stepping beyond cultural background, country of birth, and language, solely based on the work.

I remember walking on a chilly night along Summer Street. Back then, Boston’s Seaport District was not the vibrant commercial and residential community of today but a collection of parking lots serving the nearby Financial District. Amid the quiet, dark streets sat the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, which had recently been completed. I felt that its large, glowing entry canopy was welcoming me at night. Here again was Viñoly’s work in front of me.

I made Boston my home and founded my own architecture firm in 2011. In all humility, my name on the door is not equal in measure to Viñoly’s. But in intention, Viñoly was a bridge and an open door to the fact that in 1983, a person with a clearly different name, with an accent included, could become an architect, an entrepreneur, a businessperson, and a founder of a company in the United States. Once again, for Latino/a career professionals, the seemingly impossible was visible and real. He paved the way for architects coming to the United States from South America and earning major projects and recognition.

Personally, Viñoly’s role and impact in my professional life, in my chosen profession, the field of architecture, are deeply meaningful and powerful. When I think of Viñoly’s work and influence, I consider his global reach. In a world not yet fully attuned to diversity and inclusion, he was able to transcend regional limits of heritage, place of birth, language, and culture by presenting projects that were indisputably imperative, distinctive, and relevant. The work came first.

Viñoly’s influence within Uruguay is forever embodied in his design for the Carrasco International Airport in Montevideo. As a metaphor, I think this building can complete the circle of how Uruguayans, Latino/as in general, and the world think of Viñoly. An airport can be a great equalizer, open and welcoming to all. The first steps for an international visitor to Uruguay and the departing steps of Uruguayans headed abroad likely occur within this building. It was a symbolic project for Uruguay, and I suspect it was a meaningful commission for Viñoly. It opens the country to the world through the hands of Uruguay’s global architect.

Amir Kripper is the founding principal of Kripper Studio, a minority-owned architecture firm in Boston.

Grand Junction Glow-Up

Land Collective and HWKN complete a park in Westfield, Indiana, that supports the lives of residents.

Above the start of Grassy Branch of Cool Creek in the small city of Westfield, Indiana, a wooden boardwalk snakes through a renaturalized streambed where pedestrians can hop over the stream or get their feet wet in the flowing water. Nearby, the new park, the Grand Junction Park & Plaza, accommodates dedicated spaces for open-air performances; a glass-walled cafe with a cascading, stepped Indiana limestone facade; and a Great Lawn for lounging. Park users can picnic and play, ice-skate in the winter, or enjoy the many comfortable wooden benches from which they can peacefully observe the resurgence of wildlife.

“The water life has dramatically improved,” Melody Jones, director of parks and recreation during the development process, told AN. She also lives across from the park. “You would see minnows, but we never saw fish. The way it’s designed with these weirs, there are these pools. We see fish that are four to six inches long. It’s like, ‘Holy cow, there’s fish!’ The thing I love the most is the waterfowl and birds of prey that are back—heron and red-tailed hawks.”

The park, which officially opened last year, was designed by David Rubin of Land Collective with architecture by Matthias Hollwich of HWKN in collaboration with RATIO Architects and signage and wayfinding by Bruce Mau Design, along with an extended team of civil engineers and riparian-corridor specialists. While the end result is impressive, the effort began as a more limited project focused on flood control.

“All of these assets became possible because there was a social overlay to infrastructure,” Rubin said. “It was that marriage that made this all possible. We came up with this vision for the park that resolved the climate crisis issues and the riparian-corridor reparation issues that then had this social overlay that would create a new central park around which development could happen.”

The creek at the downtown crossroads of Westfield had overflowed throughout its history. After the Swamp and Overflowed Lands Act of 1850, the Army Corps of Engineers fixed the problem in the roughand-tumble way of early American settlements: It channelized Cool Creek to keep water from destroying productive farmlands, inserting a pipe through which the normal flow of water could pass. But in the last 20 years, regular 100-year storms began to repeatedly overtop the levee, overwhelming the pipe and flooding the area.

In 2013, a competitive bidding process had arrived at two potential landscape architects. Then Ken Alexander, the director of public works at that time, suggested bringing in David Rubin of Land Collective to share some ideas. Mayor Andy Cook expressed skepticism about choosing a new team so late in the process, but Rubin’s ideas resonated with local constituents. They talked more about the aims of the project and the values the community wanted to embody instead of showing design precedents. Then yet another flood, this one a 500-year storm, inundated the area.

Rubin and his colleagues won the bid, eventually designing the park around renaturalization of the creek. Their scheme inserted J-hooks—curved portions that slow the movement of rushing water during storm events—proposed a series of cultural facilities throughout upland sections, and

connected the grounds to the town center and neighboring trails.

“The other concepts did not include the renaturalization of the stream that runs through the park,” Jeremy Lollar, director of public works during construction, remembered. “David did a nice job of incorporating the natural element of what the stream originally was, returning it to what it was back in the 1800s. Then they did a really nice job of connecting both halves of the park to pedestrian facilities, and the building architecture was pretty unique as well.”

A small town 20 miles north of downtown Indianapolis, Westfield had a reference to precedents for great architecture with a capital A: the modern-design mecca of Columbus about 60 miles south. Now the city is fundraising for three other planned pavilions by HWKN, including one that has attracted the attention of the Indiana Symphony Orchestra for possible use as a venue.

HWKN contributed a cafe sculpted to have a rocklike appearance. “The architecture creates a dialogue between the artificial geometries of humanity and the beauty of nature that is the broken edge that appears throughout our design,” Hollwich offered.

“The best part is that every one of these pavilions is filled with program, because that’s what we really want to do,” he continued. “We want to create places for people to come together, enjoy each other, meet new people, because that, we believe, is the power of architecture. We can create places and invite people to experience each other, nature, and the architecture around it.”

A 100-year storm event has not happened since completion of the park, but the levee has already filled with water from large storm events, preventing flooding and damage. Meanwhile, though development from Indianapolis is gradually encroaching on Westfield, nonhuman residents have quickly made the creek their home. “The wildlife has taken a big hit, so it’s great to be able to put these oases in urban settings where there are animals that can maintain a habitat and survive,” Jones said. “We have foxes in downtown now. We’ve had coyotes. … Most neighbors don’t like that.”

New Life for LaSalle

In downtown Chicago, office conversions are being used to create affordable housing.

Last fall, Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD) introduced the LaSalle Reimagined plan to revive the sleepy and pervasively vacant downtown LaSalle Street corridor. Its focus will be the conversion of office towers with an emphasis on affordability. A minimum of 30 percent of the units will be affordable for households that make 60 percent of the area median income or less, which is higher than the city’s baseline requirement of 20 percent affordability for any project asking for subsidies or zoning changes. Cindy Roubik, deputy commissioner at DPD, said upping this requirement was an “achievable” way to “[bring] standards up.”

In early May, the city rounded out the selection of five developer teams that will focus on five properties, most pre–World War II historic buildings. They will be partially converted into apartments (from studios up to three-bedroom units) along a five-block stretch of LaSalle Street. All told, the plan would bring online approximately 1,600 new apartments—600 of them affordable.

As COVID-19 and remote work have emptied downtown office buildings, converting the most beleaguered, and often oldest, of these into residences has emerged as a seemingly intuitive solution that in reality is often filled with complex trade-offs involving floor plate depth and code calculations that will require the reformatting of yesterday’s comparatively primitive office towers for today’s heavily amenitized urban residences. This transition is being harnessed as a subsidized housing development tool, making the city a leader, according to Roubik. “Chicago is out in front of making sure that the conversions are more equitable,” she told AN

The hope is to develop a true live-work district where there is currently almost no affordable housing and that is accessible to all. Rafael Hernandez, principal of Blackwood Group, one of the developers selected for the LaSalle Reimagined slate, noted that “part of the city has been untapped, to say the least.”

Eighty-five percent of real estate in the area is dedicated to office space, while 5 million square feet of that area is vacant. More than half of the city’s jobs are downtown, Roubik detailed, but “we don’t have that same number living in the downtown area.” Meanwhile, “we have all this space that’s available.” With the downtown population growing nearly 10 percent since 2020, Mike Reschke, CEO of The Prime Group, developer for two LaSalle Reimagined projects, says, “We’re not stimulating demand, we’re meeting demand.”

Priority is given to historic buildings, and these projects will rely heavily on lowincome housing tax credits (LIHTC), historic tax credits (HTC), and public funding via the creation of a tax-increment financing (TIF) district. This public TIF funding ranges from just below a quarter to nearly half the budget in four of the proposals. With these public dollars, only one team went above the 30 percent floor for affordable units.

The programmatic and functional details of adaptive reuse make larger, newer buildings with wide floor plates less feasible for conversion. “The newer the office building, the deeper the floor plate,” said Jesper Dalskov, principal architect at Stantec’s

Chicago office, which is working on a LaSalle Reimagined conversion of a 1911 building. These large floor plates make it harder to use all available floor space while still making sure units have access to an outside wall with an operable window, required by code in Chicago and most large cities. Conversely, thinner, older buildings with shallower floor plates have proportionally more exterior surface area. Their operable windows and the light and fresh air they transmit were necessary in an era before air conditioning and cheap, widespread artificial lighting.

Stantec’s work on 111 W. Monroe is perhaps the most complicated conversion for these reasons. It’s a complex of two buildings; the original was designed by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, and an addition completed in 1958 was handled by SOM. To break up the thick floor plate of the duo, Stantec is digging out a 19-story light well at the western end of the 1911 building, where it abuts its neighbor. After carving out 4,000 square feet per floor, Stantec will add a courtyard at the base of the light well and a planted wall along its surface.

Developed by The Prime Group and Capri, 111 W. Monroe will offer 349 residences for a total budget of $180 million. (The property will also include a 226-key hotel, which is financed separately from the LaSalle Reimagined plan.) The building is distinguished by its columned, double-height lobby and the amenity decks to be located midway up the building and on its roof.

The high-rise at 30 N. LaSalle, built in 1975 and to be redeveloped by Golub and American General Life Insurance, is the only nonhistoric building selected for conversion. Its 149 apartments across 14 floors will be separated by a 17-foot-ceilinged amenity deck on the 11th floor featuring a cantilevered “projected porch terrace,” according to Steven Hubbard, associate principal at SCB, the conversion’s architect.

These apartments are located on the lower floors of the high-rise (upper floors will still be used for offices), where the building’s three-tiered elevator core takes up a lot of space, making the shallower footprint more usable. These lower floors are the “sweet spot” for apartments, Hubbard declared, “because most of the interior floor space that would not be usable as residential apartments is taken up by the mid- and high-rise zone office shafts.” The project’s $143 million budget includes an exterior landscape plan and the addition of operable windows.

Lee Golub, managing partner at Golub, said this project won’t pursue LIHTCs or HTCs, though Golub will apply for TIF funding. As a nonhistoric building, what it loses in vintage, Golub hopes it can make up for in “speed to market.” “We could actually get to market quicker than anybody because we’re not waiting on negotiating with tax credits and we don’t need landmark approval,” he shared.

With 75 percent affordable units—more than double what’s required—and being the only project developed by a dedicated affordable housing developer, the proposal for 105 W. Adams by Hernandez’s Blackwood Group and Celadon Partners stands out from the rest. Both Blackwood and DesignBridge, the architects for the conversion, are minorityowned (Latinx) business enterprises, and this is their first job downtown.

Designed by Hubert and Daniel

Burnham Jr., this regal and subtly detailed tower is H-shaped in plan, with a taller central core flanked by shorter perpendicular legs. It may be the best-looking building of the bunch, as well as the most severely distressed. At 20 percent occupancy, it is currently in receivership, and its terra-cotta exterior needs a thorough revitalization. The developers (Celadon specializes in affordable housing) are calling for a wide array of tax credits, subsidies, foundation grants, and privately raised charitable funds to fill out their $178 million budget across its 185 affordable and 62 market-rate units.

Hernandez said the team sees the affordable units as opportunities for “public [sector] employees, essential workers, hospitality employees, and entry-level [workers]” who work downtown but often can’t afford to live there. His project is the only one of the five offering both three-bedroom units and a grocery store in its retail base, key features for low-income families and rare in high-density central business districts. “Certain parts of the city should not be accessible only to a certain few,” says Hernandez.

Roubik at DPD acknowledges that with its deeper well of subsidy and support, 105 W. Adams will be a more complicated project, perhaps with a longer timeline, but she said the City is committed to locating lower-income housing near jobs. Even beyond the moral responsibility for a democratic city, there’s significant research about the economic benefits of making sure jobs and people are located in the same area. Severe “spatial mismatches” (as named by a 2020 Urban Institute study) harm employers if they cannot attract workers to jobs, and employees if the cost of a commute counterbalances the benefit of a job. Chicago

specifically is marked by “wide disparities in job access,” according to the report, with many job seekers living on the South Side, farther from opportunities.

“There are a lot of lower-income workers who work in the Loop,” Roubik stated. “It’s a more resilient model to try to provide more housing options near where people work.”

Despite Celadon and Blackwoods’ approval for their project, other developers aren’t eager to push the 30 percent floor for affordable units. “The City’s requirement is 30 percent, and that’s all we’re gonna do,” Prime’s Reschke said. He called the Celadon and Blackwood project an “outlier proposal, which I don’t understand. We think a better ratio is 20 to 30 percent workforce housing units. If you slant it too much to all affordable [units], the building becomes more and feels more like a public housing project.”

In Chicago, you can say less than this to invoke the debacle of high-rise public housing towers like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes: Their combined 18,000 units were torn down after colossal failures of public policy, building maintenance, and, perhaps least of all, design.

The mixed-income composition of LaSalle Reimagined and its legacy architecture located in a part of the city that’s not starved for capital means that potential mishaps won’t resemble those of the past. Still, a similar question remains at play: Do dense blocks of housing for low-income people deserve a significant, purpose-built presence in the city?

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design journalist and critic focused on the intersection of design in architecture and landscape architecture and policy.

Labored Relations

Graduate students at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College are on strike for better pay.

On March 29, more than 2,000 graduate-student workers at the University of Michigan went on strike, including a supermajority of graduate-student instructors at the school’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Since their contract expired on May 1, they have been holding teach-ins and pickets and meeting with administrators, demanding a $38,000 annual wage; the hiring of unarmed, nonpolice emergency responders; and increased healthcare benefits.

The current demands of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), a labor union affiliated with the AFL-CIO and formed in 1974, reflect the often precarious position of graduate students in the United States. The central argument of Michigan graduate architecture instructors is a familiar one: Pay increases have not kept up with the cost of living.

At Taubman, graduate students primarily hold teaching and research positions, which involve teaching, grading, and hosting lab or discussion sections. The university compensates them with tuition waivers of up to $12,947 per semester for in-state students and $26,062 for out-of-state students, in addition to a salary of $24,050 for two semesters of work. Numerous graduate students told AN that these rates are insufficient and that many students work additional off-campus jobs to make ends meet. The university responded that the instructors also “receive comprehensive health insurance with no monthly premiums and per-semester childcare subsidies that start at $3,043 for one child.”

Some faculty members, many of them nontenure track, have offered their support for the graduate students, including through the circulation of an open letter authored by less than 20 percent of instructors. An additional open letter of support has been signed by over 300 people, including Mabel O. Wilson, Peggy Deamer, and Alexandra Lange.

Teaching positions are one way that students pursuing Taubman’s various master’s and doctoral degrees support themselves. However, not all graduate students are able to secure one of these positions. Doctoral candidates are often given preference, and decisions on applications can be released last-minute, leaving students with few alternatives to offset costs. “You don’t know whether you’re going to have to take out a $30,000 loan to go to school with a week’s notice,” Ivan Gort-Cabeza de Vaca, who recently earned his MArch at the University of Michigan, told AN

PhD candidates also claim they are at a disadvantage compared with students at other schools at the University of Michigan: They receive four years of funding as opposed to five or six offered by other schools, less than at many architecture schools in the U.S. “The pay that PhDs receive for teaching is the pay that we live on throughout the year,” said Sben Korsh, PhD candidate in architecture at Michigan and research coordinator of The Architecture Lobby. “The university pays us the money not just for our teaching but also for the research and service work we do. We put in 40 to 60 hours a week.”

In a statement, Jonathan Massey, dean of Taubman, shared with AN that “changing the contents and cultures of practice and

education” to work toward a more equitable field “takes time.” In practice, Massey argued, this includes the “aim to expand access to architecture and planning education and increase compensation and support for everyone who works at the college, including graduate-student instructors as well as lecturers, tenure- and practice-track faculty, and staff.” Massey noted that graduate teaching positions “require 10 to 20 hours of work per week” and that “we have arranged summer funding for all of our doctoral students, regardless of whether they are striking or not.”

A day after the strike vote, Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School, the umbrella for most of the university’s graduate programs, including Taubman’s PhD tracks, announced $12,000 in additional summer funding above the $24,000 baseline for many doctoral students—a long-standing request among doctoral students. Rebecca Smith, a PhD candidate in architecture, told AN that Taubman had not issued supplementary funding, while students in many humanities departments who already had stronger funding packages received additional summer funding. Many departments had offered funding in addition to the baseline for the academic year both prior and in response to the strike, yet disparities between departments have been a continual issue for PhD students.

In Search of Faculty Support

Andrew Herscher, a professor of architecture at Taubman, has withheld grades along with other faculty members in support of the strike. He told AN that he and other faculty have had to consider conflicting concerns regarding the tactic’s impact on students, such as its effect on visas and financial aid. Some graduate students also expressed concerns that visas or financial aid might be threatened based on their participation in the strike. The university told AN that this worry has “no merit.”

Student workers withholding labor were asked to attest whether or not they were working, and if they replied no or did not respond, their pay was deducted. Korsh told AN that the university also asked faculty to report graduate workers who were withholding labor. Herscher spoke about the pressure the university had put on faculty members during the strike, including potential plans to hire “substitute faculty” to grade courses, calling it an infringement on their academic freedom. He expressed skepticism that the university was bargaining in good faith given its filing of a lawsuit requesting a court injunction and an incident in which a campus police officer, trying to make space for the university president’s car at an off-campus restaurant, shoved a graduate student protester to the ground.

“What does it mean to tell the people at the bottom of the power structure to maintain collegial relations within the community when the power structure itself is flagrantly and consistently undermining those relations?” he said. In his statement to AN, Massey argued for the value of the school’s pedagogical work, including teaching more equitable forms of practice.

Taubman’s Role Within the University of Michigan

The university’s response to the strike has largely characterized issues of compensation in terms of hourly wages, yet doctoral students’ work is not paid hourly and is limited to an eight-month academic year. “I was shocked by how little pay and institutional support the PhDs receive in comparison to the healthy finances of the college,” Korsh said. “Most of us are—or will at some time be—insecure in our housing, food, and transportation.” In a statement to AN, the university said it is currently paying a fair wage and that GEO must be willing to move on its bargaining positions in order to come to an agreement.

Graduate students and faculty members told AN that Michigan’s pushback against graduate students has been particularly harsh compared with strikes at Rutgers University and the Rhode Island School of Design. They said administrators should focus on governing the universities for the public good; this could mean attempting to introduce free education, fighting for debt cancellation, and serving existing students’ needs rather than focusing on minimizing labor costs and raising money for research and endowments.

Amid this, students and faculty said they had received little guidance from Taubman administrators. Dean Massey responded that “Taubman College is not a party to negotiations between GEO and the university. We do not control university actions relating to compensation during the strike or, in general, university-wide working conditions. Nor do we retaliate or take adverse employment actions in response to legally protected activity on the part of anyone in our college.”

What Does This Mean for Architectural Labor?

The Michigan strike comes after successful graduate student strikes and unionization efforts such as the unionization of Bernheimer Architecture last year and the petition to unionize Snøhetta filed earlier this month. Questions of architectural labor have circulated at Taubman for years through informal discussion, but while architecture students had been active in GEO, they say discussion of exploitative labor practices was limited. The strike ended this status quo.

“Students and faculty want so much to see themselves not as workers but as a managerial class,” Korsh said, emphasizing Taubman’s position as a professional school. However, by the time the strike began, most students within Taubman offered their support. Gort-Cabeza de Vaca said the strike had also received support from many of the college’s undergraduate students.

Faculty members at Taubman and other colleges have begun to discuss other ways of supporting the strike. Herscher told AN that “one of the strike’s most consequential outcomes to the faculty is that it has furthered organization around the formation of a union.”

Faculty members at Michigan are not currently unionized, and while faculty unions, particularly of tenure track faculty, are not common in the U.S., faculty at other large public universities, like Rutgers, are unionized. “The strike really heightened our awareness of our status as laborers in the university,” Herscher said.

Lecturers at Michigan have been unionized through the Lecturers’ Employees Union since 2004. They were joined by other nontenured faculty workers—gallery workers, librarians, archivists, and museum staff, or GLAM—to form LEO-GLAM in 2021, though the two groups negotiate different contracts. At Taubman, over 40 lecturers are LEO members. The union will begin bargaining for a new contract this fall.

“We respect and appreciate how [the faculty have] stepped up to support the strike,” Smith said, “not just for us, but for the larger political ideals the strike represents and its implications for the university and what is possible here.”

At stake, in part, is how architects imagine themselves as creative professionals. Architectural education often encourages students to identify as business owners rather than as laborers whose efforts create value for others, according to some critics. “This strike invites [architectural educators] …to reflect on our ideological allegiances, our labor, and the relation or nonrelationship between them. In other words, to ask ourselves, ‘Whose interests are we serving through our work at the university?’” Herscher said.

Massey told AN that “architectural labor, in general, is not rewarded at the level we believe it deserves. With allies in practice and education, many of us at Taubman College are working to change this.” He continued, “We are piloting new approaches to teaching and learning,” such as online courses, shorter degrees, and flexible course sequences, with the aim of helping students develop their capacities faster and at a lower cost or to help them parent, work, provide care, and pace their learning.”

Striking students told AN that while they are optimistic, they believe the strike will continue into the fall semester. Korsh called on architecture faculty to push administrators to offer them a deal that meets the needs of graduate workers and their community: “Those with power and social capital should be demanding that our very reasonable needs are met at the table.” CW A prior version of this article was published online in AN on May 30.

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SOM’s Baxter Under Threat

Currently under the threat of demolition, SOM’s Baxter International suburban office park is part of a vital but unheralded design legacy, preservationists say.

continued from cover Located in Deerfield, Illinois, along Chicago’s suburban North Shore, the 101-acre campus demonstrates a level of thought and rigor not often applied to suburban office parks. Its unmistakable star is its Central Facilities Building, with two lighthouse-scaled masts hoisting up a cable-stayed steel roof, leaving room for massive column-free spans below in the complex’s social hub. Beyond, a series of nearly identical office pavilions and an executive center dot the landscape in a closely ordered, cellular arrangement that radiates out from three central parking garages.

Like SOM’s John Hancock Center, Baxter was the product of Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan’s legendary synthesis of architecture and engineering. Though it’s hardly as famous, it displays some of the same legible persuasiveness through its quick lesson in form and tectonics, delivered with just a glance. “It’s one of Bruce Graham’s tours-de-force,” Tomlinson said. “It took a very particular attitude about the land—it was seen as a campus in the prairie—to save as much of the groundscape as possible.” Graham said the cable-stayed structure “created a grand space that appears as a very gentle capture of the endless expanse of the Middle West.”

But weakened by supply chain congestion, rising costs, and poor financial performance, Baxter is laying off thousands of workers, selling off parts of its business, and closing the book on its campus, making the company vulnerable to a much less “gentle capture” in the days ahead. In January, Baxter announced its plans to sell the campus to Bridge Industrial, which is currently petitioning the Deerfield city government for permission to tear down SOM’s suburban titan and build in its place a 1.3-millionsquare-foot warehouse and shipping hub.

Preservationists told AN that the Baxter campus is worthy of preservation and that it must be considered in the context of its designers’ wider body of work. “It’s a confluence between significant architects exploring how you think in new ways about work,” said Iker Gil, editor in chief of the Chicagobased design journal MAS Context. “How do you design for [flexibility] and also how do you bring structural innovation that you might see at the Sears Tower into this suburban development?”

Beyond the building’s historical legacy and creators, the Baxter campus’s modular flexibility makes it ideal for adaptive reuse, said Tomlinson. Baxter’s repeated office pavilion floor plates can be subdivided intuitively, as they are designed for tenant spaces to expand and contract as needed. “You could imagine each one of those modules conceptually being like a floor of the Inland Steel Building,” Tomlinson offered. Additionally, SOM designed a modular 5-foot wall partition system and uniform electric and telephone floor ducts that are easily accessible beneath modular carpet tiles, allowing tenants to plug-andplay workstations easily. Tomlinson and his colleagues designed the interiors, furnishings, and MEP systems. “It was a total design,” he said.

Baxter’s site plan is unique, with parking confined to garages—at first two, then another was added in 1984—instead of enveloping the site in a moat of asphalt as most

suburban office parks do. It’s also distinguished by its internal circulation routes: The buildings are connected by a web of second-floor skywalks and a network of underground tunnels.

The buildings are arch-rationalist and rectilinear and made of white-painted steel or aluminum with stainless steel trim. Only the masts of the Central Facilities Building break up this low horizon. This campus center point sits up on a cleft earthen berm, with its main entrance at ground level. The two masts rest on 80-foot caissons, made of cast concrete, 6 by 6 at their base and rising 35 feet above the roof. Forty-eight cables span out from the top of the masts. Tensioned cables below the roof reduce the floating movement of the roof from 3 inches to 1.5 inches. Inside is a 700-person cafeteria, lobby, auditorium, and training center. In its heyday, planter boxes and the natural light streaming in from multistory glass walls created a sense of communion with the surrounding landscape of ponds and prairie.

From the outside, the Baxter campus “has a medical sterility to it,” said Preservation Futures historic preservationist Elizabeth Blasius, who wrote about the Baxter for Gil’s MAS Context. While these aesthetic qualities might not win scads of adherents on their own, they are emblematic of the complex’s midcentury vintage as a car-focused, tightly controlled, hermetically sealed, edge-city compound where interaction with the surrounding landscape and context consists mostly of distant gazes. Commuters to Baxter were subject to every one of Tomlinson and SOM’s whims as they moved from their car to the parking garage, tunnels, and skywalks leading to their offices. Considered today, these planning and design features clarify some reasons why suburban office parks of this era are a largely untested frontier of historic preservation.

The limits of this kind of car-dependent development are well understood today. It’s a carbon and land-use necessity to ask that reuse schemes loosen some of these bounds and attract a more diverse array of uses to lessen car dependence. Along these lines, one solution Blasius points toward is adapting Baxter into a “metroburb,” a multiuse campus featuring restaurants, retail, and businesses of many sizes. A former AT&T campus called Bell Works in nearby suburban Hoffman Estates and designed by Lohan Associates in 1990 is one such example. Another is Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs complex in New Jersey, which features a food court, clothing boutiques, an escape room, virtual reality center, Montessori preschool, hair salon, four gym and fitness centers, and a basketball court, as well as commercial office and event spaces. In Hoffman Estates, new townhouses are being built at Bell Works, pivoting the development toward a live-work urban microcosm, potentially lessening reliance on cars.

With its mix of social and event spaces, Tomlinson suggests that Baxter could become a community college or hotel and that its modularity and size mean it could be subleased to several different organizations. When it was new, local organizations that had nothing to do with Baxter would rent the Central Facilities Building for events, and today you can get married at the former Bell Labs. “It’s not hard to think of opportunities for it,” says Tomlinson. “The design is not so particular that it can only be one thing.”

Preservation nonprofit Landmarks Illinois placed the Baxter Campus on its 2023 list of the Most Endangered Places in Illinois, and advocacy manager Kendra Parzen played up the carbon savings of avoiding new building. But she also said that there’s a bias against appreciating and preserving suburban architecture: “We have a harder time conceptualizing that important works of architecture can be located in suburbs.”

The City of Deerfield received 42 letters in opposition to Bridge Industrial’s plan from April 27 to May 5, many of which cited concerns over traffic, noise, and pollution. One person wrote in to express this

succinctly and tersely: “Do we want this to be Deerfield’s new reputation? The truck pit stop of the North Shore?” (Only Parzen’s comments, filed in another letter, mentioned the historic value of the existing campus.) Some cited health concerns for children with respiratory ailments, and others mentioned the pledge the city made in January to reduce transportation emissions by 55 percent by 2030. Nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition against the development. Writing in MAS Context, Blasius points toward Amazon’s abysmal and careless worker safety record as reason to question the expansion of shipping hubs.

During an at times raucous Deerfield Plan Commission meeting on May 11, people held up signs opposing the plan and jeered at Bridge Industrial team members and consultants as they made their pitch. The Bridge team reported that traffic at the complex would likely be less than when the Baxter campus was at peak occupancy and downplayed air pollution risks. Commissioners questioned why a valuation expert’s report on the impact on home prices resulting from the construction of a similar logistics hub didn’t take into account the value of homes before the industrial facilities were built. (The median home price in Deerfield is nearly $500,000, and the median household income is $169,000.) They also questioned why Bridge Industrial surveyed traffic levels on the site during a holiday weekend. At another plan commission meeting to be held on June 8, local homeowners and their representatives will present their opposition. As of this writing, the final outcome has yet to be determined.

A lack of discussion of historic preservation at this stage doesn’t bother Blasius. “Approaching a building like Baxter just from a historic preservation perspective is sort of an uphill battle,” she said. “There isn’t historic context to build a case for why these are important, architecturally significant, and worthy of landmarking. You have to create the case for why it’s architecturally significant from the ground up. Here’s a great opportunity for preservation to capture these different audiences and get together toward a common goal.” ZM

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Unforeseeable, Unavoidable, Irresistible

Lesley Lokko’s Venice Architecture Biennale is a welcome breath of futuristic air.

After a subdued pandemic iteration, the International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia returns with a strong 18th version curated by Lesley Lokko, the Ghanaian Scottish architectural academic, educator, and novelist. Lokko is the founder of the African Futures Institute and themed the biennale to examine Africa as the laboratory of the future.

The exhibition, which focuses on decolonization and decarbonization, organized in six parts, offers powerful sweep of architectural talent from across the planet. The work on view is materially rich and expansive in its imaginings. It welcomes viewers into an expert understanding of overlooked histories and showcases architecture’s capacity to project ideas into space using many forms of media. Seen from a North American perspective, the work transcends the contemporary feeling of emergency to arrive at a deeper level of personal exploration and community engagement. Rather than bottling up the state of architectural discourse today, this version of the Venice Architecture Biennale succeeds in showing us where we could be headed.

Lokko is the first person of African descent and the fourth woman to curate the

architecture biennale. (Architecture still lags a bit behind art: The first African curator of the art biennale was Okwui Enwezor who curated the main show, All the World’s Futures, in 2015.) Before even setting foot in Venice, Lokko’s intentions are clear from numbers alone: Of the 89 participants, more than 50 percent are from Africa or identify as part of the African diaspora. Gender representation is split about evenly, and the average age of participants is 43, lower than in prior showings. Nearly half are educators and work in small practices of five or fewer people. Updating the statistics of a profession that still skews older and whiter means that a host of new contributors are showing work that the world should appreciate. The message is clear. As Lokko wrote, “The balance has shifted. Things fall apart. The centre can no longer hold.”

Lokko’s Force Majeure display takes over the main pavilion of La Biennale. It begins outside, with the addition of a canopy to the whitewashed facade: A set of red struts supports a roof of cut pieces of corrugated metal above a recessed area painted a darker ruby tone. The addition sets the tone for a potent mix of contextual attunement transformed by action. Inside, the grid of

galleries host work by 16 participants selected by Lokko to show us the way forward. Much of the work is impressive: Olalekan Jeyifous’s ACE/AAP 1 fills the large, upper-level gallery. It imagines a network of renewable, green technologies (the African Conservation Effort, or ACE) that enable a rapid transit system (the All-Africa Protoport, or AAP) to move passengers between diasporic sites. The worldmaking, set in the year 1X72, delivers complex infographics and elegant, Midjourney-esque rendered portraits of users. The space is set up like a transit lounge with deep, plywood benches and yellow sculptures. On screen, a video scrolls through imagined transit sequences, news simulations, and job advertisements, with transitions that mimic the split-flap display once seen in airports and train stations. The scene is retro-futuristic and stylish, well deserving of its commendation with the Silver Lion award for a promising young participant.

Elsewhere, Native(s) Lifeways 2 fills a gallery and the open-air Scarpa garden with research on and designs for the Black cultural landscapes of Charleston, South Carolina, and the Low Country by Hood Design Studio. A wood-framed pavilion

by Sean Canty is bathed in colored light; it seems aloof until one realizes it includes studies of two vernacular buildings—a home and a juke joint—built by his great-grandfather, Edgar. Francis Kéré’s Counteract 3 returns to his origins through a curvy wall augmented by clay pots, largescale photography, and painted signage. (Nearby, SOFTLAB@PSU, led by Felecia Davis, installed Textural Threshold Hair Salon: Dreadlock, which was supported in part by a contribution from AN.) Other highlights include Mediterranean Queendoms, a woven tapestry by New South included as one of Lokko’s Guests from the Future, and a room of wall drawings in chalk by atelier masōmī, from Niamey, Niger.

The arrangement means that some pieces were inevitably shunted to faraway galleries, and the rush to the finish line left some technical issues to be fixed, including an opening video in the round on the work of Adjaye Associates that was at times on the fritz. The awkward, dark room below Jeyifous’s staging was given over in part to a video from Theaster Gates that reflects on ten years convening the Black Artists Retreat in Chicago. Though moving, it isn’t as compelling as two other works by Gates on view

simultaneously in Venice: The Flood, made for Fondazione Prada’s Everybody Talks About the Weather exhibition, in which performers sing and act out a flood; and Gone

Are the Days of Shelter and Martyr, a 2014 film in which Black monks perform in a Catholic church in Chicago destined for demolition, showing as part of Icônes at the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana. Dangerous Liaisons, installed in the Arsenale’s long Corderie interior, expands Lokko’s vision to a wider set of practitioners and projects. The opening spatial sequence disassociates attendees from the outside world: One encounters a bath of blue light, a mirrored octagon with screens rotating through quotes, and then a tall screen sports a piece by spoken-word artist Rhael “LionHeart” Cape 4, that asks people to imagine “a view that wasn’t prescribed to you” and characterizes architecture as “organized dysfunction.” For Lokko, LionHeart is “architecture’s first poet laureate.”

The movement ferries you toward Griot by Studio Barnes 5, which centers a 6,000-pound, solid Identity Column carved from black Spanish Marquina marble between drawings and masks. While the latter items deal with the main themes of

appropriation, Black bodies, and columnar disorder through projective means, the former is physical in its realignment of Western architectural history to include Blackness as a central component. In an interview for Mas Context, Germane Barnes said that the column “shows just how heavy it means to be Black.”

What follows extends the theme, with some variation along the way. Aequare: the Future that Never Was, a three-part project by Twenty Nine Studio/Sammy Baloji 6 , investigates the displacement of precolonial society during Belgium’s colonial possession of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The piece includes a film made from archival imagery and Baloji’s field research, archival documents from agronomists and architects of the Belgian government, and, most powerfully, research on the Belgian architect Henry Lacoste and his design for the Belgian Pavilion at the 1935 World Fair. Never built, it is materialized here in a model made of copper and brass. Baloji, a photographer, also contributed a second project completed with architect Gloria Cabral and art historian Cécile Fromont that compresses mining detritus and scraps of Venetian glass into a tessellated wall supported by scaffolding.

Other highlights include further moments of 1:1 construction. AD—WO’s Ghebbi 7, an Amharic word that denotes a walled territory, is a frontal threshold that one passes through en route through the show. It is structured in zip-tied bamboo and finished in corrugated metal and blue tarp, which is cut and rolled up to reveal photographs of ghebbis in Addis Ababa by Ethiopian photographer Tsion Haileselassie. The projects pile up through the long Corderie, culminating in a video by Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai that sets his 1980 film House, about the expansion of a home in Jerusalem by Palestinian workers, against footage from a new play that transposes the story to the stage.

Broken into sequences punctuated by films or atmospheric pieces, the Arsenale’s Corderie is stocked with impressive work and research, pieces serving as curatorial “spacers” between more intense arrangements. Additional North American practices make impressive contributions. Under the Gender & Geography theme for the curator’s Special Projects, J. Yolande Daniels installed The BLACK City Astrolabe: A Constellation of African Diasporic Women, a tunnel-like mapping device. Nearby, under

the Mnemonic heading, Höweler + Yoon and Studio& (Mabel O. Wilson) 8 give voice to the archives at the University of Virginia, which informed their work on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers on the school’s campus. In the main space, Chicago’s Sweet Water Foundation documents acts of furniture-making (the outfit, cofounded by Emmanuel Pratt, also built a meeting house at Forte Marghera, across the lagoon on the mainland), and Low Design Office exhibits Enviromolecular, the latest version of its work with participatory construction in Ghana.

Across the two sites, the best work begins from narrative but makes its impact through material operations such as weavings, textiles, fabrics, carvings, and models. Videos were also a favored format, though it’s hard to sit still for an extended time here. Thankfully, the book-on-thewall era of architectural exhibitions is gone, now replaced by the presence of enigmatic, crafted objects. (Even the establishing wall texts were problematic: Their low-contrast vinyl installation, though chic, was hard to read, as George Kafka noted in his review for eflux.) Commentary is extruded through process, not form or declaration,

Unforeseeable, Unavoidable, Irresistible continued

which means the show’s pieces are felt not through rational analysis but instead bodily absorption: Lives and histories that have been embedded into media, and you feel things in response. The fact that most of the work comes from small practices means that the difficulties of larger offices (where most architects work) and the attendant political baggage is set aside in preference for individual voices to speak. For the first Venice architecture biennale to center Africa, the tone could have rightfully been one of upset and demonstration against the state of the continent after centuries of exploitation. Instead, the work soars, transmuting human experiences into offerings that vibrate with life.

Thandi Loewenson’s contribution, The Uhuru Catalogues, is an example of this conversion: A series of industrial graphite tiles are etched with murals that image sites of African liberation. Not just a medium to be applied onto paper, the graphite becomes a substrate that thickens with significance: The material is refined to create batteries, largely used in the Global North. Loewenson hails from Zimbabwe, which is the largest producer of lithium in Africa; this knowledge layers the topics of postcolonial extraction and climate

justice into the already-compelling artifacts.

This isn’t to say that “critical” work is absent from the show. In the Corderie, Andrés Jaque’s Office for Political Innovation presents Xholobeni Yards: Titanium and the Planetary Making of Shininess/Dustiness 9

The installation links activists from Africa with a range of experts to critique architecture’s addiction to shiny facades, as seen in the clear glass of Hudson Yards, which is made possible through titanium-based coatings whose mining has caused Xholobeni, South Africa, to become a dust bowl. Jaque writes that the installation “mobilizes architecture’s capacity to allow human bodies to feel the violence other bodies sense through human extractivism.” The operatic stage set of models lights up to the sound of Jaque’s voice, which unpacks our responsibility for more-than-human awareness.

Close by, an expert project by Amsterdam-based Killing Architects documents the operations of detention camps in Xinjiang, which since 2016 have allegedly held over a million Muslim minorities. The research, originally published in the now-shuttered BuzzFeed News, is based on satellite imagery and interviews with ex-prisoners and results in a film,

detailed drawings, and wall-sized illustrations about the layout of the facilities. It is an astounding project for which architect Alison Killing was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, but it was offensive enough that China, after opening its own national pavilion, pulled out of the biennale in protest. (National leadership in Beijing refuses to acknowledge the documented human rights abuses, while Killing’s team “stands by [their] reporting.”)

Even celebrated participants aren’t immune to drama. Adjaye Associates likely appears the most in the biennale, with four separate contributions, including Kwae 10, a blackened-timber structure that hollows out a triangular prism, prominently set on a dock outside the Arsenale. The office actually has a fifth effort on view in Venice if you count its appearance in an independently organized exhibition about NEOM, which took over two floors of an abbey in Dorsoduro. The project has been criticized widely for its greenwashing. Here, Adjaye Associates’ proposal for a portion of The Line, one component of NEOM, is seen in a large model and renderings. The exhibition evidences that The Line is now under construction, but just what it will look like remains unclear.

Whatever structural critique is handled indirectly in the main exhibitions lands with full force in the national pavilions, many of which are successful outings. The best ones advance criticism head-on. The Netherlands is presenting drawings of architect Carlijn Kingma that illustrate the flow of money through society. Latvia 11 has realized a satirical supermarket that turns the pieces from the last ten biennales into consumer projects to be plucked from cardboard shelves, a reminder that even cultural endeavors do not escape commodification. The Korean Pavilion 12 stages a game show and speculations that explore how people might cooperate in 2086, when, it is thought, the population will peak. Germany collected the refuse from last year’s art biennale and organized it into a handsome, inventoried warehouse. And Canada 13 launched the protest-soaked Not for Sale!, an investigation into the country’s housing crisis by Architects Against Housing Alienation. Austria, whose pavilion backs up to the wall of the Giardini, attempted to build a bridge to allow free access to the grounds. Venice officials shut down the idea, so the show includes a half-bridge built from scaffolding and the

research of local activists about the growing footprint of La Biennale across the city.

The move toward open access aligned with the latest version of the Unfolding Pavilion, curated by Daniel Tudor Munteanu and Davide Tommaso Ferrando (who also joined AN’s Critically Yours symposium), which publicized the two locations where one could freely access the walled Giardini sans 25€ entry fee. The authorities soon removed the unauthorized interventions. By the end of the vernissage, a healthy skepticism about the affair sets in, along with sleep deprivation and the summed effects of too many spritzes. How radical can an organization be when its lead sponsors are Rolex and Bloomberg Philanthropies? The event promises its own carbon neutrality, but what about the emissions of its jet-set attendees? Thankfully, the work amassed by Lokko remains after the crowds disperse; I toured the full biennale a second time the following week and found it productive to have more quiet to linger within. The terror of Venice is that there is so much to see; the benefit is that what you see sticks with you.

Other national pavilions again work through material means. The U.S. pavilion 14 explores plastics through the work of five

artists and designers who use the petroleum product in thoughtful ways. At the Belgian pavilion 15, organizers grew tiles made of mycelium and mounted them on a wood armature. Within the Nordic countries pavilion, a version of Joar Nango’s Girjegumpi The Sámi Architecture Library shares its stacks amid raw wood structures finished with animal pelts. Finland mounted an ode to the huussi (composting toilet) and call for the death of its flushing cousin. And Bahrain considers the value of water through a setup that condenses vapor into liquid that then drips down to planters.

Still others directly address their actual buildings: Switzerland literally deconstructs the wall between its Bruno Giacometti–designed pavilion and its neighbor, the Venezuelan gallery designed by Carlo Scarpa, turning the freed bricks into benches. Japan’s is a love letter to its own concrete pavilion, designed by Takamasa Yosizaka. Estonia set up shop in a rented apartment near the Arsenale to explore the gap between a home’s role as investment and platform for living.

Politics still enter the picture. Though almost 17 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa, only three countries

from the continent have official national presences: South Africa, Egypt, and Niger. India, the planet’s most populous country, isn’t participating, and Russia’s freestanding pavilion has remained dark. (It also wasn’t used during last year’s art biennale, when its curators resigned in an act of protest.) Ukraine, meanwhile, delivers a two-part pavilion: A low, dark, fabric-clad room in the Arsenale complex and a grassy earthwork in the Giardini that bowls into a narrow amphitheater; both are places for telling stories.

The awards jury heeded the curator’s priorities when making its selections: The Golden Lion went to Terra, Brazil’s pavilion 16 curated by Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares, which seeks to reconnect Indigenous knowledge back to the soil; and DAAR, led by Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, for their work on decolonizing architecture in Palestine and Europe.

In remarks during the opening press conference, Lokko addressed the crusty complaint that the overall affair “stopped short of architecture,” a common refrain for those who don’t see the value of architecture welcoming those it has excluded, either de jure or de facto. Lokko countered

that “it is our conventional understanding of architecture that stops short.” (Patrik Schumacher had a similar pan; he posted on Facebook that the participants used their spotlight for “documentary-style intellectual-artistic allusions to moral issues, garnished with pretentious critical-speak, of course without ever taking the risk of really taking up an explicit position or offering constructive proposal.”) Elsewhere, Lokko said “the intention is not to replace, but to augment. To expand, not to contract. To add, not subtract.” The uplift of nonwhite practitioners is not a substitution or stunt but an ongoing, long-overdue broadening of who gets to make architecture as we renovate the foundations of our shared world. Regime change begins at home, but its difficulty sets in when you take stock of your local conditions: With all this goodwill in the air, why aren’t things improving faster?

In a wall text, Lokko wrote that “the survival of the profession will ultimately depend on our ability to adapt to changing circumstances, intelligently, thoughtfully, ethically, and resourcefully.” Other routes into the future exist; Lokko’s biennale shows us a way forward. JM

Nearly Perfect

After years of work, Herzog & de Meuron’s Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn is now finished. In January, Herzog & de Meuron unveiled a new website that makes perusing the firm’s vast body of work a pleasure. Starting with an attic conversion in 1978, each of its 594 jobs is represented by a thumbnail on the website’s Projects page, which offers a variety of ways to search and filter. Click on “U.S.” as the location and 52 thumbnails remain on screen. Then choose the status “realised” and 30 of the 52 disappear. A search for “Ascan Mergenthaler,” a partner at the firm since 2004, reduces the 594 projects to 70. They include the de Young Museum in San Francisco (2005), the Parrish Museum on Long Island (2012), and the restoration of the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan (2016)— three of many commissions on which he was the partner-in-charge. Mergenthaler’s latest is Powerhouse Arts, which opened in May in the former Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company’s central power station in the rapidly gentrifying Gowanus neighborhood.

The nonprofit Powerhouse Arts offers lowcost studio space and fabrication services to artists who might otherwise be priced out of the neighborhood. Its 170,000-square-foot red-brick building was, until recently, home to squatters and a lure for graffiti artists. Could anyone have been more qualified than Mergenthaler to turn this industrial relic into a rough-and-ready hub of creativity? At the de Young, Mergenthaler showed how formally inventive he could be; at the Parrish, he showed how much beauty he could wrest from industrial materials after the museum cut its budget by 60 percent post-2008; and at the armory, he demonstrated his light touch with some of the most beautifully decorated interiors in the city.

The 1904 power station consisted of a red-brick turbine hall, covering about half an acre, with huge arched windows. The adjacent boiler house, a taller and narrower structure, was demolished after the facility was decommissioned in the 1950s. The firm designed a new six-story annex in the footprint of the boiler house and filled it with studios and fabrication shops for ceramics, printmaking, public-art construction, metalworking, and woodworking. The rooms are spacious, well lit, and well ventilated. There are no finished ceilings, so exposed ductwork and conduits emerge as design elements. From the inside, the building is a natural extension of the turbine hall—the connections are practically seamless. From the outside, the annex also looks, at least from a distance, like part of the old building: Its walls, cast in concrete, are precisely the color of the turbine hall’s bricks.

The showpiece—Herzog & Meuron’s reinvented turbine hall interior—is nearly perfect, with echoes of the much larger turbine hall in London that it transformed into the Tate Modern a quarter century ago. (While the Basel, Switzerland–based practice now has an office in New York, PBDW Architects was the architect of record for this project.)

The interior walls of the Brooklyn structure were covered in the same kind of Popart graffiti that once graced New York City’s

Above, top: The studios are spacious, well lit, and well ventilated, with no finished ceilings, and exposed concrete, ductwork, and conduits.

Above: The turbine hall will be used for art exhibitions, performances, fashion shows, product activations, dinners, parties, film/photo shoots, film screenings, conferences, and corporate events.

Left: The architects repaired the interior as needed but cleaned and left most of the graffiti in place.

subway cars. Mergenthaler said his rules for the graffiti were simple: “If something needed to be repaired, we repaired it. If something needed to be cleaned, we cleaned it. And then we stopped.” (Cleaning softened some of the paint colors just a bit.) In fact, very little of the old interior remains. The architects removed everything within the shell of the building, then filled it with a big new concrete box containing a below-grade parking garage and two floors of offices, classrooms, and support facilities. The process was reminiscent of another project headed by Mergenthaler: the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, in which the shell of an old brick warehouse building was emptied out and then fitted with a new concrete parking garage. But in Brooklyn, unlike Hamburg, there is no concert hall on top of the old building. Here, the roof of the concrete box serves as the floor of a very big room suitable for art shows, performances, and parties. (An early test came with a benefit for Open House New York last month.) That room, with a narrow mezzanine at its perimeter, clerestory windows, and a roof supported by a filigree of steel, resembles the drill hall of the armory on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, though it’s about a third the size.

Herzog & de Meuron’s other major intervention was to create a new entry and lobby at the east end of the building, complete with a handsomely utilitarian stairway and lots of exposed structural steel. All the metal is painted the color of primer, suggesting a work in progress—perfect for a center of artistic exploration. (The color is very close to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cherokee Red and also to the color of the building’s brickwork.)

Joshua Rechnitz, a press-shunning philanthropist, picked up the $180 million tab for the renovation, which works out to about $1,000 for each of its 170,000 square feet. (Outside, there is a garden by New York–based Ken Smith Workshop.) Inevitably, there were staff and program changes during the project’s ten-year gestation. The current director, Eric Shiner, headed the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh from 2010 to 2016. On opening day, he compared Powerhouse Arts to Warhol’s first factory. That building, he said, “changed art history. We hope to do the same thing here.” What he meant was that artists working in the building have their own shot at greatness. Mergenthaler, a master of transforming without deforming, has given them a good head start.

Fred A. Bernstein is the winner of the 2023 award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to an American who explores ideas in architecture through any medium.

Facing page, top: Powerhouse Arts hired Herzog & de Meuron to convert the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company’s central power station into a studio and event space.

Facing page, left: A new concrete six-story annex for studios was added by partner Ascan Mergenthal, matching the color and arched windows of the red-brick turbine hall.

(W)rapper’s Delight

Eric Owen Moss Architects completes a new office tower in South Central Los Angeles.

“It is...an eyesore,” one respondent said, criticizing the new (W)rapper building in South Central Los Angeles designed by Eric Owen Moss Architects (EOMA) and completed earlier this year. “I think it looks ugly,” offered another, “and messy.”

These are the words of the general public, surveyed by Fox 11 News’s Susan Hirasuna, which were issued forth from computer speakers during a recent meeting with the architect at his office. He turned to me with a grin like a goblin standing over a pile of gold. “They don’t know what to make of it!” he exclaimed, clearly enjoying the coverage in quixotic fashion. These plebeians on the news, of course, are outsiders to architectural discourse. They will, some believe, never understand the complex theoretical impetus that justifies such designs, so their head scratching can be brushed aside. Moss and his ilk are insiders, conversant, some believe, in an extended discussion about what architecture is. To truly understand Moss’s latest project is to appreciate the oscillations between these two groups.

The (W)rapper is a new 16-story, 180,500-square-foot office tower abutting the Hayden Tract in Culver City, where Moss has long been sculpting offices with names like Pterodactyl and Beehive for creative businesses like Vox and WongDoody. Like a luxury sports car built for the driver, not the passengers, the (W)rapper has no bloat, save for what serves the high-end office space. The street level of the building has been cut away to provide a generous space for cars to enter the garage below, and the lobby is raised a floor above, where it joins a quirky, vestigial-tail staircase that meets pedestrians from the Metro E Line station to the east.

As a way to lure creative office ventures with variable needs into signing leases, the floors vary in heights of 13.5, 16.5, and 24 feet, according to Dolan Daggett, project director at EOMA, who walked me through the hulking mass during a visit in March. Column-free interior spaces characterize creative office warehouses, so the (W)rapper re-creates that space but lifts it into the sky. This thirst for columnless floor plates also generated the need for a structural facade of steel tubes that gives me the ick as they discombobulate the storefront glazing’s presentation of the Los Angeles basin beyond.

All claims of sustainable design rely on an appeal to longevity. The tower is base-isolated, which offers incredible resistance against earthquakes. According to the EOMA website, the (W)rapper could “return its occupants to the office the following day.” Yet, the ability to survive a major seismic event is achieved through a major carbon splurge, as architecture critic Oliver Wainwright pointed out when reviewing the building for The Guardian. The (W)rapper therefore is a building expressing its own Freudian death drive, contributing to the very threat it stakes its value against. It promises survival in the face of destruction for those who can afford it, kind of like a Tesla Cybertruck.

The “W” in (W)rapper is in parentheses because it creates two meanings. Include it and you get Wrapper, which describes the way the building is ringed by its chaotic-looking structure. Without it, rapper, references musical artists prevalent in South Central Los Angeles. While Moss’s previous projects are located in Culver City, which is 10.7 percent Black, (W)rapper is in Baldwin

Hills/Crenshaw, a neighborhood that is 71.3 percent Black. It’s tone deaf to name a new luxury office high-rise after a music genre invented by Black Americans who, in South Central especially, are dealing with ongoing issues like gentrification.

In conversation, Moss locates (W)rapper among an incoherent web of references that include ancient sites like Chichen Itza, poems by W. B. Yeats, and an extended discussion he has been having—primarily with himself, he admits—about architecture in a changing world.

It strikes me that were Moss a student presenting the idea to any jury in an architecture school, the results could be embarrassing. When I asked him to describe the building concept, he went on for longer than I expected and piled references on top of references. It was like intellectual manspreading. I imagined a group of insider jurors picking the project apart based on allusion alone. Moss would struggle with the famously difficult request to “describe your project in 50 or fewer words,” an essential tool of challenging students to be clear and concise.

Seen at a distance, the building is a disagreeable, clunky, loud, uncomfortable hot mess. Yet encountered up close, parts of it are captivating. I felt joy experiencing all of the strange nooks and crannies inside the building. Plus, you start to see details like the texture of the cement plaster, which was troweled by hand. For me, the formal gymnastics and misuse of building elements, creating a desire to explore and look closely, is the most important aspect of EOMA’s work. It’s that simple. And I’d be remiss not to mention the success at the municipal level: The site has been converted from an industrial lot with a 45-foot height limit to a 235-foot office tower. This is a healthy shift in density that could have a ripple effect of similar efforts throughout Los Angeles.

These inconsistencies make the (W)rapper just the latest entry in a decades-long, public battle about the value of heroic architecture and the persona of architect as hero. As Colin Rowe loosely anticipated in Introduction to Five Architects, the rise of starchitecture created a marketplace for individual architects to distinguish their work as an identifiable brand when producing what is basically spatial waste in the form of “wrappers” for speculative real estate development. As Rowe articulated, the option for waste was the requisite condition that enabled excess through formal experimentation. Architects who did this through conversations with other insiders, the argument goes, could produce new spaces that may end up helping outsiders

The dream seems to largely be drying up, as people aren’t really buying this pitch these days. Save for a few high-profile instances, large, risk-averse corporations aren’t wasting their money on experimental architecture, and lucrative contracts are often delivered to large production firms with multiple partners. It also seems that instead of worshiping said heroic visionaries, the younger generation has discovered that working for them often means accepting lower wages, longer hours, and frequently toxic professional environments. They participate in an unfortunate, time-honored talent rotation: Once the burned-out and

stuck workers leave avant-garde practice and find respite in respectful and engaging work (which does exist), they are replaced by new, eager, bug-eyed graduates.

The battle between insider expertise and outsider critique about the (W)rapper was waged publicly this spring. Wainwright, in his review, panned the project as “a gas-guzzling villain’s lair.” Yet at The Eclipse of Criticism, an online symposium about architectural criticism held by Università di Pisa on April 4, the building was defended against that criticism by Cynthia Davidson and lamented as being too focused on the “crisis-du-jour” by insider Bob Somol. This was shared in a tweet by another insider/outsider, Doug Spencer, who regularly criticizes architecture for its complicity with neoliberal capitalism. The result feels like the insiders are just as baffled as the outsiders, or maybe there is no real inside after all.

The back-and-forth reminds me of a riddle: Name something for which you take off

the outside, keep the inside, throw away the outside, cook the inside, eat the outside, and then throw away the inside? The answer is an ear of corn: Through the process of shucking the husk and cooking the cob, a new edible outside emerges. For years, it seems, architecture’s inside has proliferated at the expense of its outside concerns. Perhaps the (W)rapper will serve as a tombstone for this flavor of macho, carbon-intensive, pseudointellectual contortionism. It certainly marks a moment where the payoff of years of architectural work is a polite clap by a handful of protagonists while the rest of us stand around scratching our heads.

Places of Worship

Adjaye Associates’ Abrahamic Family House opens in Abu Dhabi.

COURTESY ADJAYE ASSOCIATES

Foundations for Adjaye Associates’ new multifaith complex in Abu Dhabi were laid long before the project broke ground in 2020. It began with a landmark antidiscrimination law, passed in 2015, that criminalized religious hate crimes against the three “divine religions” or Abrahamic faiths. In 2016, the United Arab Emirates established the Ministry of Tolerance and Coexistence, along with a tolerance hand sign that the Wu-Tang Clan would be proud of. Three years ago, the country issued the proclamation of a national Year of Tolerance, and the Pope and Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam signed the Document of Human Fraternity in Abu Dhabi. In September 2020, the Abrahamic Accords, in which the UAE and Bahrain normalized relations with Israel, were signed. Morocco and Sudan would soon follow.

Bringing together a mosque, a church, and the first new purpose-built synagogue in the region in a century, along with a secular pavilion, the Abrahamic Family House is the most visible expression of this shift. Three cubic forms, each with its own formation of columns, face different directions: They are oriented toward Makkah (Mecca), the rising sun, and Jerusalem for Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, respectively. The trio of worship venues is connected by an elevated central pavilion landscaped with local plantings and a cavelike visitor welcome center. It is a foreign policy document converted into architecture. “Ugly buildings for an ugly brief” was one friend’s reaction. But when I visited, shortly after its public opening, I found it unexpectedly beautiful.

The complex is located in Saadiyat Island’s Cultural District, the Emirati capital’s paean to Berlin’s Museumsinsel, and is surrounded by starchitecture. The whole gang is there: Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Mecanoo, Tadao Ando, and Zaha Hadid Architects, each with a spectacular landmark museum that may or may not be completed. In contrast, the Abrahamic Family House is remarkably understated. Each house of worship has a courtyard with a triangular water feature and fruit trees: lemons for the mosque, oranges for the church, and pomegranates for the synagogue. The cubes are exactly the same size and made out of the same materials: Omani limestone, oak, and an off-white concrete made with aggregate from Saadiyat. All signage is in Arabic, English, and Hebrew. They differ in their architectural

COURTESY ADJAYE ASSOCIATES

articulations and auxiliary spaces, which attempt to both symbolize and meet the functional needs of each faith.

Graceful, elongated arches adorn the mosque, which has wider arched windows with a double layer of lacy mashrabiyat behind the full-height arcade. The understanding of light as a building material is handled with expertise through the complex; it is particularly effective here, as it casts a chiaroscuro of dappled light onto the prayer halls. Inside, four tulip-like columns seamlessly flow into nine tall vaults. Unlike the sharply defined ornamental muqarnas common in Islamic architecture, this vaulting is gently rolling in a way that suggests a spoon taken to an avocado. Two external bronze-fenced ablution spaces marry geometry to gender, with inverted spherical

Below: Elongated arches adorn the mosque

Below, middle: Behind the mosque’s full-height arcade, wider arched windows have a double layer of lacy mashrabiyat

Below, bottom: Sections of each place of worship

Below: Thin, stringy columns make up the facade of the Christian church, inspired by shards of light.

Below, middle: A shower of timber battens descends from the ceiling of the church.

Below: The facade of the synagogue facade is surfaced in three overlapping layers of V-shaped columns.

Below, middle: The synagogue interior includes a bronze mesh inspired by the original Tabernacle.

and pyramidal ceilings defining spaces for women and men, respectively.

At the Christian church, thin, stringy columns make up its grim facade, inspired by shards of light. As with the synagogue, the church’s exterior form extends indoors, so this idea is echoed in both the pew design and the shower of timber battens descending from the ceiling, delivering power and austerity.

The church includes a dramatically cracked ambo—symbolizing the word of God—with a serene octagonal baptistry. Here too, coexistence is factored into the design, but not among faiths so much as different Christian denominations. While the synagogue serves the UAE’s overwhelmingly Orthodox Jewish community, the church is set up to be used by both the country’s Catholic majority and

Protestant worshippers. As such, specific symbolism has been stripped back to the bare minimum. A large, suspended golden cross, for example, is purposefully neither plain nor a crucifix but something in between.

The synagogue is captivating. Its facade is surfaced in three overlapping layers of V-shaped columns, in reference to the palm fronds that are sometimes used to cover sukkahs, the temporary shelters erected for the festival of Sukkot. In reality, they’re more like metal elevator grates. (“It’s like designing a church based on a Christmas tree. ... It’s like ChatGPT architecture,” design critic Tamar Shafrir remarked in a recent conversation.) There’s a preponderance of somewhat arbitrary references here, not just in the shul but throughout the project. The columns touch the

ground at seven points and the soffit at eight, indexing man and God. The synagogue interior has a bronze mesh inspired by the original Tabernacle, while the skylight somehow relates to a chuppah. But the overall effect is somehow very utilitarian and sensible , as if beauty were to be found not in splendor but in creating space for community.

Each place of worship includes an auxiliary space related to water and purification. For the synagogue, it is a mikvah, or ritual bath. Halacha or Jewish ritual law specifies that the water must be from natural sources like spring water or rainwater that directly fills a cistern. This poses a problem in the arid climate of the UAE, where water is desalinated from the sea, which is considered a spring too, but strict rules around conveyance mean it cannot be

used. The solution thus far has been to truck in ice, which bypasses transport requirements even as it might not be the most environmentally sound option. This detail offers a small glimpse into the many small, mostly invisible negotiations the country is making to turn its ambitions of tolerance and coexistence into lived reality.

Constructing Justice

Working from New Orleans and Portland, Oregon, Colloqate unites engagement and design.

If architecture is the act of coordinating inputs and outputs relative to material, space, and time, then much of the work done by Colloqate Design consists in determining what that process looks like relative to typical architectural practice. It might be said, then, that the New Orleans interdisciplinary studio operates at a meta level. Its insistence on first principles— namely, justice, inclusivity, and equity—would support such a view, as would its many connections to academic discourse and novel pedagogical experiments like Dark Matter University.

But this characterization avoids the degree to which Colloqate’s ideals are entangled with its methodology, according to design principal Bryan Lee Jr. “While there are a lot of polemical considerations, there is a practicality to the work that we’re doing that results, for example, in a change in RFP structures,” he told AN. “How do we challenge the way procurement happens? Answering a question like that means making real, material changes that impact the output of the work.”

Lee founded Colloqate in New Orleans in 2017. (The name is a portmanteau of colloquial, as in “the informal language of people and place,” and collocate, as in arranging resources.) He moved to the city in 2011 and soon made his way to the offices of EskewDumezRipple, where he said he “learned how to

be an architect.” Active in the National Organization of Minority Architects for more than a decade, he harnessed the theme of its 2015 conference (“Social Justice by Design”) into a workshop called Design as Protest (DAP). The initiative morphed into an independent platform with chapters in dozens of architecture schools around the country. On Donald Trump’s inauguration day, DAP staged multicity workshops that, in addition to their function as symbolic protest, served as a test case for putting multiple, often multigenerational, constituencies into dialogue.

The studio’s emphasis on community outreach is notable for its contrast with the deflationary exercises undertaken by developers and other empowered stakeholders of capital projects looking to mitigate pushback. Colloqate implements a more nuanced approach by retaining a grasp on the tangible. According to Lee, the studio has hired over 80 “organizers”— activists, community stewards, and longtime residents referred to in Colloqate’s literature as the “PhDs on the block”—on a part-time paid basis to consult on numerous projects, including a New Orleans innovation district and a workforce training center in Portland, Oregon. Their responsibilities vary, though they can mean running workshops, helping shape conversations with participants, and collating the data these sessions generate.

“The most critical thing is to have people organizing from the very beginning. We want to get people in predesign and then extend their engagement across the entirety of a project,” Lee said. “The intention is not to bifurcate engagement and design. They are one and the same.”

To avoid having that engagement peter out in a flurry of Post-it notes, Colloqate enshrines localized knowledge and experiences in a repository that would seem antithetical to the purpose: architectural documentation. Data points and ephemera gathered during the workshopping phase are incorporated into a “design justice” document that gets appended to the CD set. By building reflexivity into the actual stuff of design, you are extending the longevity of a community, Lee said. “So when the next set of renovations happens in five, ten, 15 years, and whoever is in charge goes to review the documents, they will get all the technical information as well as annotations, narratives, the rationale for our own design decisions. They will not only get the as-built architecture but also the as-built community.”

1 Design Justice/ Design as Protest, 2015–

There is a nested quality to Colloqate’s work. Various task-specific initiatives are designed to be mutually reinforcing. For example, Lee describes the DAP workshop series he originally developed for the 2015 National Organization of Minority Architects conference in New Orleans as the “organized action” of the Design Justice Platform, a suite of programs that has also included training seminars and, in 2018, a national summit sponsored by the AIA. These cumulative efforts, Lee told AN, are a framework through which the tenets of a “socially just profession” can be incubated: “Because a lot of the communities that we serve don’t have the financial capacity at any given moment to immediately put a building in the ground, it means we have to do a lot of visioning work with people. It means that our work as designers is about creating expressions of value for people living in a place that is marked for change and showing how they could guide that change themselves.”

2 Launch School 2017–

The first phase of this ongoing project will see the renovation of an existing 20,000-square-foot administrative building on a former airfield in Jamaica Bay, Brooklyn, for use by a progressive-leaning K–12 charter school. ARO is heading up the building upgrades, while SCAPE is preparing plans to restore the surrounding landscape. Colloqate, which initially provided design support but was recently promoted to an associate partner, has worked to shape the design desiderata, with an emphasis on racial justice and sustainability. (The school will serve a predominantly Black and Brown community.) Lee commented on the commitment of his collaborators to the process of design justice. “That’s a non-negotiable for our involvement,” he said. “Every firm we work with has to go through multiple rounds of our design justice training. They also need to incorporate what we call the ‘design justice set’ into the CD set, which can be a tool for community engagement down the line.”

3 Portland Community College Metro Center, 2019–

On its website, Bora Architecture & Interiors touts the high-performance facade of this work-training facility in northeast Portland, which incorporates low-embodied-carbon materials and low-Ufactor windows. It also hypes the innovative use of cross-laminated timber in large stretches of the building, now under construction. But the Portland architecture firm gives equal billing to the project’s “trauma-informed design and design justice principles” that reflect Colloqate’s involvement. According to Lee, Bora and other team members attended training sessions on critical race theory ahead of community engagement workshops. When COVID-19 threatened the impact of these proceedings, Colloqate conveyed the team’s progress in a graphic newspaper it mailed to over ten thousand residences in the area. “Our aim,” said Lee, “is to make an architecture or public space that is truly rooted in the communities we’re serving rather than an architecture that is superficial to those communities and expects them to embrace a new format of space. That’s the wrong way ’round.”

4 Midland Library 2021–

Design justice sets the top-level agenda for every one of Colloqate’s projects, beginning with the predesign and design development phases. The studio organizes several community engagement sessions to identify “the political, procedural, experiential, and architectural implications” of any given design option, Lee said. From this material, Colloqate compiles a “spatial implications document”—separate from the design justice set—that effectively serves as an index for the implemented scheme, capturing the impressions surrounding its conception and reception as well as its material, ecological, and financial ramifications. In the relevant document for the Midland Library in Portland, you will find feedback from engagement activities with various user sets, captured in upwards of 4,600 comments related to issues ranging from “access and safety” to “identity, culture, and belonging” to “delight.” Through its Community Design Organizer program, Colloqate was able to hire 13 people to facilitate the workshops.

28 Anthology

A Blossom Blooms in Little Rock

Studio Gang and SCAPE expand the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts.

Architect: Studio Gang

Location: Little Rock Arkansas

Landscape architect: SCAPE

Associate architect: Polk Stanley Wilcox

Architects

Construction manager/general contractor: Nabholz, Pepper, Doyne

Structural engineer/enclosure consultant: Thornton Tomasetti

Civil engineer: McClelland Consulting

Engineers

MEP/FP engineer: dbHMS

Acoustical/theatrical/AV designer: Arup, Acoustical

Cost estimator: Venue Consulting

Lighting designer: Licht Kunst Licht

When the newly reinvigorated Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) in Little Rock opened to the public in April, its overhauled galleries greeted visitors with a special exhibition titled Together, which features inclusive, often exuberant work by, among others, Oliver Lee Jackson, Deanna Dikeman, Jim Hodges, and LaToya M. Hobbs. The meditation on family, community, and humanity’s connection to nature is a fitting thematic companion to the museum’s architecture, which creates new, publicly accessible gathering spaces and forges an improved connection to MacArthur Park, the city’s oldest public park.

Led by Studio Gang and SCAPE in collaboration with Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects, the design restores the museum’s original 1937 facade—enclosed by an ill-conceived addition in 1982—while giving the building a central stem that blooms into entrances to the north and south. Its kinetic, folded roofline and floor-to-ceiling windows beckon the city inside like the architectural equivalent of a waved arm.

The free museum offers a rare mix of visual and performing arts, art education, and community programming in addition to maintaining 14,000 works in its permanent collections. In Little Rock today, if a person wants to take a ceramics class, audition for a children’s stage production of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, or see rare drawings by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, they go to AMFA.

Studio Gang founder Jeanne Gang cited the breadth of the institution’s programs and support within the local community as an important inspiration. “So many other institutions are striving to adapt, to make their programs serve their communities better,” she said at a press preview. “The first time I came [to Little Rock], it struck me that this museum already had that. It was a place that was ahead of its time with

its art school, the theater, the galleries. It was really a community center already.”

Funded by a Little Rock hotel-tax bond passed by voters in 2016 and a $35 million gift from the Windgate Foundation, along with additional private donations, the extensive renovation responds to decades of accretion. First opened in 1937 in an H. Ray Burks–designed, WPAbuilt, art deco box, the museum was expanded five times between 1963 and 2000 as it grew into the largest cultural institution of its kind in Arkansas.

With so many ad-hoc additions and renovations, the building suffered from both functional and operational problems—for example, it had eight different mechanical systems, none of them coordinated with the others. The primary parking lot’s location separated the museum from MacArthur Park, forcing visitors, in the words of SCAPE founder Kate Orff, to “literally put [their] back to the park” as they entered.

The renovated museum integrates its programs and additions with the insertion of a sinuous, double-height volume nicknamed the Blossom, which unfurls at either end to create a central light-filled corridor and lobby space. It eases wayfinding challenges and gives the museum a new architectural identity. “We had this idea of cracking the building open and making what, at the time, we were calling Main Street—which isn’t very cool; ‘the Blossom’ sounds much better. It was this idea of a main street that connected north and south,” Orff said. (Studio Gang used a conceptually similar—but aesthetically very different—approach with the American Museum of Natural History’s Gilder Center in New York, which opened just weeks after AMFA.)

With pleated wood ceilings expressed by thousands of suspended plywood baffles, the new space establishes a visual connection from one end of the museum to the other and navigates a 6-foot grade change. The reconfiguration establishes clear connections between the main galleries, the performing arts theater, the lecture hall, and the newly named Windgate Art School, which occupies the ground floor beneath the galleries, all of which were given facelifts and technological upgrades as part of the renovation.

On the south side, the new folded-plate roof structure widens to shelter a new restaurant and entry vestibule oriented to the southwest. This shift in orientation was critical to the relocation of the main parking lot and the realization of a new landscape connection to MacArthur Park, first

established in 1892. “That was my first site-planning gesture, literally taking the parking lot and cranking it [90 degrees] and putting it along the west side,” Orff said. “That allowed this whole gesture to happen.”

The reinvigorated landscape draws from Arkansas’s native ecology, with “petal gardens” that radiate outward from the cantilevered roofs. Capped with curving, precast concrete benches, the apex of each garden features a mound of river rock that receives roof runoff from custom-designed scuppers. The drains form ephemeral water features when it rains before channeling the water into wildflower-filled bioswales.

SCAPE’s improvements called for planting of 250 new trees on the 11-acre site and avoided turfgrass, apart from an existing crescent lawn and a new flexible event lawn. Instead, the landscape design prioritizes a ground cover of low-growing, native sedges that will thrive under the museum’s canopy of mature oaks and create wildlife habitat. “Oaks are really a keystone species of the American landscape, hosting innumerable caterpillars and birds,” Orff noted. “Having an unmowed ground plane is a key part of that whole life cycle.”

On the opposite side of the museum, a sweeping, glass-enclosed volume extends from the main galleries toward the historic circle drive, hovering above the original entry court and overlooking the new museum landscape and art deco facade. Furnished with clusters of low tables and casual seating, the interior serves as an informal gathering space dubbed the Cultural Living Room, similar to the Mack Scoggins Merrill Elam Architects–designed Great Hall at Tulsa’s Gathering Place. At one end, an art deco–inspired bar serves coffee and cocktails and can be rented out for private events.

It is from this perch—an elevated public space—that the museum architecture’s values are most clearly demonstrated. Undeniably ushering in a new era for the AMFA, the building reaches out to the Little Rock community in new and more transparent ways while not losing sight of the past. Even as it wraps the historic facade, this new gathering place pays homage to the institution’s long history, engaging the original building as one might frame a beloved work of art.

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SPACES OF INCLUSION

The buildings, cities, and landscapes where we live are not neutral. They are shaped by the interests of those in power, who often exclude others—people of color, regularly—from decisions, processes, and profits. The features in this issue cover initiatives that work in the opposite direction and expand the set of people whose voices are heard. In Dallas, an architecture critic leads the charge to reimagine sites of violence through the proposal of a connective, memorial landscape. Moody Nolan, an African American–owned architecture office, has served HBCU clients for over 30 years, resulting in more than 70 projects on 32 campuses across the country. And in the classroom, educators are revising how professional practice courses are taught, an improvement that expands knowledge about careers in the field for its future leaders.

Top: The Reimagining Dealey Plaza design by Stoss Landscape Urbanism and MPdL weaves a series of streetscape, landscape, architectural, and memorial gestures into the existing transportation infrastructure.

Left: A tiered amphitheater facing the grassy knoll ramps up to a soaring promontory and overlook that gradually descend in a winding, planted pathway delivering visitors across the train tracks to Martyrs Park.

Above: The design calls for planting trees down to the Trinity River, a move that anticipates the redesign of upland areas of the river’s levees for parks and recreation.

Facing page: Dealey Plaza in 1961

Commissioned by architecture critic Mark Lamster, Stoss Landscape Urbanism and MPdL Studio offer a new public terrain for downtown Dallas that addresses its violent past.

REINVENTING DEALEY PLAZA

Settled in 1841 by Tennesee-born trader John Neely Bryan, who opened a general store, post office, and ferry on the banks of the Trinity River, Dallas is now a major destination within Texas and the country at large. Yet like many cities, traces of a violent past remain underacknowledged in its terrain.

In July 1860, a fire destroyed the city’s business district. At the time Dallas was a town of fewer than 700 people, including 97 African Americans. The fire, occurring not long before the outbreak of the Civil War, sparked accusations of arson against abolitionist and Black leaders, culminating in the lynching of three Black men. A widely circulated 1910 postcard picturing a massive crowd of whites lynching a Black man at the center of Dallas offers another window into its hidden history of racial terror. In 1963, the city dedicated Martyrs Park to the victims, but the site remains isolated from pedestrian access beneath the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad yards—the so-called Triple Underpass—with an uncomfortably narrow and dark walkway before Elm Street emerges and descends to the river.

This history is overshadowed by another incident of violence: Dealey Plaza is just on the other side of the Triple Underpass. Many Americans know it as the site of one of the country’s most shocking and calamitous events: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—a figure of enormous hope and aspiration for a generation of young people—as his motorcade drove through Dallas on November 22, 1963, the streets lined by throngs of supporters. The event, captured on film by an amateur photographer, was followed by an uncanny series of improbable incidents, among them the killing of the oddball assassin by an equally oddball nightclub owner—also photographed in the act. The graphic and incongruous official account of events spawned innumerable government investigations, conspiracy theories, Hollywood movies, and deathbed confessions.

Dealey Plaza became a place of shame and embarrassment for Dallas’s elected officials, who tried to ignore it, placing only an informational plaque at the site until, in 1970, the city commissioned Philip Johnson to design a memorial several blocks away. The unfortunate result is a grim, Brutalist artifact. Work proceeded slowly to fully and properly tell the story of the event. In 1989, the Dallas County Historical Foundation dedicated a museum to commemorate the assassination, the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, located inside the Texas School Book Depository building from which the assassin fired the fatal shots.

In the meantime, Dealey Plaza attracted hucksters and conspiracy theorists, who regularly marked the locations where bullets were found with spray-painted x’s on the pavement. Rather than taking the situation as an excuse for grandstanding and the reprimand of city leaders, Mark Lamster, architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News , decried the sad state of this part of downtown. “It is a deplorable state of affairs,” he wrote last October, “but also a great opportunity; a chance to transform this site into a space of civic memory and understanding that embraces the past and points to the future.”

Lamster has done just that. Through his leadership, the Dallas Morning News has commissioned an extraordinary vision for Dealey Plaza. Led by Chris Reed of Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Monica Ponce de Leon of MPdL Studio, the effort is an inspiring example of what architecture criticism and public memorials can and should be. The Reinventing Dealey Plaza project layers transportation infrastructure, historic preservation, ecological design, and two memorials to shocking incidents of political violence within a generous transformation of one of Dallas’s most significant and neglected public spaces.

The mandate for the site’s proposed rehabilitation originated in a 2020 column by Lamster in which he argued for the closing of Dealey Plaza to vehicles, along with the Triple Underpass, a piece of 1930s railway infrastructure that cuts through downtown Dallas. As Lamster wrote in his article last year presenting the concept, Dealey Plaza has become “perilous to navigate, marked by tawdry vandalism and utterly inadequate to both its historical gravity and to the functional demands of the city.” Its pedestrianization would be a fitting way to honor the place, an imperative for the safety of visitors, and an opportunity for Dallas, he argued.

“I think our first and most significant move was to shut down Elm Street, one of the three roads that are moving through [Dealey Plaza],” Lamster told AN. “That’s the road that Kennedy was shot on. And just to say, we will no longer have traffic on this road, that having moving vehicles going quite fast over the site was not appropriate. Shutting that down, making it a pedestrian space—making it a safe space—was really important.”

In response, the design by Reed and Ponce de Leon weaves an elegant series of streetscape, landscape, architectural, and memorial gestures into the existing transportation infrastructure. Elements of the conceptual plan include the pedestrianized street, dedicated bike lanes, an outdoor amphitheater, poetically slanted trees that symbolize the destabilizing events, and a memorial to the Kennedy assassination composed of pooling wells honoring the places currently disgraced by ad hoc disaster tourism.

“These spaces are supposed to be honorific; they’re supposed to be celebrating the lives of people who were lost,” Reed said in an interview with AN. “This was really about a city-making project. It was about a district. It was about a series of public spaces and connections that all of a sudden reframe the question of commemoration and remembrance. It’s not about a monument or a singular thing or gesture but about a series of stories that could be told by the way people reengaged the urban fabric and made their way through the city.”

The infamous grassy knoll, a designated national historic site marked by a plaque since 1993, is left intact, but nearby, a waterfall-like installation washes the Triple Underpass with undulating blue and white light, referencing a missing ecological feature: the diverted and channelized Trinity River. After a flooding incident in 1908 destroyed downtown Dallas, the Army Corp of Engineers built the Triple Underpass in 1936 to route automobiles where there once had been a ford in the river. Dallas is separately working on a gargantuan $459 million floodway project to shore up its levees and add pump stations.

The Reimagining Dealey Plaza scheme intersects with 2015 plans by Stoss with SHoP and James Lima Planning + Development and calls for planting trees down to the Trinity River, a move that anticipates the redesign of upland areas of the river’s levees for recreation. As a part of the larger riverfront remediation project, the conceptual plan for Trinity River Park—iterated by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh but still awaiting funding—landscapes the 285-acre site with playgrounds, picnic areas, gardens, and winding paths, adding wetlands for invertebrate species, fish, and birds; access points for kayak and canoe entry; and increased space for walking, running, and biking. It also anticipates the relocation of a problematic piece of governance: a decommissioned jail that the City of Dallas has long hoped to purchase from the state and redevelop as a commercial area reconnecting downtown to the riverfront.

But where Reed and Ponce de Leon’s concept transcends an ordinary streetscape improvement project is its engagement of the earlier killings, committed about a century prior to Kennedy’s assassination. (Earlier this year, a large physical model of the design was on display at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, where Ponce de Leon is the dean.) The site is currently marked only by a sign that communicates the park’s name, but it will soon host a monument by artists Shane Allbritton and Norman Lee of RE:site Studio, known for their abstract, patterned public art and memorial projects, including a finalist proposal for the World Trade Center memorial competition. Their memorial would be largely inaccessible to pedestrians without a reshaping of the streetscape, so Reimagining Dealey Plaza proposes a tiered amphitheater facing the grassy knoll. It would ramp up to a soaring promontory and overlook that gradually descend in a winding, planted pathway delivering visitors across the train tracks to Martyrs Park.

The gesture “does a great deal to connect spaces that cut across histories,” Ponce de Leon offered during a conversation with AN. “It actually engages the public in multiple scales so that you can go there by yourself and contemplate on your own, but also you can go with your family, you can go with a school group, or you can actually have a larger gathering…. For me what is important is the emphasis on looking for ways to open a new way of thinking about commemoration. And in a way that allows multiple histories instead of a single history to be told.”

Jerry Hawkins, executive director of Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation, is among the supporters of and participants in the project’s development. His organization is dedicated to transformational and sustainable community-based change while addressing racism in the city.

“Dallas is a very unique city when it comes to American history,” Hawkins told AN. “Texas is one of the leaders of oppressive legislation right now. We lead the country in banned books, and much of the white nationalist propaganda comes out of North Texas. We just had a shooting in Allen, Texas. The El Paso shooter came from North Texas. So it’s a very unique place. But it’s also a place that needs some support. And we need to welcome people who are trying to engage in that historical remembrance. So this is a welcome project.” SZ

CAMPUS EXCELLENCE

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) play a vital role in the education of Black Americans. These important institutions often began as land-grant institutions mandated by the federal government in areas with long-standing racist policies that did not allow the admission of Black students to other universities. (The first was Cheyney University, established in 1837.) As a result, HBCUs, largely concentrated in the American South and Midwest, evolved to become educational havens in otherwise hostile environments.

Moody Nolan has developed impressive expertise in serving HBCU clients. Since 1985, the architecture office has completed more than 70 projects on 32 campuses across the country. Its commitment to these important institutions is driven by the firm’s own values as the largest Black-owned architecture firm in the country. Working with HBCUs was an early source of commissions: First was the design of a botanical library and greenhouse at Ohio’s Central State University in 1985, and it continued in significant projects for schools like Morehouse and Howard. Its current scope of work ranges from libraries to laboratories and student centers and signals a growing trend of increasing enrollment. Today, 287,000 students are earning degrees at HBCUs.

After working extensively, but not exclusively, on these campuses for over 30 years, Moody Nolan’s Cincinnati office started an HBCU committee in 2019 to explore relationships and methods of support; now its members can be found at all of the company’s 12 locations. Director of business development for HBCU projects Vincent O. Terry told AN about the importance of a Black-owned firm engaging in culturally relevant projects like HBCUs: “The freedom to share what you’re feeling as the end user and ask questions without intimidation is best handled by Black architects. When working with these HBCU campuses there is nothing like having that trust, and it’s important to hire people who look like you so you can have those heart-to-heart discussions. This is an essential reason why we created an HBCU committee.”

Working on HBCU campuses does present design challenges, as their development is often stunted by a lack of funding and prominence when compared to institutions with predominantly white student populations. Some of these obstacles are spatial; for example, many entities own large amounts of land that has gone undeveloped, resulting in sprawling or disjointed facilities. Others are financial: A lack of funding means that any project built on the campus has to pack as much impact as possible. Moody Nolan approaches these general concerns as design considerations and aims to increase density on campuses while layering a variety of programs into buildings when possible.

One of the goals when Moody Nolan designs any building on a HBCU campus is to use cultural and historical sensitivity to increase enrollment and retain students. This is done through both demographic knowledge about the students who typically attend HBCUs and interactive design processes. At Alabama A&M University, for example, Moody Nolan ensured that the new University Event Center could accommodate the immediate family of each graduating student at commencement, a seating capacity

of 6,000, given that many students who attend HBCUs are first-generation college graduates. To maximize the use of the arena, the seating is flexible and can be converted to accommodate a volleyball court, basketball court, and an assembly hall.

Moody Nolan also engages students by implementing interactive design exercises early in its process. This is important for engaging students whose educational development has been disrupted by the isolation and tension caused by the pandemic. At Thurgood Marshall Hall, a residential complex with 670 beds and dining hall that was completed last year at Morgan State University in Baltimore, students advocated for the inclusion of smaller more intimate meeting and dining spaces in addition to the traditional, communal cafeteria; they wanted a comfortable space for students used to more solitude and tighter social circles. These spaces were included in the final design of the building. As providers of all types of higher education reorient their facilities to a tech-savvy student body and face restrictive budgets, innovative spaces that respond to new ways of socializing, learning, and living are necessary in plans that rethink the typical college campus.

Architects in Moody Nolan’s Housing Studio, which extends across several offices, also updated the program of Thurgood Marshall Hall to address the specific needs of HBCU students and the financial constraints of the institution. What was initially a straightforward residential and dining hall grew to include fitness centers, counseling services, and group study rooms with access to tutors. Including supplementary programs within the same building where students live not only removes the need for traditionally separate buildings for fitness, mental health, and tutoring—thus reducing costs—but also equips students with the resources they need for success at their fingertips.

Beyond anticipating the needs of its majority-Black users, Thurgood Marshall Hall also showcases the legacy of its namesake as a celebration of Black success. Murals,

photographs, and exhibits about the Baltimorean who became the first Black Supreme Court justice appear on walls throughout the building, tapping into the recognition and storytelling that permeate the HBCU projects in Moody Nolan’s portfolio. A similar strategy was used in the office’s design for the student library and learning center at Texas Southern University in Houston. There, the collections room features quotes by Black writers etched into glass, and long corridors are used as gallery walls to showcase art.

Historically, architecture has not been a friendly place for Black practitioners. Racism, both institutional and interpersonal, has kept the number of Black architects low. Today, only 2 percent of licensed architects in the U.S. are Black, though there are programs in place to help prepare students of color for careers in the field and support them during the process, including efforts led by local chapters of the National Organization for Minority Architects.

Moody Nolan’s work with HBCUs extends beyond the design and delivery of buildings and into the advancement of the profession through supporting Black students and young professionals. The firm uses its work on HBCUs to raise awareness about the possibilities for Black architects by participating in career fairs, hosting a lecture series at Tuskegee University to shed light on the profession, and mentoring students who are interested in the field.

Terry shared Moody Nolan’s ambition to grow its relationships with HBCUs: “Our mission is to work on every single HBCU campus in the country and continue bridging that gap between culture and design.” He is careful, though, to note that the practice should not be pigeonholed as a “Black firm.” Moody Nolan’s abilities can be seen in both its size and in its professional achievements: The office received the AIA’s Architecture Firm of the Year Award in 2021. Moody Nolan brings “a level of uniqueness and authenticity to HBCU projects,” Terry said. With these accolades, it seems likely that there will be more successful projects for HBCU clients ahead.

Moody Nolan’s three decades of work for historically Black colleges and universities is a key component of the office’s success.

Research Question

What factors cause people to leave an architecture firm? And what factors convince them to stay? The aim of the research is to look into the components that contribute to the turnover rate of first jobs, from work culture, to o ce environments or from personal reasons to ones that are outside of an employees control. Are there correlations between firm sizes and particular reasons? Or are turnover rates generally a ected by larger crises going on?

PRO 7408 - Frameworks of Practice, Fall 2022

WHAT

correspondedtomyvalue

Imovedoutofthe

Giventhechoicetoteach

workattheo

Left: “Turnover Rate" by Pawel Bejm, Oonagh Davis, Nicola Ho, and Cathy Wu. From Jacob Reidel’s PRO7408 Frameworks of Practice, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2022.

Facing page: “From School to Practice” by Jiwon Kim, Suraj Radadia, and Reuben Zest. From Jacob Reidel’s PRO7408 Frameworks of Practice, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2022.

changedbusinessmodel

longerfeasible

Ihadababy

Class of 1995 Large firm

Research Methodology

Class of 2005 Large firm

An o cial survey was conducted in collaboration with Career Services at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A short questionnaire was sent out to Master in Architecture I graduates (graduation year 1949-2022) asking about the length of their first job, their reasons for staying and their reasons for leaving Questions regarding the profile of the firm were asked (i.e., firm size) in an e ort to find larger trends amongst the answers. In total 276 responses were recorded.

Data Visualization

The data visualization concentrates on e orts to delineate the top reasons a fresh graduate would either stay at a firm of leave, then sorting these by the firm sizes. Correlations between the reasons were found were appropriate (i.e., pay was too low; would have stayed in pay increased). Specific case studies were also highlighted to reveal the diversity in career paths.

Paweł Bejm, Oonagh Davis, Nicola Ho, Cathy Wu

“What Are Architects’ Purported Values?” by Karen Duan, Trent Fredrickson, Konrad Holtsmark, Ethan Poh, and Peeraya Suphasidh. From Jacob Reidel’s PRO7408 Frameworks of Practice, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2019.

design design

workedtherefor11years,

leftaftermysalarynolonger

PRACTICING PRACTICE

The word “practice” suggests routine and repetition. Like the kid who takes 100 shots from the free-throw line, the act should improve its desired outcome. Within architecture, the term, as Dana Cuff wrote in her 1992 book Architecture: The Story of Practice, is “the embodiment, indeed the expression, of the practitioner’s everyday knowledge.” That knowledge is imparted to young people in architecture school through studio coursework in which students develop their design skills. But the expression of those skills takes place later in an office, a professionalized setting that demands not only design ability but also business acumen. The practice of practice begins, for schools accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB), with the Professional Practice class.

Typically offered as one course unit, “ProPrac” enables students to explore the structures that govern an architecture business practice, including contract documents, risk management, project budgeting, ethics, and more. But the practice of teaching practice has yielded an evolution in the coursework itself: Professional Practice classes provide an opportunity for students to engage critically in the realities of work. Rather than creating an environment for students to learn the basics of business, these new models for Professional Practice encourage historical and theoretical frameworks, research, and addressing the realities of labor.

NAAB requires ProPrac coursework as part of its 2020 Conditions for Accreditation and lists four learning objectives: “how the program ensures that students understand professional ethics, the regulatory requirements, the fundamental business processes relevant to architecture practice in the United States, and the forces influencing change in these subjects.”

The course’s content is driven by the fundamental understanding of architecture as a professionalized career, said Jacob Reidel, assistant professor in practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “For a long time, it’s been an agreed-upon that you need to have some course, some material, that gives future graduates some understanding of what actually goes into running an architecture business—to actually practice practicing,” he explained to AN

But the class is not necessarily seen as a glamorous one, said Jess Myers, assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. “The way that people practice is taken for granted a little bit, which is why I think that professional practice itself also had the stance of kind of being very boilerplate—and also a class that people didn’t necessarily want to teach,” she offered. “You don’t feel you could bring a lot of yourself into it. But then NCARB’s 2020 guidelines opened things up a little bit.”

Myers has structured her syllabus to emphasize the forces of influence included in those 2020 guidelines: Having started her teaching career during the SHoP unionization campaign, she saw labor movements as a force to investigate with students. Rather than requiring her ProPrac students to do the typical exercise of imagining themselves as firm owners who then grapple with the legal and ethical realities of running their practice, she framed the exercise from the perspective of someone entering as a junior employee. In this way, students are able to approach course topics from the perspective of a

position with less institutional power, allowing them to contend with ethics, negotiation tactics, portfolios, and visa statuses from a perspective most relevant to them.

For Dr. Aaron Cayer, assistant professor of architecture history at the University of New Mexico, labor rights and worker power have also been a focal point for his ProPrac classes. However, he addresses the issue from a historical and theoretical perspective, examining the role of architects nationally and internationally, and moving into practice issues in a sociological framework.

“We’re thinking about legal forms of organization and their deeper meanings—not just corporations but different types of enterprises like cooperatives and unions—and how each relates to the political economy and structures architecture practice,” he said. His students perform research like surveying New Mexico architecture firms about intern pay and healthcare provisions; unlike Myers, his students invent their own firms that emphasize alternative models of practice like B Corps or cooperatives. “At its core, it’s a balance between history, theory, design, and the traditional tools of business,” he explained.

The class, he believes, addresses the problem of professionalization: As universities increasingly need to prepare students for the workforce, their focus on critical thinking is lost. Citing the book The University in Ruins by Bill Readings, he says, “Most universities have lost their cultural focus and transformational role. This is part of the broader neoliberalization of higher education, and we’re seeing that in architecture. For instance, history and theory have been marginalized within our new accreditation requirements and marked as ‘extracurricular.’”

These instructors cover the required subjects needed for accreditation, but they’re also dealing with some fundamental issues inherent in architecture education. By integrating history and theory, Cayer attends to the university’s neoliberal shift, while Myers argues that students imagining themselves as workers in a practice helps erase some of the “intolerance” that students are taught in design studios.

“Through design studios we give [students] a rigid picture about what a successful career in architecture looks like,” Myers said. “You see a lot of dissatisfaction, especially in junior architects, because there’s this idea that the only way to actually be practicing is to have complete control over the design. It’s like every other skill set that it takes to run that job is just a burden. Professional Practice is a place to expand that imagination of how many people it takes to bring the built environment into being, to manage and steward it.”

Reidel teaches a ProPrac-oriented class called Frameworks of Practice at Harvard. While his course is not meant to satisfy NAAB requirements, it is designed to supplement the school’s additional ProPrac requirements in its curriculum. Reidel has structured Frameworks under the premise that practice and offices are inherently designed structures that are subject to external forces and crises, to “critically examine how the discipline, the practice of architecture have come to be—how we got to our craft, how we arrived at our current state—and then looking at examining new models for practicing new frameworks for practice,” he said.

Like Cayer’s, Reidel’s students also explore and visualize labor issues like gender inequality and worker satisfaction. One recent group examined in-house architecture research—groups that perform investigations into materials, technologies, and methods in addition to contributing to built work—to better understand how large firms perform and apply research, and how it is funded. These issues aren’t new, he said, so he asks students to track them back as far as the early 20th century to demonstrate that “a lot of the issues that people are wringing their hands about today have been issues for the profession since it was created. So if this is not the best model for supporting creating great spaces in a way that supports the people who do it, I’m open to other models.”

Students educated under these models of ProPrac coursework will likely gain important knowledge related to issues of labor, hierarchy, and equity when they emerge from school, but it is not the case that this mode of practicing practice is the norm. A (woefully outdated) survey conducted by NAAB and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in 2018 revealed some equally woeful information about how ProPrac courses are being taught at 111 different NAAB-accredited schools: 43 percent of respondents noted that they do not teach equitable workplace practices; only nine percent discuss the future of practice through “Society, Policy, and Economy,” which “calls attention to the role of the architect in society and how he/she responds to the changes outside of our control.”

Without thinking about “outside forces”—a criterion named specifically by NAAB—students are at risk of learning about the business of architecture without considering how their work functions in relation to political, social, and labor systems. Teaching with such context—connecting to “larger questions of values, ethics, how to effect positive change in the world,” according to Reidel—can help solve issues inherent in the profession itself.

“Ultimately, we have to be honest that many of the issues that the profession is facing are not going to be solved in the professional realm,” he said. “Those issues with architecture work, the culture of architecture that we all know, start upstream in school, and you’re not going to change the profession if you don’t change the way we approach school.”

When the practice of practice begins during the earliest moments of an architect’s education, one might assume that the more we practice, the more improvement we might see. But until the practice of teaching evolves, we will be reminded of an old cliché: Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.

A new wave of educators are updating how professional practice courses are delivered in architecture schools. What are they teaching?

The Ins and Outs of Architecture

Windows, walls, and doors not only form the technical envelope of a building, but they also communicate its design to passersby. Shaping both occupant experience and community reception, these three major building components are integral to the outcome of any project, no matter how mundane or intricate their expression may be.

These building elements are centerpiece of the ever-pressing topic of carbon—in this case, both operational and embodied. The operational leeway of these components can drastically impact the additional energy required for a building’s operation, while their embodied carbon is significant in standard North American building practices. The question of new material technologies for windows, walls, and doors should be at the forefront of these conversations.

AN has selected three projects that explore material selections of windows, walls, and doors in different North American climates. Ranging from stick-frame construction—which still makes up a large swath of American construction—to curtain wall systems that deal with various scales of prefabrication, this section surveys the three components as they play out across a range of typologies.

Grimshaw continues to fill out its West Coast portfolio with the Rob and Melani Walton Center for Planetary Health at Arizona State University, realized with Architekton. The project’s glass-fiber–reinforced-concrete facade was complet-

ed with careful planning of the system’s prefabricated metal panels and smaller joints to give the appearance of a contiguous wall with scalelike geometry.

In a deceptively flat-paneled glass and metal facade, Perkins&Will’s building for York University’s School of Continuing Studies in Ontario twists and turns. With a waterproofing and drainage system built into the facade, the outer wall meets both technical requirements and the design team’s aesthetic aspirations as its angles give the appearance of a building on the move.

At Emory Midtown’s Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, SOM balanced large east- and west-facing facades with heat gain challenges in a 17-story curtain wall. The unitized system was designed with careful consideration of long-term maintenance.

An additional pictorial examines the subject with a more artful eye. In Austin, Faye + Walker’s film-inspired Aperture House is captured through the lens of Leonid Furmansky. Beyond the formal treatment of the garage apartment’s four corner dormer windows, the building explores how stick-frame construction can inform an expressive facade without driving up costs.

Since materials research and emissions requirements may significantly change what these systems look like in the future, these four offerings provide a range of adaptations that offer innovative interpretations. CW

Careful consideration when detailing windows and openings can have significant impacts for project success.

44 Case Study

Desert Haven

Grimshaw and Architekton fight the Arizona glare with a fine-tuned, two-sided approach to exterior windows.

Design architect: Grimshaw and Architekton

Location: Tempe, Arizona

Architect of record: Grimshaw and Architekton

Landscape architect: Ten Eyck Landscape

Architects

Structural/electrical/MEP engineer: Buro

Happold

Civil engineer: Sherwood Design Engineers

AV/acoustics: The Sextant Group

LEED consultant: Thornton Tomasetti

Cost consultant: Rider Levett Bucknall

Lab planner: Research Facilities Design

Construction manager at risk: McCarthy

Building Companies

Signage/wayfinding: Grimshaw

Lighting/daylight/energy modeling/facade

consultant: Buro Happold

Lighting design: Buro Happold

Vibration: Colin Gordon Associates

Telecommunications: The Sextant Group

Fire & life safety consultant: Jensen Hughes

General contractor: McCarthy

GFRC facade: Unlimited Designs

Rainscreen facade: MKB Construction

Glass: NT Glass

Windows: Vitro Architectural Glass

Doors: Arcadia

Ceilings: Armstrong

Roofing: Tremco, Hydrotech

Seen from the street under the bright Arizona sun, the Rob and Melani Walton Center for Planetary Health is hard to miss. The research facility, designed by Grimshaw Architects and Architekton, is the latest addition to Arizona State University’s Tempe campus. It houses a suite of interdisciplinary departments and institutes within its 281,000-square-foot layout. Its exterior catches the eye with an interlocking glass-fiber–reinforced-concrete (GFRC) facade and an interior courtyard lined in a glazing and aluminum-composite panelized system.

Considering the arid and sunny locale, the project’s massing and choice of facade material and detailing proved essential to its high-performance credentials. The Walton Center rises from a porous base of columns, taking advantage of prevailing breezes and water-retention basins to cool the complex. That massing is supplemented by an expansive

courtyard, which also functions as a passive shading device and means of air circulation.

Insulated glass unit modules measuring 7.5 by 3.5 feet produced by Vitro Architectural Glass punctuate the exterior facade and courtyard. Shading helps keep the notorious solar heat gain of Arizona at bay, and the GFRC panels, whose molding mimics the folded surface of saguaro cacti, provide extensive UV protection on the exterior facade while letting in daylight and sustaining views.

For the courtyard, the design team enhanced the flow of filtered light with a cool green-blue mega-panel glazing system prefabricated prior to installation, the colors paying homage to the Grand Canyon’s Havasu Falls in northern Arizona. Crews bolted the panels onto a stainless-steel “drift-track” embedded in concrete floor slabs at a pace of approximately ten per day. For office and laboratory spaces adjacent to the courtyard walls, the team opted for narrow window modules that diffuse natural lighting to support individual and group work. The larger conference and meeting rooms are daylit with floor-to-floor curtain wall glazing.

However, the tolerances of those metal panels was difficult during construction. “The most challenging detail was maintaining a consistent joint size between mega-panel joints and individual metal panel [IMP] joints,” Grimshaw associate principal and architect Eric Johnson told AN. “This was technically complex due to the limitations of construction tolerances on-site. The intended appearance of the skin as a continuous surface was achieved by matching the mega-panel joint size, color, and material to the typical IMP joint size and strictly following specified design tolerances.”

The Rob and Melani Walton Center for Planetary Health is currently applying for LEED Platinum status, as ASU requires all new construction of university buildings to achieve a rating of LEED Silver. Though that certification is still underway, the design of the project’s fine-tuned enclosure is sure to set a new standard for Arizona.

46 Case Study Desert Haven continued

Above, top right: The courtyard functions as a passive shading device and means of air circulation.

Above, left: Narrow window modules facing the courtyard diffuse natural lighting to support individual and group work in well-appointed office spaces.

Above, right: In the courtyard, a prefabricated cool greenblue mega-panel glazing system filters natural light.

Left: Inside the courtyard, the tall, thin facade modules overlook elevated walkways.

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48 Pictorial

Framed

Faye + Walker’s cinematic windows add drama to a garage apartment in Austin.

If you look at the work of Sean Guess, principal at the Austin-based architecture office Faye + Walker, you might think he is a film nerd. Aperture House, a garage apartment Guess designed for a cinematographer and a movie director, is defined by a street-facing window whose proportions are 1.66:1 (5:3), an aspect ratio favored by some of cinema’s great directors. Alfred Hitchcock used it for Rear Window, for example, and the proportions of that movie’s frame are echoed in the proportion of the window that James Stewart’s character stares through to watch his neighbors.

But Guess is more interested in another kind of framing: the wood kind. Aperture House, named for the window in question, is less a heady exercise in proportions than a practical exercise in wood-based construction. Its drama comes from the careful execution of a simple concept: a gable roof punctuated by four dormer windows set at the form’s corners.

The garage apartment is the second volume on a small lot in East Austin’s Montopolis

neighborhood, an area still replete with chain-link fences, cracked sidewalks, and old trucks, even as development arrives along East Riverside Drive. Guess knows the area well, as he has realized other projects here and lives nearby. The clients wanted a garage and some room for visiting parents and other guests. Taking the existing house as a starting point, Guess proposed a direct extrusion of that gabled form with a wood deck between the two volumes. Then he added the corner dormers. When Guess showed the clients a study model, the cinematographer left the room and came back with an old Kodak camera. The window, he pointed out, was the same aspect ratio as the camera’s viewfinder, and the same used in European-arthouse films. It’s also very close to the golden ratio (approximately 1.62:1) beloved by Le Corbusier and others.

At each corner of the vaulted second floor, set above a two-car garage, a dormer defines a programmatic area: living, cooking, sleeping, bathing. Forget the furniture: This interior is all

about the angles. “This was really an exercise in making interesting forms and spaces with stick framing,” Guess told AN. In the living area, the window is pulled back 18 inches to allow for some protection from the high southern sun; an exterior surround made of limestone provides additional shading. The window slides into the vertical wall, which sits below the top plate of the second floor, and there’s a recess above the window so that the owners can pull down—what else?—a movie screen.

Guess’s interest in framing, he said, comes in part from a desire to keep projects affordable. “If I design something that I know is going to require steel in order to achieve a certain effect, I’ve gone against the nature of the project. With stick framing, I can take all the things we know work structurally and make sculptural moves within that.” The design of Aperture House, for instance, sets the bottoms of the window headers flush with the ceiling framing. “You have to have a header over a window,” Guess remarked, “but you don’t necessarily need more wall above

the header.” Instead, windows extend up to the 9-foot-high ceilings of the dormers. (The sill heights of the Marvin windows vary according to program). A millwork box around the bathroom corner sits flush with the framing so that it reads as a wooden volume within the white drywall interior.

Faye + Walker is building a body of work that shows the power of a simple concept executed well. “To get to minimal, there’s a lot of complexity,” Guess reflected. “When you pull back the curtain, it’s really hard to achieve something that looks simple.” That’s a thought a director can appreciate.

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Window and Wall Systems

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“The key to the design was openness. We wanted to bring the outdoors in, especially on the main level, and allow for outdoor areas on different levels of the home.”

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54 Case Study In Service of Health

SOM’s Winship Cancer Institute at Emory Midtown in Atlanta establishes a holistic approach to patient care.

Architect: SOM

Location: Atlanta

Clinical architect: May Architecture

Civil engineering/landscape design: Kimley-Horn Associates

Signage/graphics: Herter Design Group

Construction Manager: Batson-Cook

Construction

Programming: MPR International

MEP/lighting: Newcomb & Boyd

Medical equipment planning: Introba

Kitchen planning: Rippe Associates

Code/life safety: Jensen Hughes

Hardware: Phillips-Langley & Associates

Acoustics/vibration: Cerami & Associates

Facade: Permasteelisa

Glass: AGC Interpane

Doors: AD Systems, Stanley Access, C.R. Laurence

Roofing: Carlisle

Insulation: Owens Corning, Rockwool

The Winship Cancer Institute at Emory Midtown, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), opened its doors to patients on the Emory University Hospital campus in May 2023. The project joins a veritable building boom in the Midtown neighborhood of Atlanta, which has seen a spate of significant projects by the likes of John Portman & Associates (now Portman Architects) and Duda|Paine Architects.

For SOM and the client, the primary consideration for the 17-story project was to establish a holistic approach to patient care, which informed both the space planning and the exterior. It houses a wide range of care facilities, including oncology facilities, infusion treatment, inpatient beds, and outpatient clinics. A total of 160 collaborators guided SOM’s design approach to the project’s wide-ranging functions. The overall facade geometry, organized in two-story increments, is intended to provide the tower with an approachable scale in relation to the surrounding Peachtree Street area.

“The largest facades are east and west facing, which was necessary for programmatic reasons, but if not designed well would have challenging solar exposures,” SOM health practice leader Anthony Treu told AN . “Upon concluding our studies, we found that a serrated facade geometry would work to both reduce solar gain while also minimizing glare in the patient rooms. On the north and south tower volume, we implemented a fly-by curtain wall system to complement the expression of the two-story care communities, each centered on a specific type of cancer, and further help to minimize glare."

The largely 6.25-foot-wide glazing modules, manufactured by AGC Interpane, with the curtain wall panels fabricated and installed by Permasteelisa, rest on a continuous concrete curb and are secured by an attachment under the slab above. At both the podium and the tower, the serrated unitized curtain wall panels, located on the east and west facades, are supported by embeds fastened to a depression along the perimeter of the concrete slab.

The success of any project is, of course, not limited to its construction. Considerations have to be made for the long-term maintenance of its infrastructure, especially for a curtain wall of this scale. The designers initially considered using a davit system, which lifts cleaning crews on a crane extending from the roof, but they concluded it would be safer and easier to integrate a maintenance

unit into the structure. They worked with Integrity Scaffold Service Group to design a custom building-maintenance unit, comprising a pantograph cradle—a gondola system with a counterweight extension—to access the facade beneath its protruding horizontal

sunshades. “Some of the most intricate design challenges came from coordinating the maintenance of the facade, specifically the horizontal sunshades facing the north and south of the building,” said Treu. “We are able to maintain facade access throughout

the entire tower with one efficient system situated on the roof.”

Through this methodical approach, the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory Midtown is well positioned to remain at the vanguard of patient care for years to come. MM

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Hardware

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58 Case Study

Twist and Shout

York University’s School of Continuing Studies stuns with a triangulated wall system of aluminum panels and windows.

Design architect/architect of record: Perkins&Will

Location: Toronto

Lighting design/AV/acoustics/

telecommunications: Smith + Andersen

Signage/wayfinding: York University and Suria Design Studio

Facade consultant: RDH

General contractor: Aquicon Construction

Facade system: Alumicor

Glass: Carey Glass

Windows: Alumicor

Doors: Alumicor, Lambton

Roofing: Johns Manville

Waterproofing: Soprema

Insulation: Soprema, Johns Manville

In May 2023, York University, on the outskirts of Toronto, unveiled the new School of Continuing Studies, its newest building. Designed by the local outpost of Perkins&Will, its pivoting form, clad in a diagrid of glass and brushed aluminum, adds a distinctive twisting presence to the campus.

The 120,000-square-foot structure rises five stories. Its contorted form results from a geometric design process that shifts a rectangular floor plate around a common centroid, introducing a two-wave curve across the north and south facades. The warping plane informed the overall facade geometry, which contains a floor plan composed of modular learning clusters, lecture halls, and wellness amenities.

“It was initially generated by developing a diagrid geometry to loft the north and south facades using a simple mass in Rhino,” Andrew Frontini, Perkins&Will principal & design director, told AN. “A Grasshopper script was used to optimize the triangular panel size to accommodate the necessary floor-to-floor datums as

well as the manufacturing limitations of both the glass and metal components.”

The glazing modules come in preassembled parallelogram-shaped units, manufactured by Carey Glass in Ireland. Specially produced in a range of sizes due to the twisting form of the building, they are composed as units of two large triangles, which are assigned unique local designations to secure the correct fit during installation. Each panel is clipped to the structural frame at the top of the panel and held below to maintain the angles.

A notable challenge for the design team was to accommodate the waterproofing and drainage system for the twisting facade. They tested mock-ups with weeping vents inserted between the unitized panels, simulating extreme weather events, which ultimately allowed for a taut building skin that ensures both ample daylight and high energy efficiency.

Though the project is ambitious, the design team had to keep budgetary considerations in place, and they balanced them by deploying

a rigorous geometry of repeated off-theshelf components. “The result is a biaxially symmetrical composition where a series of tilted structural frames increase their degrees of inclination in opposite directions as they move away from the center of the building,” Frontini said. “The rotation of the overall form introduces a two-way curve into the north and south facades. As the building rotates about its centroid, a triangulated panel pattern takes advantage of regular and biaxial symmetry to create zones of repeat panel shapes on both the long and short facades of the building.”

The work paid off, as the project received a 2023 Excellence in Design Award from the Ontario Glass & Metal Association. It is also on track to achieve LEED Gold certification. For the time being, the School of Continuing Studies is a welcome and tantalizing gateway to the York University campus. MM

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63 Exhibition Highlights

Dwelling

Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde

Through September 4

Home often looks like a state of mind, and it’s not always a reassuring picture. As seen in Dwelling, the current show at Canal Projects’ Chinatown gallery, the kinship of objects, however appealing or artfully arranged, isn’t enough to relieve the tediousness of introspection—or mortality, for that matter. Take Picasso’s Table, a canvas by the Brooklyn painter Marcus Jahmal that reinterprets the Cubist repast into a deathly composition of drinking glasses, an eating vessel, spilled wine, and a calf’s skull. Illustrator

Kyung Me, who also hails from Brooklyn, transmutes the dread of domestic routines into moody noirscapes halfway between Double Indemnity and The Handmaiden, while Los Angeles–based painter Kenrick McFarlane colorfully invokes the estrangement of the self that is the lot of homo economicus. The works, which all hew closely to the humors of contemporary figuration, gain from their tasteful surrounds, courtesy of Brooklyn design studio Worrell Yeung. SM

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest and Worry Will Vanish

What if Van Gogh’s churning skies weren’t the projective howls of a soul in torment but rather toxic belches? Factories at Clichy, painted in 1887, implants the idea that Van Gogh reckoned with the transformational effects of industry. On this canvas, smokestacks bloom with the proliferation of sunflowers. It is one of two dozen by Van Gogh showcased here, which, despite the marquee, encompasses the work of four of his contemporaries:

Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Émile Bernard,

and Charles Angrand. This “avant-garde” is retroactively constituted, though there are a few commonalities that justify the framing. In the 1880s, the unknowing postimpressionists frequented Asnières, a northwest suburb of Paris whose clamorous manufactories seemed to have elicited a new sensibility. Lurking off to the side of Signac’s placid “Ponton de la Félicité” at Asnières (Opus no. 143) is an unassuming gas holder. Van Gogh ventured a reproduction, a failure that nonetheless sent him on his way. SM

Carl Craig: Party/After-Party

Through July 23

Is Pipilotti Rist the godmother of today’s profligate displays of “immersive” art like the Museum of Ice Cream and Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience? Unlike that frothy bilge, Rist’s installations aren’t invitations to pose, gambol, or lose oneself to childish urges. That they doubtlessly incite some of these same responses shouldn’t be taken as capitulation; there is plenty in Rist to unsettle, disturb, or just understand. First staged at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) in 2017, Pixel Forest

and Worry Will Vanish wholeheartedly take up pointillism’s cosmic pretentions, a position that sees in the infinitesimal an image of the universe. Selfie-takers fear not: There are blinking orbs galore. Characteristically for Rist, Worry partly flirts with the architecture itself, a rare fan-shaped design by Mies van der Rohe. Both pieces, plus a third (Peeping Freedom Shutters for Olga Shapir [2020]), were recently acquired by the MFAH. Given their popularity, it’s a sound investment. SM

Flashing light and sound constitute Party/ After-Party , an installation by the DJ Carl Craig at the Warehouse in Los Angeles. With its industrial connotations, the venue is utterly fitting for Craig, a habitué of the techno scene that sprang up in 1980s Detroit. The dark and steely mise-en-scène, complete with clangorous soundtrack, is meant to evoke late-night warehouse parties, albeit during opening hours; the untz-untz beats dribble out into the surrounding

museum, much to visitors’ bemusement. (Craig previously staged the piece in the basement of New York’s Dia Beacon.) The most game among them can strut their stuff on the dance floor at the center of the lugubrious space, though the revelry isn’t meant to last. The overhead lamps flip on as the music drops out, revealing a spare room of plenty of incongruous outfits. You know what they say about parties: You gotta know when to leave. SM

64 Review Vitruvius Without Text: The Biography of a Book

André Tavares

design patterns become “mnemonic or reminiscent forms,” regardless of context and use.

This, Tavares does not need to add, is what the classical tradition in architecture is all about. Tradition, after all, means “transmission,” and the core principle of the classical tradition is that some architectural forms or patterns can travel across space and time, and when they show up, even in the most incongruous settings, they signify to all familiar with their history the tradition to which they belong, and the allegiance to that tradition of those who chose those forms to put them where they stand. Similar modes of signification and recognition apply, of course, to most buildings, as all ways of building become at some point, if they endure, the tradition of some places or people; but when this memorative function is invoked in the name of the classical tradition, and explicitly theorized and posited as a matter of principle, we must stop and ask some difficult questions.

the moderns in the 17th century to the present—may suggest an answer.

continued from cover understand and relearn the ancient way of building, of which nothing was known beyond what could be elicited from a paltry corpus of muted ancient monuments, often ruined beyond recognition.

They soon found out that Vitruvius’s text, born at a time when books were laboriously handwritten on papyrus rolls, wasn’t exactly a technical manual. Roman builders of Vitruvius’s time learned their trade on the job, not from books, so it’s hard to tell for whom Vitruvius originally wrote; to this day, his is the only known treatise on architecture from classical antiquity, which suggests that when Vitruvius dedicated it to the first Roman emperor, Augustus— also his employer—his ten volumina would have had few competitors on the manuscript market. To make things worse for our Renaissance humanists, we now know—but they didn’t—that Vitruvius collated snippets from Hellenistic sources describing a way of building that was already archaic, and out of use, in his own time. All the same, copies of Vitruvius’s manuscript survived somehow throughout the Middle Ages, and when the humanists started to study it, they subjected Vitruvius’s text to the usual stages of modern scholarly appropriation: philological analysis (what did Vitruvius really write?), exegesis (what did he mean?), hermeneutics (what does that mean to us?). The first step required critical editions; the second and third, commentaries and illustrations. Images in particular were challenging, as Vitruvius’s text, like all scientific and technical treatises of classical antiquity, was only scantly illustrated. All original pictures being lost, modern interpreters had to add pictures to a text that didn’t have any, to illustrate buildings that, in most cases, nobody in the 16th century had ever seen—and most interpreters of the time could not even remotely figure out. Not surprisingly, this feedback loop between old text (often corrupted and obscure) and new images (often made up) produced over time some curious results; yet this is how, faute de mieux, Vitruvius’s book soon became “the Bible of Western Architects,” endlessly reprinted, translated, illustrated, interpreted, excerpted, and commented upon: the backbone of the European classical tradition in architecture, of which Vitruvianism came to be seen as a synonym.

Vitruvius’s first edition in print was in 1486 (or 1487), and by 1909 the German historian (and castle builder) Bodo Ebhardt could count around 100 (including

translations, epitomes, and reprints); in 1978 the Vitruvian catalogue compiled under the direction of the Italian academician Luigi Vagnetti featured 166 editions, with brief descriptions of each. André Tavares, under the auspices of the Institute of Theory and History of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), now publishes in this book a bibliography of 283 Vitruvian titles, from 1486 to 2016, alongside a history of Vitruvian editions in print, which is particularly valuable as it adds a few items published in the 1930s and 1940s that Vagnetti had, perhaps not accidentally, overlooked; Tavares also covers and contextualizes the wave of Vitruvian titles that followed the rise of postmodernism and the concomitant revival of interest in the classical tradition, and reviews recent Vitruvian studies of architectural interest.

This clarification is important as Vitruvius, as an encyclopedia of ancient arts and sciences, has been perused at length by art historians, architectural historians, antiquarians, and archaeologists; but it also contains important sources for the history of cities, of ancient medicine, of meteorology, of building materials and building techniques, of ancient building types, domestic and public; of music and musicology, of the theory of proportions, husbandry, hydraulics, astronomy, sundials, mechanical clocks, geometry, automata, poliorcetics, military machines, and more. But when architects— past and present—read Vitruvius, they tend to do so in their own special way. Of this Tavares offers a vivid historiographic illustration, showing how Vitruvius’s brief mention of a certain layout of courtyards in ancient Roman houses (De Architectura, VI,III,1, on tetrastyla cava aedium: internal courtyards in Roman houses with columns at the four corners of the impluvium), frequently misunderstood by modern interpreters, became the source of never-ending interpretive quandaries, of which traces can be found in tetrastyle halls of all sorts built around the world from the 16th century on, ranging from Palladio’s Vicentine palazzi to Corb’s Villa Stein, a Roman bath by Schinkel, a subway station from the late 1920s in Berlin, a 1946 coffeehouse in Tomar, Portugal, and Reichlin and Reinhart’s 1974 Casa Tonini near Lugano, Switzerland—some of these Vitruvian allusions being deliberate, some not. As Tavares thoughtfully concludes, the persistence of the tetrastyle design pattern highlights “the shared space of formal imagination,” where

For the classical tradition is not the tradition of just any place; it is the core architectural tradition of Christian Europe, and Europe is the continent that, beginning right around the time when the idea of the classical tradition was taking shape, took over by force, and ruled over, militarily or economically, many other parts of the world. Hence the classical tradition is seen and resented in many parts of the world as a sign of the presence of colonial masters, postcolonial landlords, or foreign occupiers. Architectural historians might object that colonial powers didn’t always choose classicism to manifest their presence in foreign lands—other styles, such as Gothic, Romanesque, or national styles, were also occasionally used; the Italians in Eritrea even chose modernism to represent Fascist colonial rule. Yet classicism was in most cases the default option.

Likewise, the association of the classical tradition to one branch of Christianism in particular—the Roman Catholic—is a recent, postmodern aberration. When the Reformation came, the idea that architecture depended on the written authority of one book (the Architect’s Bible!) found a more sympathetic audience in the Protestant North than in the Catholic South, and rulebased Vitruvian classicism in particular became a puritan version of the classical language of architecture favored by early modern Evangelicals as a reaction against the baroque grandiloquence of counterreformation papacy. Last but not least, the classical tradition was the architectural language of choice of Enlightenment atheists (during the French Revolution, for example), and from the very start (in Florence circa 1430), but more strongly as of the late 18th century, classical architecture was also seen as a symbol of the republican democracy of Greek cities—alongside its long-standing association with Roman despotism and imperial power.

For all this, the classical tradition in architecture appears to have always had a particularly strong appeal to unsavory characters of all kinds—war criminals, dictators, white supremacists, or just plain and simple authoritarian, totalitarian, or centralized political systems. These notorious connotations are often taken for granted today—they are nevertheless puzzling. Why did so many bad guys—and some of the worst political institutions and associations in human history—develop such a liking for classical architecture? Is there something inherently wrong, possibly criminal, inscribed in the DNA, so to speak, of the classical tradition in architecture? The way architects have used Vitruvius for the last few centuries—from the end of the quarrel of the ancients and

Medical doctors today are well familiar with the medical science of Hippocrates, or Galen; they still study it at school, but they don’t use it to treat their patients. Many engineers today are fascinated by the machines that Heron of Alexandria designed and built around Vitruvius’s time, but they don’t follow Heron’s science to design electric cars. Architects are unique among all modern professionals in thinking that some theories from classical antiquity may still be of direct and practical use today—for example, that Vitruvius’s rules on the proportion of Doric temples may serve to design social housing, or an airport. That may appear to outsiders as a view somewhat devoid of common sense, yet architects believe in it for a reason, derived in turn from a universalist ideology that is deeply rooted in many Western philosophies. Even if they do not always say so in so many words, some classicist architects are more or less intimately persuaded that some Vitruvian rules—some rules of the classical tradition in architecture—are timeless and universal: valid across space and time. But if you believe that your ways are always good, and good for all, you may also easily conclude that your ways are the best, and everyone else’s are wrong and may deserve little respect.

This is where an architectural tradition becomes the assertion of the supremacy of one cultural tradition against all others; this is where the history of European architecture becomes the proclamation of a Eurocentric view of world architecture. We see what that means in daily life. If that is your worldview, all your buildings become ideological frontier posts: totemic indexes and flag bearers for the tribes that surround them. They mean to all that see them: We are the people of this place; this is what we are; this is where we come from; this is how we build. If you are not one of us, go elsewhere. In a world that is now painfully, and laboriously, trying to coalesce around some basic human principles of equality, diversity, and inclusion, classical architecture is thus at risk of becoming the emblem of all who stand for the opposite, and the rallying cry for many self-styled “anti-woke” reactionaries: Classical architecture was for example mandated for federal buildings by an executive order of former U.S. president Trump in the final days of his administration; the classical tradition in architecture was likewise recommended in 2020 by an official U.K. government commission on building, and the same principles have been more recently endorsed and reiterated by U.K. housing secretary Michael Gove.

Let me be clear: André Tavares’s book is sound scholarly work (although I have found a few marginal errors here and there, and I have reservations on some historiographical issues, as is to be expected), and we should be grateful to him and to the ETH in Zurich for this publication. But let’s all be aware of what is at stake here. As Tavares concludes:

“To possess a physical copy of Vitruvius, regardless of whether one reads it or not, is to possess an idea evocative of architecture’s cultural background, of its longstanding sources, and of the value of order and proportion.” As Vitruvius would have said, caveat emptor.

Mario Carpo is the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London and professor of architectural theory at the University of Applied Arts (die Angewandte) in Vienna. His latest book, Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity, was published by the MIT Press

65 Review

Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism, 1920–1930

The Cooper Union New York April 25–May 5

their ability to array primitive shapes along one, two, three, or four axes, the most complex of which might yield over 3,000 unique arrangements. Present-day Cooper Union students used computer scripting to quickly visualize all of them, which flickered past on a screen. Ladovsky also developed a set of space exercises wherein students manipulated mass to express proportional relationships in a way that prized “dual rationality,” based on the conservation of materials but also of “[psychic] energy.”

of the last places that protects and preserves freedom, therefore teaching is also a socio/ political act, among other things.” That same liberty seems to be widely under attack from both within and outside universities today.

How to learn architecture? The question has plagued scholars from Leon Battista Alberti to Bruno Zevi. The answer might constitute an originating kernel of pedagogy or the educational structure through which one acquires knowledge of a subject. (“I will learn you architecture!” Herman Hertzberger reportedly told his students at the Berlage Institute.) Popular models come and go. For decades, the standard was set by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and then replaced by the Bauhaus’s centripetal progress from a preliminary form and materials course inward (and upward) toward the creation of buildings. Another variant emerged from John Hejduk’s tenure at The Cooper Union in New York, during which the architect established a set of exercises that prized abstraction and visual play infused with a certain poetics.

The school, then, is an ideal place for an exhibition about an important—and underappreciated—moment in the history of architecture pedagogy: Vkhutemas, the Russian Higher Art and Technical Workshop, which trained students from across the Soviet Union in a variety of disciplines beginning in 1920 and continuing until Stalin shuttered the school in 1930.

Vkhutemas is often pitched as “Soviet Moscow’s Bauhaus,” but the epithet doesn’t really fit, as the student body of the former was an order of magnitude larger than that of the latter: 2,000 versus 200 pupils. Though the work produced at Vkhutemas was widely published during the 1920s, its legacy fared worse than its German counterpart. The Bauhaus’s leadership largely escaped to academic positions in America, while few Vkhutemas instructors were as lucky: Rationalist Nikolay Ladovsky, a leading figure at the school, remained in Moscow after 1930 and worked as an architect before fading into obscurity and dying in 1941, possibly from suicide. Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s first director, omitted Vkhutemas from his diagram that charted the lineages of modern art (the Bauhaus was included), and though he exhibited work by Soviet artists who taught at Vkhutemas, there was no mention of the institution, a treatment that differed from the display of art by Bauhaus faculty. While much ado was made of the Bauhaus’s centennial in 2019, similar accolades were not extended the following year for Vkhutemas.

This is useful background information for Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism, 1920–1930, which was on view at The

Cooper Union for a mere 77 hours this spring. When one approached the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, a historical timeline and initial diagrams lined corridor walls, but inside, a separate impressive world of knowledge was on display.

Expertly curated by Anna Bokov, assistant professor adjunct at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, and Steven Hillyer, director of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive, the show featured the work of 27 students who, over the course of two seminars and a workshop, studied, reproduced, and extended artifacts from Vkhutemas. (Early versions of some of the projects were on view in the school’s virtual End of Year show in 2020.) The engaging results vivified projects that went largely unencountered for a century.

The curators organized the show around five themes. After encountering a detailed flowchart of the school’s departments and faculty, viewers first confronted the Projects section. In it, ten Vkhutemas diploma projects were re-created by Cooper Union students as both drawings and models. Wallmounted drawings showed the designs in orthographic form and as Arctic-mode rendered views that expanded on archival documentation, allowing new encounters with recognizable schemes like Georgy Krutikov’s New (Flying) City, Rachel Smolenskaya’s House of Congresses, and Ivan Leonidov’s Lenin Institute for Librarianship. The models, realized at two different scales in consistent materials, encouraged formal comparisons between the designs.

On another wall, Objects showcased analytic drawings of furniture and consumer goods—white- and red-lined axonometrics on black backgrounds—while a display cycled through animations made by Cooper Union students of the objects in assembly, such as a teapot folding into its carrying case.

The Constructions section witnessed the rebuilding of artistic experiments of Vkhutemas professor Alexander Rodchenko, who in 1920 developed a set of serial groupings of unitized blocks according to his “principle of equal form.” Cooper Union students both drew the combinations and built them anew with pieces of lumber.

Exercises staged a set of space teaching experiments developed by Ladovsky. He had proposed using math to create combinatorics, which studied the arrangement of 2D shapes, as a basis for architecture as a science. Students would then be tested on

The course on spatial experiments was a success and quickly entered Vkhutemas’s core curriculum by 1923. Its visual outputs were some of the most striking results of the entire school’s output, seen in a series of abstracted, intersected forms modeled in clay and other materials and documented like sculptures. (One such image appears on the cover of Bokov’s Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930, her archivally rich publication about the school, a gallery copy of which was within arm’s reach on a nearby tall socle.) These objects are nearly incomparable across the universe of architectural imagery. Cooper Union students re-created a handful of the pieces with some invention: Many survive in single photographs, so the backsides and scales of the pieces had to be imagined and then modeled.

Instruments, the final theme, yielded the most jaw-dropping results. Cooper Union students studied “psychotechnical laboratory devices” used by Vkhutemas for evaluation of both 2D and 3D geometries, digitally modeling them and building three full-size versions in wood. One contraption, a volume-eyemeter, tested the ability to match volumes within beakers of varying shapes, while another challenged eyes, peering through a viewing device, to register dashes as aligned. A third, which had a lined element slide over a circle and a square, tested the recognition of equal-sized areas cut from the two different shapes. Scale was again the issue: Like detectives, Cooper students estimated the apparatus’s size based on a photograph with a hand in the frame. The trio of training machines brought the history of Vkhutemas to life in a measurable, bodily way.

The principal tragedy of the show is that it was on view for less than two weeks: Its delay from its originally scheduled run earlier in the year meant the contents were wedged between another display and the school’s final reviews and End of Year show. There were no politics in the show, but it faced political setbacks, as opponents said the effort was inappropriate given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and The Cooper Union’s location within the neighborhood of Ukrainian Village. (AN consistently covered the controversy online.) The resulting decision was to move forward with nuance after talks with Cooper Union and Ukrainian communities, and the show was supplemented by a quartet of helpful contextualizing texts, which weren’t on display but were included with press materials. The school also held a roundtable for students to present their work on Vkhutemas and engage in dialogue about its contemporary resonances.

Unrelated to the exhibition’s contents but held during its run, the school conducted a public program in which experts shared highlights of Ukrainian cultural achievements in the first part of the 20th century, noted the cultural legacy lost in Ukraine during Stalin’s reign, and spoke in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, who are defending their country even as you read this review.

According to The Cooper Union, about 150 people attended. Decades earlier, Hejduk stated his belief “that the University is one

The senseless violence of Russia’s ongoing war is paired with the microscopic, misplaced aggression of reactionaries who sought to kneecap what is essentially a display of virtuosic undergraduates who Rhinomodeled their way through the depths of the pandemic. Vkhutemas should be uplifted as a model for education today. As Bokov wrote in her curatorial statement, the school fostered a culture of collaboration and creativity that transcended the boundaries of class, gender, and nationality, and even questioned the established hierarchy between students and teachers. The school offered free education and accepted students from underprivileged social classes—many of whom lacked secondary education—regardless of their artistic talent or academic standing. It opened its doors to students from diverse national backgrounds, some of whom previously did not have access to higher education. Vkhutemas was one of the first design schools to foster gender equality—women enrolled in all disciplines, including architecture, on equal footing with men.

The story of Vkhutemas offers an example of progressive activity that is politically and aesthetically rigorous at the same time.

The show’s subject matter is its rightful focus, and its existence evidences The Cooper Union’s history of pedagogical rigor and the talent of its students. In his curatorial statement, Hillyer notes that the students’ work “speaks to and engages with a tradition of formal analysis in the School of Architecture that spans decades, design studios, and seminar courses alike.” That lineage is enhanced using digital tools, which allowed the interpretation of historic artifacts into a plethora of new visualizations. Though the show’s run was too short, thankfully the work of Cooper Union students on the subject is being compiled into a catalog that will arrive by the end of the year.

Halfway between today and Vkhutemas’s ten years of operation, student work from The Cooper Union was on view at MoMA in 1971 in the exhibition Education of an Architect. (Imagine if that were to happen today!) The show was aligned with a publication of the same name edited by Hejduk, which was followed by a sequel in 1988, also with the same name but edited by Elizabeth Diller, Diane Lewis, and Kim Shkapich. Though the volumes aren’t immune to contemporary critique—in 2012, Peggy Deamer called the latter “American formalism usurping Continental intelligentsia”— they establish an orthodoxy whose visuals, seen again, can be read as descended from Vkhutemas. Many other capital-P projects were, too. It’s easy to read up on Rem Koolhaas’s early interest in the Soviet avantgarde, which informed much of OMA’s work: A clear line of inspiration connects the sphere in Leonidov’s thesis project in 1927 to OMA’s Zeebrugge Sea Terminal from 1988, about 60 years later.

The Cooper Union’s show collapses a century of history onto itself: If the archival imagery were removed, the recent efforts could convincingly be repackaged as the work of foundational studios taught today, an editorial thought experiment that showcases the consistency of architectural representation across the chasm of the 20th century. For 11 short days, the exhibition and its tribulations showed us how ahead of its time Vkhutemas was and how stuck in the past we are now. JM

After Gentrification

Urban cores have become such a small portion of the built environment that they no longer embody the problems of mainstream urbanism. Today, 70 percent of American cities are suburban by area. Unlike the continuous blocks and streets that make up the arrangements of traditional urban cores, the cul-de-sac suburbs lack a public dimension. There are no mixed-use streets, few representational monuments, and no viable political arenas save privately owned commercial or administrative venues. In the suburban world, quotidian life has been entirely privatized.

As the overall expanse of the private, suburban world has steadily grown, the public urban core has been left to the yin and yang of blight and gentrification. And while reinvigorating urban cores is an important job for the architect, it distracts from another job that is of far greater urgency. Designers should no longer be satisfied with renovating the premodern cores of our existing cities. Instead, they should work to produce an alternative to the suburban world that we have built over the past seven decades.

Architects and urban designers have a responsibility to acknowledge that the traditional 30 percent of the built environment is gentrifying at an extremely rapid pace. Consequently, we are running out of historical urban infrastructure of continuous blocks and streets that support not only the spaces of public inclusion but the construction of a coherent city. We no longer construct traditional urbanism, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and have not done so for the past 70 years. Over these years, the lack of urban construction has accelerated gentrification because the traditional infrastructure that remains is a limited commodity subject to price escalations common in any finite market.

When we understand that the extent of traditional urbanism is limited, we also understand that the principal role of the architect within the historical city is to serve as an agent of gentrification. But those pursuing gentrification do not need our attention— the displaced subjects of gentrification do.

Over countless cycles of urbanization, we have come to accept gentrification as an ageless and never-ending cycle of decline and renewal. Since it is always with us, we assume there is nothing to be done about it, at least not as far as design is concerned. From this perspective, there is no such thing as what comes “after” gentrification because gentrification is a process that seemingly never ends.

But when the urban frontier collapses— when we run out of the infrastructure that allows for an urban world to exist—then the process we have historically known as gentrification ends and another process begins. This process is much more politically charged, as it is characterized by a unique form of disenfranchisement.

After gentrification, those who are pushed out of older, traditional neighborhoods cannot afford to move to other urban areas. Instead, they seek affordability beyond the urban frontier in suburban zones. Gentrification is not pushing displaced individuals out into older, dilapidated urban areas where they can reclaim their public status as a coherent constituency. They are instead being pushed out into suburban oblivion. In the suburbs today, there is no public world for those disenfranchised by gentrification to reinhabit, notwithstanding the advent of virtual spaces. While those who enjoy the fruits of gentrification thrive, those who find themselves on the wrong side of the massive neoliberal income gap are pushed out into an isolated

environment for which the brutal anonymity of the online world is no match.

Urban alternatives existed for previous generations, but that is no longer the case today. There are no urban alternatives. There are only the suburbs, whose deficiencies go far beyond a lack of a public existence. Today’s victims of gentrification are pushed into a totally privatized world defined by cultural, political, and economic exclusion. They occupy neighborhoods in which the closest thing to urbanism is a rundown strip center or a franchised service road off an interurban freeway. They enter the disempowering isolation of a privatized world. In the absence of mixed-use pedestrian streets or any other shared terrain, what remains of shared public spaces amounts to little more than unkempt parks, half-used parking lots, or empty athletic stadiums. In coming decades, as the proportion of suburban development reaches 80 and 90 percent in many metropolitan regions, it is the suburb, not the traditional city, that will most desperately require urban reform.

Across the globe, the gentrification of prewar building stock proceeds at different rates. European capitals are more advanced; their ossification has been triggered largely by tight preservation laws and the extraordinary growth of mass tourism. (It might come as a surprise to many Americans that more than 80 percent of Parisians live outside the historical arrondissements bound by the urban périphérique.) Gentrification in London and Madrid pushes inhabitants into even greater isolation as, each day, their cores come to resemble the hollowed-out stage set that is Venice. Two of New York’s five boroughs are thoroughly gentrified, as are urban areas of San Francisco and Boston. Others, like Austin or San

Diego, are rapidly catching up. While percentages of suburban development vary, there is no question as to where the process leads in each of these cities. Once the current cycle of gentrification is complete and the historical building stock is turned over to the tourists and to the one percent, only the suburbs remain.

Today, the job of the architect is not the gentrification of traditional real estate but designing substitutes for the suburbs’ disempowering alienation. Architects are tasked with producing an alternative to the privatized suburban world into which the disenfranchised will otherwise disappear. Along with such a call to action, it should be made clear that there are few villains in this situation. We are all complicit in the privatization of the city, and we are all implicated in pursuing self-interest at the expense of the public world. All of us have indulged in some portion of the past seven decades of postwar consumerism, and we are now suffering its consequences, even those who have been able to remain within urban areas. As the historical city shrinks in relation to the expanse of the all-consuming built environment, it becomes sclerotic, as do the public values it once represented. After gentrification, there is one appropriate response: to elevate the status of the suburban through the creation of a public realm within our private worlds. Perhaps only when the historic cores of our cities are fully gentrified will we realize that we have all become suburban.

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