Syracuse Center of Excellence
Syracuse, New York

The Syracuse Center of Excellence in Energy and Environmental Systems is a research center for a federation of more than a dozen institutes and corporations that promote energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality. Located on a contaminated site in downtown Syracuse, the building anchors the corridor connecting the city center and the university campus.  The laboratories are organized along a circulation path that acts as gallery with its activities visible to the public. 

Considered a “living lab,” the facility incorporates cutting-edge technology for energy efficiency, embodying its sustainable mission.  Sustainable design strategies include photovoltaic panels to generate electrical supply, a horizontal wind turbine, and a geothermal borefield that provides half of the heating and cooling needs. The building’s relatively narrow width promotes daylighting, natural ventilation, and panoramic views. The energy-efficient north and south long facades optimize solar radiation in both summer and winter.  The north façade provides acoustic insulation from the adjacent highway.  Radiant heating and cooling and displacement ventilation reduces the building’s demand for mechanically driven air. Recycled and non-volatil e-organic-compound-emitting materials lower embodied energy costs and foster better indoor air quality. A green roof above thermally insulates the area below and collects storm water for the building’s non-potable water needs.  The building is slated to receive a LEED Platinum certification. 

The design for the Center of Excellence demonstrates that with intelligent and integrated planning and design, a highly performative sustainable building can be easily achieved. 

Link Hall at Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York

Our design for the new addition to Link Hall, which connects the existing engineering school building to the adjacent architecture school in Slocum Hall, is intended to stand in contrast to the existing buildings in both style and material. Industrial in its character, basic structure, and material, the faceted form of Link Hall expresses its program of aggregated environmental and material research. The renovated and expanded space will serve as an academic campus for the Syracuse Center for Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems, and program elements include the High Bay Testing Lab on grade, a 30 foot high laboratory for materials testing, and on the floors above, flexible student research spaces and offices.

The mineral-like form is meant to be understood as a metaphorical “diamond in the rough”, emphasizing the position of Link Hall as an emerging center of research study activities that will, through various collaborative research activities, increase its value. 

Newspaper Café, Jindong New District Architecture Park
Jinhua, China

The Newspaper Café is one of seventeen pavilions designed by Chinese and international architects that provide gathering spaces for the citizens of Jinhua City as part of a public project for the Jindong New District Architecture Park. The Architecture Park is located at the threshold between the old city of Jinhua and a new development proposed by Herzog and de Meuron, and was conceived by Ai Wei Wei, a Beijing-based artist.

The building is a narrow folded plane with two façades.  News media is displayed on the north wall facing the old city in a transparent glass and steel façade designed to display more than one thousand standard size Chinese newspapers. Viewed at different distances, the north façade either hides or reveals its content. At a further distance, the newspapers are no longer individually discernible, and compose an abstract texture. The wall facing the Architecture Park and museum is white plaster left intentionally blank to invite display, inscriptions and projections of art. The structure sits on a plaza made of local limestone aggregate and concrete.

The design is encircled by a ramp that leads to a rooftop viewing platform and reading terrace. Portions of the newspaper façade pivot open to an interior cafe. The surrounding plaza provides additional cafe seating adjacent to the structure.

The simple, folded shape of the Newspaper Cafe provides for a multiplicity of activities reflecting the energy of the dramatically transforming city of Jinhua City. It is a place for discourse, exchange of ideas, relaxation, and perhaps entertainment.

Visitors’ Center for Darwin D. Martin House
Buffalo, New York

This building, currently under construction, will provide support spaces for visitors to the Darwin Martin House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1906 residential masterpiece in Buffalo, New York, which is undergoing restoration. Program componenets housed in the visitors’ center include tour ticketing, galleries, a theater, and museum shop.

Following Wright's dictum that "Form and Function are One," the design seeks to integrate the aesthetic and philosophical dimensions of the project with its technical and performative components. Furthermore, with the Martin House having had a definitive impact on the development of early Modernism, this project seeks to restate the importance of Frank Lloyd Wright in presaging the course of architecture as it exists today. Current environmental concerns have forced us to reconsider the true meaning of “Organic Architecture,” to understand it as an integral architecture that embraces technological advancements in materials and in mechanical and structural systems with expressive intentions that inspire the human spirit.

House on the Gulf of Mexico I
Casey Key, Florida

The guest house to a 1957 house designed by Paul Rudolph is on a 535-foot wide sand bar near Sarasota Florida, with the Gulf of Mexico is to the west and Sarasota Bay to the East. The Gulf side is a protected sea turtle habitat; the bay side a protected manatee habitat. The house is built on the footprint of a structure destroyed by hurricanes. The densely planted site is exposed to extreme climate - hurricanes, floods, downpours, and strong sun. To protect from hurricanes, storm surges and flooding, the house is raised seventeen feet above sea level. Sheltered by live oaks, palms and mangroves, it is reached by an exterior stainless steel staircase. The stair becomes the new "center" of the house to connect and separate activities within.

The construction responds to the intensities of this climate. Concrete foundation piles are driven twenty-one feet into the sand. Concrete grade beams and pile caps support cast-in-place concrete piers. The habitable space is raised on "pilotis" above wave crest height. The pilotis also respond to the trees on the site: the bulk of the building is within the dense tree canopy providing privacy and shade. The floor slabs, also poured-in-place concrete, are supported by concrete masonry shear walls and steel tube columns. Window frames are steel; glazing is clear, opaque or translucent as needed to protect from glare and heat gain. Differences in opacity create variety and liveliness on the faade of what otherwise might have seemed a hermetic glass box.

The design has been conceived as a tribute to the legacy of the "Sarasota School," a group of architects led by Paul Rudolph and Ralph Twitchell, who practiced in the area from the early 1940's through the mid-'60's. Characteristics of their work such as protective roof planes and local colored concrete masonry are reinterpreted in a tighter volume with minimal detailing and elemental materials.

House in New Canaan
New Canaan, Connecticut

The project is a renovation of a house designed and built by John Black Lee in 1956. The original house has a spirit of experiment; the geometry of the house is simple and rigorous. The objective of the renovation is to respect the original intent and spirit of the house and to renovate and rejuvenate it so that it can continue to function as a family house.

It was a strong desire of both the client and the architect to preserve this particular moment in architectural history of New Canaan and to give it an extended life to continue the legacy that it deserves. The architectural design focuses on change of detailing and shift of material use. The exterior 4”x4” columns were replaced by 2”x4” stainless steel “T” columns.

It’s slenderness is achieved by the efficiency of the use of steel versus wood for the columns. Stainless T columns are added to either side of the existing interior 4”x4” wood columns to brace it in order to raise the clerestory an additional fifteen inches to bring in more light and to bring into view the glorious pine trees on the property.

New stainless steel windows and doors were custom designed and fabricated to allow larger fixed windows and pivot operated doors to engage interiors and exteriors more actively. The operation is subtle; therefore it does not destroy the overall spatial configuration. The major change is in the proportional change of section and elevation. The exterior panels were white and are now gray to blend with the stainless steel and to become more discreet in the pine forest, more as a Miesian pavillion to enhance the ethereality and lightness of the newly rehabilitated house. The site is on a rural property in southern Connecticut with gentle contours where tall pine trees form a major landscape element.

Compound on the Gulf of Mexico II, Casey Key, Florida

The compound occupies a narrow strip of land near Sarasota, Florida, with borders on two bodies of water, Little Sarasota Bay to the east, the Gulf of Mexico to the west. An old coast guard station was located there, and the dormitories and a large dock still remained. The site stretches east-west, dividing into a series of precincts that create a series of intimate, changing landscapes as one moves from gulf to bay.