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Rodolfo Machado Professor in Practice and Co-Chair Department of Urban Planning and Design |
Projects
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Provincetown Art Association & Museum (2003-2006) The renovation and expansion of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum has dramatically improved the museum’s ability to store and display art, and represents an attempt to shape an architectural identity for the institution within the unique Provincetown context.
From the beginning of the project, the Museum clearly expressed its objectives: to significantly increase the ability to store a growing art collection; to develop a clear sequence of gallery spaces that could be used individually or collectively; to expand the Museum School facilities; and to establish a clear entry for the Museum that incorporated the existing two galleries as well as the Hargood House. The project was realized in two phases. The first occurred during the winter and spring of 2004 and involved the renovation of the Hargood House, the Hawthorne Gallery and Hofmann Gallery, as well as creating a library in the old conference room and expanding the office spaces. This initial renovation work was followed by the expansion, which has been ongoing since October 2004. This phase included creating the new Patrons, Jalbert and Duffy Galleries, as well as much needed new art storage areas and an expanded Museum School. In contrast to the existing galleries, the new ones open towards Commercial Street, the town’s major pedestrian thoroughfare, making the institution visually more accessible to its community. As part of the second phase expansion, all of the building’s mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems were replaced. In addition, the building was brought up to current building and ADA code. All told, the work has taken nearly three years and has nearly doubled the size of the institution.
The renovations and expansion were designed to rigorous standards of sustainable design. Some of the building’s ’green’ elements are visible, such as the photovoltaic panels on the roof, the use of native plants in the landscape and the many natural materials seen on both inside and outside the building. Others, although less visible, also play a significant role. These include a thermally efficient building "skin" with added insulation and high-performance windows, the use of natural light and a "daylight dimming" system for the galleries and studio spaces which supplement natural light with artificial light as required. Finally, the building has a "natural ventilation system" which, when appropriate, allows the building to be cooled with outside air. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Willard J. Walker Hall will accommodate both recent and future growth anticipated at the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. This 85,000 square foot building will showcase state-of-the-art teaching classrooms and student learning spaces, teaming rooms, spaces for industry partnering, and a financial markets trading room. With Walker Hall, the Walton College will build upon the increasingly important relationship between business research and graduate education by hosting the College’s research centers. The building takes advantage of its hillside location to project a contemporary image visible from downtown Fayetteville. Walker Hall, along with the adjacent Center for Academic Excellence building, frames a new 300- by 100-foot academic quadrangle. The strong massing, materials, and landscape of Walker Hall tie together the previously undefined campus precinct.
Inside, a succession of double-height spaces organizes the main circulation of the building. Program elements are organized vertically to promote connections between undergraduates, graduate students, and the various research centers. The largest of these double-height volumes is the forum, which links together Shollmier Plaza, café seating areas, a 150-seat auditorium and the trading center. Other double-height spaces are adjacent to undergraduate classrooms, research center meeting rooms, and a graduate reading resource room. The undergraduate classrooms are located at the street and mezzanine levels, public gathering spaces and the career center on the plaza level, the financial trading center and graduate school of business administration on the second floor, graduate-level classrooms on the third floor, and research centers and the boardroom on the fourth floor. The integration of massing and landscape with the interior spaces allows the new building to represent the College’s mission to balance between the business community and leadership in teaching, research, and service within academia. American University of Beirut Competition (2003)
This winning competition proposal for AUB's new Suliman S. Olayan School of Business building has been precisely conceived from the outside in and from the inside out. From the outside in means that it has been generated from the point of view of campus planning, aiming to produce the best and clearest exterior spaces, maximum pedestrian connectivity, desirable lines of vision and the proper building mass (building height and profile, etc.) according to its location and its relations to adjacent buildings.
Thus the scheme proposes, first, a large green oval that carefully located on the axis of existing steps that will become a major access to the sea, a connector bringing large numbers of students from the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, and beyond to the Corniche's elevated edge. This new quadrangle has the effect of bringing the street positively into the campus community of buildings, while giving the School of Business its own nameable and identifiable lawn. Second, the proposal creates an L-shaped four-story building with a first floor-or ground plane-consisting of four enclosed pieces traversed by paths. These are grouped around the School's central space, a triangular open courtyard, a place for spontaneous congregation that can easily be referred to as its "heart" or its "lung"-given its breathing, cooling function. This floor is very porous and transparent; it promotes collegiality and contains the school's lobby, the auditorium, the café and its terrace, as well as student facilities, mailboxes, and related social programs. The building has a generous corner on the Corniche, a corner that recognizes its exceptionally good location while maximizing views of the sea from the Upper Campus.
Third, a stone garden wall and planters define the campus edge and include a pedestrian gate, the only campus gate on the Corniche, to be used mostly for sporting or academic events at the School of Business. This gate will constitute one terminus (the other being the Main Gate) of the only north-south promenade connecting the New Lower Campus to the Upper Campus. This building has also been developed from the inside out, which means that its configuration results from focused attention on its program, the production and the transmission of knowledge, the ways in which it will be used, the quality of its interior life, and the specific particularities of this school, its personality and its people.
In terms of clarity of organization, legibility and easy way-finding; the undergraduate education facilities are located on the second floor, graduate education-the MBA program-on the third, and the Executive Education program on the fourth floor, which also contains the Dean's Office in its corner. A triangular courtyard joins these three levels, and each overlooks the space, enriching it with their different lives. The building displays a unique and strong image (thus helping to establish the branding of the AUB School of Business), very much of its place-understood as being both of Beirut and the American University-as well as of today. It is undoubtedly a contemporary building, but in a manner aimed at permanence and appropriateness at all levels: cultural, climatological, technological, ethical, budgetary, etc. Silver Spring Town Square Competition (2003)
This winning proposal for the Silver Spring Civic Building and Veterans Plaza is sited to extend the axis of Ellsworth Drive into the site as it crosses Fenton Street. The plaza completes a larger sequence of outdoor spaces of various sizes and characters, which starts with the nearby Metro station and extends through the Discovery Communications Headquarters gardens and the Silver Plaza. With its significant change in grade, this particular site posed a challenge in attempting to maximize the plaza's openness to the surrounding neighborhoods. By maintaining the grade level at the main intersection of Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street, the plaza settles into a place midway between the grade extremes with ramps and stairs providing access to the plaza from all sides. The skating rink and its canopies are situated at the Ellsworth and Fenton intersection, signaling the entrance to the plaza and energizing that portion of the space with various activities throughout the year.
The civic building's entrance, located opposite the skating rink and pavilions, is placed on axis with entry to the plaza, and extends through the building's glass atrium allowing a secondary entrance from Veterans Place. The building is divided into three distinct zones: the great hall and its supporting program; the glass atrium space allowing entry from both sides of the building; and a three-story volume along Ellsworth Drive containing the Community Program Center, Round House Theater School, and Regional Service Center. The entrance to the Roundhouse Theater School, located at the lower level on the corner of Ellsworth Drive and Veterans Place, provides a degree of autonomy and accommodates off-hours access for these program spaces.
The building's plan is highly flexible. Theatrical performances and activities of various scales and orientations are possible. The great hall, for example, can be subdivided into three spaces of different sizes. Upper-level balconies provide room for expansion as well as a variety of spectator experiences. The walls opposite the great hall's stage open completely to the plaza. An exterior, upper-level, covered balcony allows the plaza to serve as an outdoor theater oriented toward a stage located below the canopies along Fenton Street. Further, the large proscenium-like elevation of the great hall's building mass creates a civically scaled, flexible space meant to function as a memorable urban destination in the life of the Silver Spring community. The Getty Villa (1994-2003)
Commissioned after an extensive international search in 1994, the Getty Villa project involves a transformation in excess of $150 million to convert the existing site into a new center for the study of classical antiquities, archeology, and comparative ancient cultures. Several new facilities will surround the existing museum and former residence, both of which are undergoing extensive renovations. The first two years involved developing the master plan as well as defining and refining the Getty’s program goals. The master plan corrects the shortcomings of the previous visitor entry sequence by creating a sequence of spaces along the hillside to the west of the existing museum.
Circulation is clarified, new parking facilities and offices are added, and the public spaces of the surrounding site are strengthened and enriched. The new entry sequence features an entry pavilion that collects visitors from new parking facilities and drop-off points, while providing basic visitor services and site orientation. Stairs and elevators lead visitors up from the pavilion to a garden path that serves as the principal connection between the pavilion and the museum entry. At the end of the initial sequence, visitors arrive in a new central plaza linking the museum to additional new public facilities that include a café, bookstore, 250-seat auditorium, and a 450-seat outdoor theater. Further to the north, several new buildings house art conservation and training lab facilities. This north campus complex includes the addition of a 30,000 square foot office building, conference spaces, a grounds facility, loading docks, and a staff parking garage. The new construction elements are conceived as an integral part of the gardens and outdoor spaces. Consequently, they are expressed as stratified retaining walls—discrete with spaces built into the hillsides—or articulated as architectural objects. The new architecture was designed neither to contrast with nor to emulate the architecture of the museum itself, but to enhance the character of the Villa site, balancing gardens and architecture. Motown Center Competition (2003)
The Motown Center constitutes a new building type. It is a hybrid of museum, entertainment center, education facility, etc. But it is not a theme park: the cultural legacy it houses is too important to be trivialized by using the commercial tricks of theme park design. As such, there is no precedent on which to base one's design; instead, architectural invention is needed. Motown and its artists display a unique, strong, specific image: a mixture of studied, choreographed, polished theatricality; a seductive, mannered sense of glamour coupled with a strong sensuality. Theirs is an image defined by fashion consciousness, a socially integrationist attitude and a deep (Detroit-flavored) American-ness. The image is stylish, tasteful, elegant, cool, and always creative. The proposal is intended to have a very clear and distinctive image-a strong, recognizable iconic presence in the city, befitting the importance of Motown in the history of Detroit-and, equally important, a clear, legible, somewhat familiar way of distributing the spaces the program requires throughout the building. Imagine a typical large family house, with a generous covered driveway and a main front door, followed by a vestibule leading to a two-story hallway containing a flight of steps; opening left and right there are a dining room and a library; beyond the hallway, a greenhouse room, a terrace, and a garden can be seen.
The Motown Center proposal is, at the ground level, organized just this way. The driveway is termed the Main Drag. This is a place like no other ever built, an homage to the streets of Detroit and the music they nurture, and to the role that cars played in the city's culture. Covered by a cantilevered canopy/sign/chandelier, the Main Drag is the Center's own street, a carpet of black asphalt made to glow and shimmer like a sequined fabric through the inclusion of lights and pieces of glass in its surface. It is the grand arrival to an event, the everyday bus drop-off, the station of valet parking assistants, the subject of future postcards and a location for photo shoots, a place to dance or to park, to meet or to dream. The Main Drag can be partially or completely enclosed by a curtain of metallic fabric/mesh, which can be rolled up or drawn as needed. Anchored to floor mounts, it will confer sensual privacy, theatrical glamour, and magic to this place.
Opposite the curtain, a continuous glass front bends inwards to welcome visitors; at the seam is the main door. Like in any familiar street, The Grand-restaurant, cabaret, club-opens directly onto the Main Drag, as does the Corner Store, the Center's bookstore and shop. At night, with curtain up, these transparent beacons of light will attract and animate Woodward Avenue. The Vestibule-carpeted, upholstered and curtained-softly ramps down towards the hallway. It is the necessary introductory space to change the mood, to attain a "Motown state of mind," to prepare for the pleasures to come. The house's hallway is called the Spotlight Lobby. There, tickets are bought, coats checked, and it provides access the restaurant, the store, the café and Center Stage, a flexible performance space. The lobby's floor is made of terrazzo, and the elliptical figure at its center is of hardwood, thus providing a space for dancing and performing too. The wall with the elevators is folded to make reference to Studio A's acoustical walls. This space is domed by an irregular conical shape crowned with an elliptical skylight, which produces a bright spot of natural light on the steps. Ample glass folding doors connect it to the café and to Center Stage, making it possible to use these rooms as a continuous party space, with food and service being easily distributed from the adjacent kitchen.
The Alley Café is so named because it can be entered from the parking courtyards and the alley behind the building (this allows for independent hours of operation). The sequence of spaces formed by the Main Drag, the Vestibule, the Spotlight Lobby, and the Alley Café with its garden terrace creates a continuous public passage-an arcade or promenade-clearly structuring from front to back the life of the building at the street level. Again, like in a house, the second floor is centrally organized. The upper level of the Spotlight Lobby provides convenient access to the Immersive Theater, the Sound Studio, the education areas and administrative/curatorial offices, as well as to the bar/balcony over the cabaret and the viewing balcony over Center Stage. The volume containing the third and fourth gallery floors is much like a house's attic, a treasure chest, the container of mementos and memories, the place to re-enact, re-visit, re-interpret, and enjoy. The legacy lives in them. These galleries consist of two levels of completely flexible, column-free space that can be used in many ways. They are spatially interconnected by a double-height space, the Crossroads Lounge, a glassed room emphatically oriented towards Downtown Detroit, like someone looking at its place of origin. On the east side of the fourth floor, there is a similar space, the Hitsville Lounge, containing a telescope fixed on the view of the House at 2467 West Grand Boulevard, the house where it all began.
Key to the success of the Motown Center is its ability to create a new kind of music experience, responding to a variety of visitor types in a way that is seamless and complementary. Just as the space allows for unique moments for various visitors to cross paths and interact, so too will the exhibition strategy. The notion of spotlight moments is a key aspect of this strategy. Spotlight moments comprise everything from interactive exhibits melded into the fabric of the archival exhibitions, social music experiences where groups gather around music in public spaces and resident experts who wander and intertwine official histories with their own personal anecdotes. The exterior of the galleries' volume is wrapped with perforated metal sheets displaying large-scale images of Motown's artists and founding personalities like a contemporary fresco. The metaphor of the Motown Center as house has been very useful, because it allows-at a pragmatic level-the production of a building whose use even a first-time visitor will find vaguely familiar, or natural, a building where spaces are where they should be; thus a building free of the pains "of having to find your away around," free of the chaotic confusion often characteristic of "music centers" or "halls of fame." In addition (and considering the symbolic level now), since Motown
began in a family house and since Motown was a family and acted
like one, it makes a great deal of sense for the Motown Center
to evoke a domestic arrangement. Atelier 505 at the Boston Center for the Arts (1997-2004)
The Atelier 505 mixed-use development contains theaters and arts facilities to expand the Boston Center for the Arts, commercial and retail spaces, and over 100 residences. The new building treats the entire city block as a conceptual unit divided into many buildings orchestrated relative to one another with the BCA's Cyclorama dome as the architectural centerpiece. The new building mass steps back from the face of the Cyclorama along Tremont Street, exposing the building's copper dome to the street. This stepping back also creates a triangular public plaza, animated by landscaping, paving patterns, café seating, shopfronts, display windows, and lobby entrances. This plaza is a simple stage-like surface for activities that spill from the building. The architecture reinforces this activity by its mix of program and by its activation of the street, with multiple entrances to retail, housing, and public functions. The new construction is designed to read as several volumes, rather than as a single monolithic building, in order to allow for transitions in scale and to echo the nature of the South End fabric. The Rockefeller Stone Barns (2000- 2004)
The renovation and adaptive reuse of this collection of farm buildings as the new Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is part of the creation of an 80-acre farmland preserve in Pocantico Hills, New York. The 49,000 square foot complex of Norman-style stone barns were originally designed by Grosvenor Atterbury and built in the early 1930s by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. on the grounds of the Rockefeller estate near Tarrytown, New York. The converted barns and surrounding preserved landscape will be maintained in perpetuity through the stewardship of this non-profit organization. The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is a non-profit farm, learning facility and cultural center, which serves to demonstrate, teach and promote sustainable, community-based food production. Also located on site is a for-profit restaurant, which works in tandem with the livestock and growing operations to provide a model of the culinary and environmental benefits of reducing the distance between field and table.
The project houses classroom/conference spaces, exhibit spaces, an intimate silo reading room, administrative spaces, a café, and a four-seasons growing operation that includes a 24,000 square foot greenhouse along with three and a half acres of outdoor growing beds. When phase two is completed, the facility will also contain a new visitor center, expanded classrooms, and an event space. Because of the picturesque setting of this project, located among the rolling agricultural hills of the Eastern Hudson River Valley, the design team chose to place great significance on the visitor's approach to the Stone Barns. The roadways give glimpses of the structures before a sweeping curve offers an unobstructed view of the buildings. After parking, a brick walkway leads visitors alongside a garden to the main courtyard. The garden serves both as a demonstration area and as a functioning part of the four-seasons growing operation. The courtyard functions as the central and most important space. Surrounded by the six Norman-style barn structures, it provides a large gathering space similar to that of a village square.
The project’s circulation routes were orchestrated to draw people into the courtyard as much as possible. The exterior of the buildings were renovated with new steel windows and a new slate roof, while the weathered wood cupolas and end gables were restored. The interior renovation maintains the integrity of the original structures, yet alters their uses significantly. The client wished to keep features from the buildings’ original use. For example, an old truck scale—which had been used to determine the weight of hay coming off trucks as it was delivered to the hay barn—remains in place and is being restored to operating condition. Existing chestnut doors were restored and replaced in their original locations, but now provide shade for the classroom and conference spaces. The silos also serve as a spectacular entry to the main lobby and their interior provides a dramatic space for a reading room. Harvard Graduate Student Housing
One Western Avenue is a significant project because it represents Harvard’s first step as it expands its campus in Allston. The building occupies a prominent site at the southeast corner of the Harvard Business School campus, adjacent to the Charles River, where Western Avenue crosses Soldiers Field Road. As such, the site marks the arrival to Harvard’s campus from downtown Boston and areas south. The building’s configuration and image are based on our interpretations of its physical context: the nineteenth-century, five-story, brick-clad, U-shaped neo-Georgian courtyard houses and the mid-twentieth-century, twenty-story, concrete paneled modern towers. Both types are characteristic of the university’s riverfront and both have been excellently designed by the best architects of their times, most notably in the twentieth century, José Luis Sert. Urbanistically, the five-story low-rise we placed along Western Avenue establishes a scale for future buildings to be built further inland, while the fifteen-story mid-rise on the riverfront forms—in a pairing with the taller buildings across the river—a virtual “gate” to Harvard when arriving from the river. In addition, to use in Allston the same building types that have been used in Cambridge speaks of the desire to make both sides of the river—and all thereby implied—equal.
While One Western Avenue combines the two emblematic types of courtyard and mid-rise, it adds something else to them: a three-story, bridge-like building raised four levels above the ground and spanning 180 feet. This bridge is very important and performs several tasks: First, it clearly divides the building’s main central void into two very different spaces, a courtyard and a front lawn; from the courtyard looking out, the river view appears framed, as if it were seen through a gigantic window, a condition that improves the experience of seeing the water. Second, it makes a covered terrace between courtyard and lawn, a wonderfully tall campus “room” (to which the main entrance from Western Avenue directly leads), suitably “furnished” with a wooden platform intended for everyday as well as special occasions, and for individual as well group activities; a space like no other on campus indeed.Third, from a pragmatic point of view, it allows us to produce two desirable conditions that normally exclude one another: a courtyard open to the river, as it should be, AND on top of its edge, three stories of apartments occupying the same “front-row” situation.
Consistent with our choice of building types is the choice of skin materials we have made: brick for the courtyard and cast stone for the mid-rise. But in order to produce visual variety, scale down the building masses and, indirectly, relate to the material articulation shown by both neo-Georgian and modern buildings present in the context, we have established a series of regulations that allows us to produce experiential richness without resorting to easy “Picturesquism” or casual decoration. The courtyard building is wrapped in two brick patterns, one for the exterior walls and the other for the interior walls. These overlap in the entry passageway, thus producing a third pattern. The mid-rise and the bridge are clad in the same material, but used differently from one another, as are the types of windows they display (the novelty of the bridge finds its equivalent in the monolithic treatment of its volume. More importantly, we have dealt with the notion of virtual "transparency" (one which is of great importance to both classical and modern architecture) as a way of producing a lucid, architectonic surface treatment. This has been accomplished by letting the ideal prismatic geometry of the various building masses register in the faade planes: when two prisms intersect, their patterns overlap, thus producing a new condition that recovers the prism's ideal edge. Designing along these lines has allowed us to produce a building that is, we believe, very much a Harvard building, and one of its time and place. The Rice University Wiess College The Rice University Wiess College comprises a variety of phases and program pieces. The scope of work began with a master plan phase for siting two colleges, a new access road and gateway, an individual master's house, a university-wide health clinic, and reconfiguration of the existing intramural fields.
The Wiess College project itself includes two dining halls, a servery, and a 228-bed dormitory surrounding a central public courtyard. The rooms are designed with primarily suite type arrangements that are distinct between doubles for freshmen and sophomores and singles for juniors and seniors.
The program also contains a variety of common spaces such as a library, computer rooms, seminar rooms, recreation rooms, etc. The plan locates most of these common rooms near the dining and kitchen facilities, but also spreads some throughout the dormitory itself to encourage a mixing of students. The building takes the form of a single-loaded corridor type, in which the suites are located on the peripheral edge of the building, accessible by means of opener corridors shaded by ivy-covered metal screens along three courtyard walls. A new dining hall for Wiess College defines one edge of the courtyard. This hall is part of an integrated complex of new facilities that includes a second dining hall for the adjacent Hanszen College and a servery surmounted by a large public terrace overlooking the nearby playing fields. The building's architectural language is contemporary but developed from the historic character of the campus. Honan-Allston Branch of the Boston Public Library
The new Honan-Allston Branch of the Boston Public Library is a single story, 20,000 square foot building located along a busy neighborhood street. The building addresses issues that are important to the client, including maximum visual control within the library, a reading garden that serves as many spaces as possible, off-hours access for community use, and a prominent reading room on the front of the building. The scheme is divided into three basic programmatic zones defined by a series of parallel walls. The front zone contains all the active, information-gathering program components, including the stacks. The rear zone contains all of the meeting and program spaces, which have off-hours community use. The middle zone is very transparent, with alternating gardens and glass pavilion reading rooms. By creating several small garden spaces rather than a single large garden, each reading room is able to have a garden on both sides. This organization allows a beautiful specimen Beech tree to be preserved in one of the gardens. The periodicals reading room is treated as an additive piece on the front of the building in order to establish a scale large enough to signify the institution's importance, while materially it portrays a casualness appropriate to a community library in residential neighborhood.
This volume opens towards the street, with a continuous horizontal band of windows providing views from the outside to the internal activities of the library. Passing through the front entrance, patrons discover the inner gardens at the heart of the building. The library's warm material palette is composed of slate shingles and panels, rough slate blocks, and wood cladding. Natural-finished wood windows are used with both fixed and operable units. The interior floors are a combination of wood and cork which shares the same warm tones of the exterior materials.
Capital Plaza Competition As part of an invited competition, this urban design proposal attempts to produce important changes to the Capital Plaza and the image of Taipei's old downtown. This proposal changes the image of the place by reconsidering its public architecture in total: to reinvent its form and its programming, its open spaces as well as its interiors. First, it creates a civic square, the Capital Plaza - a plane, 174 meters long by 54 meters wide, rising up to 6 meters at both ends. Second, beneath the plaza stands a hypostyle public space, the Capital Hall, which contains an open-air covered room intended for diverse functions.
Third, the project locates a branch of the Palace Museum at Capital Plaza. Fourth, it includes a public loggia, a fountain, and two sets of cafes under the eaves of the plaza.
This series of unprecedented elements creates a distinct and uniquely Taiwanese place, a plaza like no other.
Kendall Square Competition The proposed office headquarters redistributes and reinvents the collective spaces of typical office buildings. Instead of a single atrium, the structure contains a series of social spaces distributed on different levels, ranging from lounges and cafes to gathering halls and boardrooms. Together, they encourage innovative exchange within the company. Locating these functions at the perimeter wall connects the building's occupants to the city through a variety of dramatic views of Boston and the Charles River. The exterior skin is conceived both as surface and a silhouette, where the curtain wall makes a distinctive profile against the sky -- a readily identifiable logo for the company. It is a crystalline landmark that unveils the activities of the building with variations in the skin to expose the social spaces.
Visible from Cambridge and Boston, the curtain wall continues above the roof on the northwest and southeast corners to create dual silhouettes and a strong sculptural form. At night, the entire building will glow like a colossal lantern. The internal lobby sequence addresses the two primary approaches to the building. It also permits a view through the ground floor and links the lobby to the master plan's northern and southern plazas. Princeton University Master Plan, The Princeton University Master Plan involves planning work throughout the entire 725-acre campus, and its surrounding 500-acre properties. The plan includes building renovations, new building construction, as well as landscape and urban space design. Within the contextually sensitive historic campus, available building sites were analyzed and interventions were carefully introduced in order to complement the existing environment. Special attention was given to planning and structuring the pedestrian pathways which define the growth of the campus and configure the various building's footprints.
The planning proposal for the rapidly developing peripheral edges of campus and the surrounding properties strives to define a coherent order and a strong spatial hierarchy which extends and connects to the historic campus.
On the peripheral sites, the master plan reinforces the edge conditions and articulates the boundaries between the university and the adjacent township. Existing parking lots, located predominantly in this area, were relocated or condensed. On the northeast campus, a new parking structure has reduced surface parking and created new sites for future academic buildings and athletic facilities. On the southern edge of campus, the master plan regulating the construction of the future Princeton Fields attempts to put an end to the disorganized building activity, while preserving the current location of the recreational athletic fields. An elliptical figure is thus emphatically traced, marked by buildings to the north and a wooded landscape on the southern lake side. The ellipse proper is a twenty-foot-wide continuous stone walk, edged with benches and parapets as well as a necklace of Princeton lamp posts. The buildings will not conform to a traditional crescent; rather they are proposed as a series of buildings and gates (the first, a 267-bed dormitory designed by the firm, is now under construction) to be built over the next ten to fifteen years by varying architects within very precise guidelines.
These new dormitories and science buildings will maintain the fragmentary nature of typical Princeton buildings facing towards the old campus while presenting a more homogeneous and contemporary image towards the playing fields. The southern landscaped edge of the ellipse will consist of a double curbed allée of trees, reaching the height of the buildings across the fields. The minimal demarcation of the sports fields will stress the informal aspects of the activities and the continuity of the grass plane. Robert F. Wagner, Jr. Park
This project occupies a unique site, characterized by its relatively small area located at the center of colossal surroundings (such as the immense scales of The World Trade Center and Hudson River). This spectacular site is dedicated to public recreation. The main function of this public place and the reason for its existence is the privileged viewing of the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor. Two points, one at the center of the Statue of Liberty's base and a second at the intersection of two rectilinear coastal edges at the site's tip, determine a line that becomes the park's geometric and structuring axis. The design of the park comprises three main components: a pair of allées that bring pedestrians towards the main park entrance, extending the sidewalks of Battery Place coming from the north and of Battery Park from the south; a pair of pavilions connected by a bridge constituting the main building; and a lawn terrace framed by continuous paths and benches.
This "Y" shaped architectural ensemble is the backbone of the park, resting in gardens and fields of grass that connect to the Battery Park City Esplanade and to Battery Park. The building is conceived as a large, over-scaled, massive masonry wall split in the center, framing the view to the Statue. This wall appears as a remnant or an exposed foundation of a colossal structure, its "crumbling" towards the city alluding to a ruinous condition.
This "lithic" formation is used to develop a pair of large public steps that seemingly prolong the allées and bring the public up to a balcony overlooking the lawn and harbor. On the wall's surfaces, a variety of brick patterns are displayed following a precise figurative symbolic strategy. The upper level, eighteen feet above the ground, is the truly significant public situation on the park, since the ground level houses rest rooms, a café, and maintenance spaces. This pair of balconies furnished with tall backed wooden benches and portable tables and chairs is the ideal ground for contemplation, lunching, and general relaxation. The character of each balcony is quite different from the other: the northern balcony offers a view of the river framed by a large arch, while on the south, the experience of the view is more open and unprotected. From the center of the bridge connecting these two, the viewer's direct relation to the Statue of Liberty is "face to face." The Marcia and John Price Museum Building During the competition stage for the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, our ideas developed within the guidelines provided by the master plan.
For us this implied more than just following established specifications for the building's placement: it required that the architecture of the new museum acknowledge and exploit its privileged location at the terminus of the campus mall and its unique condition as a free-standing artifact seen against the spectacular backdrop of the Wasatch Mountain Range. These potential attributes also suggested that the museum could afford visitors and users unique views out of the building in all directions, a condition rare to museums. As for its architectural context, the reverse was also true: the campus area surrounding the site offered little in terms of architectural features that may either impress or inspire our design. In addition, given the museum's stated programmatic intentions, we decided early on to make the proposed Grand Gallery the centerpiece of the project, its tallest and most representative space - indeed to make it a powerful, singular space. With all this in mind, the project evolved into a continuous succession of stepping prismatic volumes that wrap around as they ascend and culminate in the tall central space. This organization creates a spiral-like crescendo of discreet volumes, each one associated with specific and distinct programmatic elements. Thus, the lowest corresponds to the auditorium, the next to the entrance and public services (such as the restaurant and bookstore), followed by art education, permanent galleries, etc. These terminate in the Grand Gallery, an icon against the dramatic natural setting, which dominates the ensemble and is crowned by a halo of green glass that marks it by night and day from the inside and outside as the building's centerpiece.
To reinforce this strategy, each of the volumes is distinguished from the others by a distinct and subtle combination of two different colors of brick, creating a unique pattern for each volume. This results in a gradation of five different tones for the five volumes - from darkest (for the auditorium) to lightest (for the Grand Gallery). Large protruding window volumes inset at the outer corners intensify the thrust of these volumes' centripetal and upward movement. From all sides and perspectives, the museum appears as a commanding, dynamic, and abstract composition of articulated volumes, colors, and light. Inside, the visitor is also drawn into this dynamic play of volumes and light by the tension developed between the easy, straightforward, and well-scaled circulation system that follows the organization of the galleries, and the Grand Gallery's powerful diagonal force created by the relationship between the entry point and the over-scaled corner window. The visitor is thus constantly challenged by two realities: first, that of the exhibition spaces which are entirely subordinated to the display of the collection; and second, that of the Grand Gallery's distortions of all normal parameters of light, scale, and function. The Ronald F. Walker Tower The Ronald F. Walker Tower is intended to be an icon for the University of Cincinnati and a monument acknowledging the many contributions of the Sigma Sigma Fraternity. Urbanistically, the tower helps to establish a formal entrance to the new Commons from University Avenue, as well as to mark a memorable place for the university community.
To this end, employing a design technique of totemic origins, the design stacks varied elements that legibly symbolize the university and the Fraternity. Firmly set on its cast in situ concrete base, the tower forms the university's monogram, representing the institution's foundational role. Above, a shaft of dark wood, polished metal, and precast concrete convey the fraternity's symbols, the hammer and the Greek letters -- or labor and the culture of Occident. On top, a lantern of perforated stainless steel construction stands for enlightenment and knowledge, the ultimate goal of the school and its people. While the legibility of these symbols by those who belong to this community is important, the arcane opacity the tower produces in those who do not know or belong is equally important to us. We would like to believe that the effect the tower produces in others outside -- this enigmatic, strange perhaps even more seductive effect, the shear result of form and materials and light longing to attain beauty -- is equally memorable. Mission Bay Campus Master Plan
The new 43-acre Mission Bay campus for the University of California San Francisco will differ from traditional collegiate campuses. The institution consists of graduate students and research faculty (who live off campus), specific types of scientific activities (concentrated during daytime hours), and a single predominant building type (laboratories). These unique issues and the particular conditions of the site shape our master plan. By maintaining the San Francisco street grid, the master plan most efficiently integrates the campus with the fabric of the city, while providing flexibility for future growth. In addition, strong modifications to this grid in plan and section enable the master plan to produce a distinct sense of place and identity for the campus, while creating attractive vistas. In order to structure a campus that enhances human interaction and community, we developed three different scales of public spaces, linked together by pedestrian routes that structure sequences of campus movement.
The first type of public space includes three spaces at the scale of the campus and city. A paved urban plaza with commercial activities is defined at its edges by an arcade and a line of plane trees. A green, sloping lawn (the Hill) constitutes the heart of the campus. It rises from Fourth Street towards the public level of the Campus Center and is edged by steps to the south and terraces to the north. The iconic Administration Tower punctuates the Hill's southeast corner. A significant amount of parking is located below the Hill; as a result, the campus is not overwhelmed with structured parking in buildings that line the streets. A series of athletic courts form another space that help to foster interaction among the campus, the high school, and the surrounding community. The second type of public space includes various quadrangles at the scale of the campus block. These are garden-like spaces maximizing public interaction between a pair or trio of buildings. These quadrangles contain diverse garden types, ranging from a grove of trees to a fountain, an Asian garden to an herbal landscape, etc. The third type of space comprises semi-public terraces at the scale of the building. Every laboratory building has at least one terrace, court, or outdoor room carved from its overall mass and surrounded by offices, lounges, and academic community spaces.
The image of each space will be varied, where some will be glazed, others open, some shaded by trellises, others capped by floors above, etc. The image of the buildings will relate to the city of San Francisco (whose distinctiveness we wish to enhance) and to the UCSF institution (conveying its prestige and representing the future-looking research being conducted here). We believe this will be achieved by working with intensely colored building volumes (like those of San Francisco, expressed in materials such as cast stone, masonry, and wood) as well as by encouraging technologically inventive detailing (to represent the innovative nature of scientific activity) and a sense of visual transparency (to make the workings of the institution understandable and visually accessible to the public). Frankfurt am Main Competition
Programs such as the Urban Entertainment Center's are best accommodated in large, continuous building plates, within a single enclosure. The consolidation of parts ensures internal connectivity of multiple facilities, rational structural design and construction processes, efficient HVAC systems and marketing strategies, etc. However, European cities such as Frankfurt will not easily assimilate such behemoths, because of the finer grain of the city's nineteenth-century fabric and pedestrian-scaled streets. At the site of the UEC, large-scale infrastructure and big-box facilities edge the traditional urban fabric. The proposal therefore creates a hybrid type: an architectural chameleon that can engage the texture of the city at one moment, while asserting its monumental status and modernity at another. An arcade-like retail and entertainment environment contains courtyards, atria, and public spaces of various types. This interior environment is accessible directly at sidewalk level from all adjacent streets, from the parking garage below, and from new sloping pedestrian passages within the project. In addition, these outdoor pedestrian passages extend the surrounding urban environment to a generous public place overlooking a new boulevard. In the superimposition of these two equally viable and accessible grounds, Frankfurt can thus have both a large building and a block fabric consistent with its urban morphology. Instead of camouflaging the buildinga standard urban strategy for integrating large structureswe make the building's presence even larger, but shattered. As a collection of individual buildings, the UEC appears to have been chiseled out of a single colossal block, a shattered monolith whose original contour appears in the remaining fragments. We exacerbate the scale to achieve a powerful and seductive image, thereby creating a virtue out of the usual liability.
We thus capitalize on the unusual size of the building to stage an extraordinary event in the city, a moment of public theatricality appropriate for an entertainment center. In dealing with the termination of the boulevard, the proposal recognizes and cultivates the architectural potentials of the site's disjunctions. The boulevard visually "crashes" into the UECits intrusive violence figuratively translated into a unique public space and a series of pedestrian passages. The UEC has an iconic quality that lends instant intelligibility and recognition, where the building is essentially the logo of the center itself. The building is wrapped in a complex faceted and glazed double skin, which sets up transparencies, reflections, and refractions for the nighttime transfiguration of the architecture through artificial light.
Dewey Square Master Plan (1998-2004) The master plan and urban design for the Dewey Square precinct in Boston's Financial District, the project is comprised of a privately funded redesign of the surface restoration above the Central Artery/Tunnel Project. The design expands the scope of the previous plan to include the sizable privately owned plazas that abut the square, and re-conceives the entire area as one urban space with a single contemporary character unique within the city. Currently, the Central Artery Project is incorporating the design into their construction drawings, and construction was completed in 2004. In attempting to maintain the space as a unique, inclusive, and progressive public plaza, the guidelines promote a condition of "orchestrated variety" through several components. The square's overall pavement serves as a continuous carpet of stone onto which a series of disparate objects are placed.
The pavement's patterns reflect the large scale of the plaza, with a giant order of stripes that adjust in width to accommodate the different objects. Each object is carefully orchestrated in order to establish visual relationships with the main pedestrian thresholds into the square. The smaller objects take the form of buildings, pavilions, objectified crosswalks, and infrastructural improvements to provide public services and amenities. These include: retail spaces, a café, a newsstand/information broadcasting booth, a large public television screen, street furnishings, gardens, fountains, and various smaller plazas. All objects are designed to support urban activities -- encouraging use, sensual interactions, legibility, and people's attachment to the structures as recognizable landmarks. |
