From the architect. The project is the new work and operations headquarters for PMSA which has its design, drafting and project management processes are carried out by mimaristudio. The new office has 12.000 m2 of area on 3 stories, 4000 of which are offices, in Istanbul.
It can be seen in the designs of mimaristudio that the firm develops brand new approaches for each new project according to the physical conditions and current functional requirements of the place, regardless the studios previous projects or if they are working for the same client or not.
During the planning phase, first of all the sales teams are grouped in the center of the office floor. Teams who work on different areas are placed to be in close contact with their regional sales directors. Also the directors are placed in the center of workgroup clusters based on this idea.
Considering the largeness of the space both in area and the volume, team shells to combine two work groups are designed so that each work group can have their own identity. These shells which respond to physical, technical and technological requirements of all the staff of the group, both during their personal or team work, are designed with a space inside a space approach creating open sub-spaces inside the main work area. With this approach showroom- like effect is avoided and a different identify for each team is provided.
Layout
Other units in the office are placed around this core. In addition to this, an open multipurpose hall is proposed for the new place. This hall, which is considered for varying types of usages, is linked to social spaces. The ‘game shells’ which were specifically designed by mimaristudio are placed on the area that is next to this space.
The green lines function as natural separators that organize the units inside the office area. Plants that can sustain in closed environment and are able to use the natural light that space can provide are selected in the landscape design phase.
The space between the shells that cover working clusters are composed like streets, the material selection for these spaces are arranged to create a sense of continuity between other meeting and social spaces. 5 mm modular PVC tiles are chosen for the all floor finishing, expect meeting and interview rooms, for its sanitary and acoustic advantages. Their color and texture vary to go along with the interior design concept of each space.
Axonometric
Lighting design criteria are set by mimaristudio team as it was in the previous mimaristudio projects. LED products are used for all of the spaces in the project, linear or spot projections products are chosen for the working spaces, while in open spaces more specialized products with varying sizes and forms some of them having acoustic qualities are preferred.
With the completion of the project a space that is coherent with both PMSA’s corporate identity and the work that takes place there has come to being. Besides that, a comfortable working space for the staff that operates well and meets the actual and future expectations of the client is created.
‘Barkingside Town Centre’ is a strategic project which radically transformed the town centre of Barkingside, a suburban town on the eastern fringe of London. The project provide a new ‘heart’ to the town in the form of a civic square and high street park, supported by a range of strategic interventions along the high street and out into the Green Belt landscape beyond.
Courtesy of DK-CM
The project has transformed a series of previously neglected or inaccessible spaces around Fullwell Cross Library and Leisure Centre, a suite of civic buildings designed in the 1960s by Frederick Gibberd. We have turned these unloved spaces into ones which suggest and support activity, bringing the internal generosity of Gibberd’s buildings into the public realm. A new loggia, modelled directly on Gibberd’s clerestory windows, lines a previously blank wall to create a town square which encourages inhabitation. Entrances to all of the buildings have become open air ‘rooms’, particularly the leisure centre’s entrance which incorporates a stage and Christmas tree pit. At the swimming pool, we have created 3,000m2 of new public park out of a disused and private pool yard, bringing the pool to life as a public building connected to its high street and providing a new leafy entrance to the town centre. Where the leisure centre formerly presented its delivery bay to the High Street, we have provided a small retail unit and public convenience, a miniature of the main building, which turns a back into a front and brings the bulk of the pool into dialogue with both the High Street and the new park.
Courtesy of DK-CM
We have brought generous but aloof modernist architecture into playful and generous dialogue with the suburban high street, in a language which riffs on suburban popular building but also on European traditions of public space. Since the project’s completion, the new spaces have hosted music events, childrens’ theatre performances, evening markets and community gatherings. The park has become part of its high street, providing a much-needed place of pause amongst the shops.
Isometric 1
Isometric 2
The project grew out of a series of productive conversations with the local community, significant for their openness and ambition, and key local community groups have been involved at all stages, particularly Barkingside 21, the local environment group who are advocates of the scheme and are active in promoting the spaces and organising events there. Local swimming groups have told us of their delight at being able, for the first time, to swim under dappled sunlight provided by the park’s new trees, whilst the town square is now the de facto heart of the town and is never empty.
Courtesy of DK-CM
The project also commissioned various designers to design and deliver precise interventions in Barkingside’s wider urban landscape. As an example, Assemble
Courtesy of London Borough of Redbridge
crafted a new pedestrian entrance and beacon for Fairlop Waters Country Park, just outside the town centre, whilst Eveleigh & Klein delivered a series of sensitive, beautiful signage and branding designs for independent businesses along the high street.
Students and architects from over 30 countries have constructed a “village” of 14 wooden structures at Hello Wood’s Project Village 2016. Founded in 2010 as an art camp for students in architecture, art and design disciplines, Hello Wood has since grown into an award-winning interior summer school program focused on creating design through collaborative methods and bringing together the principles of architecture, art, innovation and social impact. The Project Village, conceived just last year, pushes these ideals to their limit by challenging students, teachers and designers to work together to create a new architecture of community at Hello Wood’s rural campus in Csoromfolde, Hungary.
Continue reading to see all 14 projects with descriptions from the designers.
In the second year of Hello Wood’s Project Village, architects were tasked with constructing a place of “arrival, permanence, and connection.” Participants first discussed current and historical settlement precedents, debating and analyzing which “subtle cues and territorial definitions make the roles of host and guest change or interchange.” This deliberation was then used to develop the 14 different typologies that were to make up the campus. Teams were then formed to realize the vision.
“Project Village 2016 is the beginning of a new era for Hello Wood. We are building a rural campus that will be open throughout the year to welcome architects, artists, social scientists, and students. In our brief we asked for projects that address actual needs of the community, from the most mundane and pragmatic ones to the utmost spiritual. We were happy to see responses to these basic functions such as a sanctuary, a storage or a public kitchen, among others,” says Peter Pozsar, one of the founders of Hello Wood.
“One of the main challenges for us during the masterplanning was to create a real settlement, where the projects are not autonomous installations, but adapt to the needs and everyday life of the community,” adds Johanna Muszbek, lecturer at the University of Liverpool and curator of Project Village.
Project by: Urban-Think Tank Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, D-ARCH, ETH Zürich, Professor Alfredo Brillembourg & Professor Hubert Klumpner
Workshop Leaders: Danny Wills, Gianmaria Socci
Team: Nora Behová, Jiaxin Wu, Németh Krisztina, Sung Lim, Iara Pezzuti dos Santos, Dormán Miklós, Cina Mael Bockstahler, Mariia Yastrubchak, Agnieszka Chromiec, Zétényi Zsófia
For the first phase of Project Village 2015, Urban Think-Tank built the Migrant House, a structure that provided the initial point of orientation for a community of travelers. Their proposal for Project Village 2016 seeks to transform the idea of the Migrant House into an idea of Migrant Hous(ing). The current work at Urban-Think Tank focuses on practical strategies of housing while remaining embedded within community-driven processes. The Migrant Hous(ing) builds on their ideas of modular construction, community capacity building, rapid and incremental upgrading and quick, pre-fabricated assembly and disassembly methods. The structures themselves will be migrant in nature. Their ability to be transported and rapidly installed, transformed and dismantled is key and a major performative aspect of the project.
Team: Mangliár László, Eve Stotesbury, Cristina Krois, Zsuzsanna Kovács Zsuzsanna, Vladimír Votava, Henry Lyle, Flavia Notarianni, Sasvári Adrienn, Sonia Molenda
The forest is a point of departure for human colonization and emergence of a modern understanding of space. The project tests the tension between these two poles and aims to make it visible and tangible. The open structure of the installation refers to the surrounding countryside and offers an ever-changing perspective between interior and exterior space. The project also works as a viewing platform to observe the incredibly wide range of biodiversity living in the area.
Project by Artem Kitaev & Leonid Slonimskiy (Kosmos Architects)
Team: Willie Vogel, Aleksandra Liszewska, Niklas Niemeyer, Patryk Slusarski, Martin Spalek, Esther Ellingsen, Martyna Rajewska, Jazmin Charalambous
In the world of communication and global exchange of cultures, walls should unite people and not divide them. As such this project is a wall but a new kind of wall – it attracts rather than separates. It questions physical borders and proposes transforming the typology of a wall from a space-divider into a functional infrastructural space itself which can provide shelter as well as provide for communal, commercial and cultural activities.The structure is built in layers according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The ground floor provides shelter for basic human necessities such as sleeping and the top floor offers space for spiritual necessities such as the need for self-expression. The team built one layer per day, each marked by a ritual of one activity: from sleeping and eating on first days to love and self-actualization on the last days.
Claire Humphreys, Marta Piasente, Lukasz Waclawek, Alexandra Kvasnicova, Kopácsi Anna, Miroslav Styk, Matthew Joyce
Before becoming encapsulated within the realm of hygiene the bath was not only a social event, but also a form of collective pleasure. The space of the bath in the city was a public one, where the care of the self was a practice mediated by architecture. The bathhouse featured different environments that regulated the body temperature in relation with varying degrees of socialization. Inverting the contemporary separation between privacy and exposure, the new baths will restore the public function of washing in the realm of the collective, becoming a place of sociality where the body will be rescued from the tyranny of puritan invisibility. Occupying a central role in the village, the bathhouse will provide a space for relaxation from the intense daily routine of construction.
Project by Martial Marquet, Nicolas Polaert and Vojtech Nemec
Team: Kiss Flóra, Aleksandra Milewska, Maddyn Mathias, Jesús Sánchez, Khrystyna Kurovets, Ozan Sen, Zentai Kinga, Berivan Atik, Horváth Rebeka, Mokos Mariann
Table is a Parliament Parliament is a Table uses the picnic table as a module to create the parliament project that functions both as a gathering place and as a place for debate.You can sit down by the table at the lower level of the arena structure, share food with others and welcome visitors. It fosters inclusivity, diversity and demonstrates the ritual of welcoming: at Project Village 2016 everyone is welcome at the table and welcome to join in the debate. The project aims to rethink the archetypal amphitheatre space. It becomes a tribune for exchange and expression in various media such as sound, music, dance and both the still and moving image. It is as much a place for entertainment as a political space. In our community the expression of oneself should be as natural as eating or drinking. Politics, democracy, entertainment and partying simultaneously shape the spaces of communal living.
Project proposal by Neal Hitch, Martin Hitch, Lucas Hitch
Team: Ania Wozniczka-Wells, Tara McKenna, Kiss Márta, Schramkó Sába, Jung Daniel Attila, Carlos Azpiroz, Davida Rauch, Raya Boyukova, Burenjargal Ganbat
The history of architecture and spirituality have always been linked. The temple structure, therefore, may be the first architectural form to take actual form within the community. In 2015 the Sanctuary project posed the question “what does spirituality look like in an increasingly non-religious world?”, but perhaps our world hasn’t become less religious, we have just given it a different name. By reintroducing traditional symbolism to practices that have never stopped we call attention to the daily rituals in which we participate. Just as the gate of every Roman city was dedicated to Janus, ritual marks one’s arrival. The act of gathering is a ritual. Built on the 300 year old ruins of a previous settlement in Csóromfölde, the Alt-Cathedral is space that represents ritual in the community. Within there are areas for ‘alter’; a fire providing fellowship; an ‘overview’ deck; interstitial spaces allowing rest or self-reflection and an area of ‘dedication’ honoring those who came before.
Proposal by Gregory Quinn and Dragos Naicu – Berlin University of Arts
Team: Géhberger Máté, Rafael Silveira, Viktoria Mank, Ana Maria Rodriguez Bisbicus, Anyana Zimmermann, Maria Tanska, Paola Chessa, Cansu Ergün, Alan Bigelow, Elisabeth Kofler
Actively bending slender natural materials and combining them with other linear or planar materials into stiff structural hybrids has been prevalent in vernacular architecture since the beginnings of human dwellings and homes. Engaging examples of this can be seen in the traditional Mudhif in Afghanistan or traditional Iranian felt tents. While the concepts and technology of such hybrids is not new, there is great potential for novelty and innovation in the digital tools necessary for their design. The hybrid structures built for Project Village 2016 will also host the village museum with an ongoing exhibition of villagers work such as sketches, drawings and a sculpture park.
Project by Suzana Milinovic and Rufus Van Den Ban (TU Delft)
Team: Steef Meijer, Phillip Fai Chung, Kéri Juli, Karl Leung,, Papp Nikolett, Joep Bastiaans, Victoria Guinet
For Project Village 2016 – Settling: Rituals of Arrival the team built and performed a Shou Sugi Ban workshop. Shou Sugi Ban refers to the Japanese technique of charring wood to extend its lifespan. As settling implies an action that requires time, space and craft we wanted to contribute to the longevity of the settlement with one of the first buildings. In order to perform this technique, the team built a fireplace, a table and a shelter. Other settlers will make use of this facility, now and in the future by bringing their material to the workshop and learning the various charring techniques most appropriate for their own purposes.
Project by Suelen Camerin, Carlos Castro (castrocamerin)
Team: Sara Simoska, Clea Granados Nikolaidou, Villányi Fábián, Dominika Galandova, Schmidt Márta, Anne de Zeeuw, Godra Orsolya, Zsuzsanna Horváth Zsuzsanna
The house is a seminal reflection of socio-political relations of people in all cultures. Besides being the place that shelters and protects human life, the way it is built, used and divided can reflect how people relate to each other and organize their society. This project is an homage to one of the most brilliant brazilian architects of all time: Lucio Costa. In 1956 Costa won the competition for the urban plan of Brasilia and in 1964 he designed the installation “Riposatevi: an invitation to rest” for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 13th Milan Triennale. Guitars and colourful hammocks displayed the paradox of a country where laziness and sloppiness are stigmas and yet it was possible to build a new capital in a few short years.
Project by Christian Daschek and Julia Wildeis | solidOperations
Team: Veerle Rigter, Sam van Hooff, Sonya Falkovskaia, Tamás László, Natascha Fakler, Czinger Jákob, Maria Elena Ferraresi
The essence of a summer school is people connecting with each other. Their motivation, skills, knowledge and will to connect and exchange amongst each other are most important. The structure(s) of our proposal are amassed singular elements, a structure which reflects a coming-together of individual elements. A structure in an infinite state, to be split, re-arranged and ultimately in parts to be taken home by all participants so they can set up camp anew somewhere else. Just as importantly, every village needs practical items, like tables and chairs.
Project by BuildunBuilt (Baki Áron, Egyed Csongor, Gadolla Máté, Kőműves Márton, Szabó Ákos, Takács Ákos)
Team: Pablo González Serna, Marta Zabik, Sylvia Winter, Angela Recasens Estrada, Yushi Zhang, Aleksandra Sudnikovich, Anna Raczynska, Makai Luca
BuildunBuilt is the architectural version of a virtual cloud. The team’s interests lie in the question of contemporary housing and the relevance and future of prototyping. They pursued an extensive research on the local history of prototyping as a technology of facilitating and defining social and aesthetic change, be it emancipatory and/or disciplinary, progressive or regressive. The future will reveal if this edifice could transform into the Hello Wood-prototype house.
Project Proposal by Zsófia Szonja Illés and Lukasz Pastuszka
Team: Danique van Hulst, Veniyana Lemonidi, Fiona Thompson, Amelia Linde, Johannes Fandl, Guiseppe Ferrigno, Sarkadi Zsolt, Ruby Sleigh, Petrovicz Anna
May it be a countryside village or a traditional house, Peru, Turkey or Hungary, Hello Wood, Burning Man or Rainbow Gathering, fireplaces always played an important role in community life. Fire was the centre where the community gather and sometimes cook, warm up, party and socialise. They were and still are the centers of communal living space where people instinctively gather. The FIREPLACE stems from a basic need of participants at every Hello Wood workshop and the idea that a fireplace can be flexible depending on its different functions. The team investigated the old Hungarian fireplace structures and were particularly inspired by the idea of the “nyárikonyha” (open-air summer kitchen).
Project Proposal by András Cseh, Endre Ványolós, Áron Vass-Eysen
Team: Florian Gabriel, Maelys Garreau, Petró Panna, Burista Emese, Jambrik Máté, Bíró Bianka, Mercedes Palacio
The project is an introduction to the concept of settling: it marks the event of an arrival. It becomes a reference point when you place down your travelling kit and pick up what you will need. Placed by the entrance on the edge of Csóromfölde. It awaits you as a membrane to pass through both ways, leaving one world with its gadgets behind and gearing up for the adventures to come. You come home to stay, play, work, eat, think, party – to be. Here you will find all you need in one extensible ‘light’, box-like object: the firewood, stones for the fireplace, a saw, a cleaver, a tub, the ladder, a bicycle etc. All are recognisable accessories that inseparably belong to us and once put together will form an inextricable part of the beginning of our story. Inventory is supposed to be an object of identification just like the inventory in Moonrise Kingdom of Wes Anderson. It models the ritual of an arrival and departure through mundane, though very iconic material proofs.
Csapat: Soós Márta, Técsi Zita, Dorota Kopania, Jozef Eduard Masarik, Simon Mitchell, Agnes Brull, Katarina Brnovic, Margot Holländer
Hermit House is a experimental research space for the individual to orient oneself in the world. A basic roof structure in combination with two different wall elements and a minimal set of furniture for cooking, sleeping and sitting, generates a space to be appropriated. All of this can be changed to accommodate the needs for cloister as well as the best ways to interact with nature and the never-ending distractions from the village. Flexibility is not only shaped by budget, climate and artistic pursuits, but also the aim to create hospitality for possible guests. When there are no guests it is the place to enjoy the silence and contemplation.
More information on Hello Wood Project Village can be found at their website, here.
Once again, landscape as a main theme of the project. This time, under our feet the fields, as an horizon the see and a vast changing sky. We were asked to design the first floor extension of a country house, characterized by its random openings configuration and the “gotelé” texture of the lime walls.
The requirement of a quick construction and the condition of a viewpoint guided the construction decisions. We looked for a clear relationship with the house and the new construction, not imitating but maintaining its own aesthetic and function.
Section
Just one exterior access, through an sculptural exterior staircases made of rusted steel was planned. As we go up to the sky we have
a first taste of the views that will be at the studio. Half original roof is used as a terrace, half as a studio. While the limits in between melt with 11 meter sliding windows and sliding timber blinds.
The rest of smaller openings, strategically placed, create green leaves squares. The skin is made by Aquapanel boards outside and plasterboard inside, creating a air chamber to ensure thermal comfort and hide the monorail windows in their opened position. As sunscreen, the traditional timber blinds widely used in Mediterranean architecture but reinvented as sliding elements, combining tradition, contemporaneity and coherence with the rest of elements.
GRAFT has designed a new residential complex, called WAVE, on a former harbor along the Spree River in Berlin, Germany. Drawing inspiration from the waterfront site, the two L-shaped buildings are situated parallel to the river and facing one another, creating an inner courtyard and providing units with views of the river and “The Molecule Men,” the iconic sculpture by artist Jonathan Borofsky.
The sculptural expression of the facade references the flowing motion of water movements, and is created by projecting balconies and oriel windows beyond the building envelope. Along the waterfront, the architects opted to give the facade maximum glazing, giving the elevation an aesthetic of simplicity and the warmth of the southern sun.
Inside the volumes, apartment types of several shapes and sizes allow for a mixture of potential tenants, ranging from 1.5 room apartments of 27 square meters to 156 square meters units featuring five rooms. A mezzanine level offers apartments with private gardens, and on the top floor, penthouses measuring between 206 to 296 square meters feature private access to a roof garden. Most of the units have a balcony or oriel window to provide views to the water.
The “fifth surface” of the facade will made up of the rooftop containing gardens and lounge space. Together with the lush courtyard in the community center, the buildings will become a place of natural respite and a green oasis in the city.
Founding Partners: Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, Thomas Willemeit
Project Lead: Annette Finke
Project Team: Alexandra Tobescu, Andrea Perle, Anna Wittwer, Christine Huber, Clemens Hochreiter, Elena Suarez, Evgenia Dimopoulou, Maike Wienmeier, Matthias Rümmele, Sven Fuchs
From the architect. The project involves the organization of an apartment located in the attic of a newly built building with 5 floors. The attic space was to become an extension of the apartment located on the lower floor, which was no longer suitable to host family who over the years had passed from 2 to 4 people.
The idea is to turn this existing space in the new living, dining and family studies, in which a new toilet was also created. The new space becomes the new living area of the house while the existing flat situated on the lower level becomes the sleeping area.
The design of the furnishings identifies the hierarchies of the domestic space, defining the ritual moments of living. The detail of the elements defines the interior space, making recognizable the dwelling places that are put together by a visual relationship, which makes the space dinamic and at the same time hierarchized.
Following the success of last year’s virtual tour of Selgascano’s 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, Photographer Nikhilesh Haval of nikreations has shared with us his virtual tour of BIG’s 2016 Pavilion entry. Hosted this year on Google Street View, the tour allows you to move through and around the “unzipped wall” design, giving you the ability to perceive how sunlight interacts with the structure. Check out how visitors are using the pavilion as an escape from the sunny park or sipping on drinks ordered at the pavilion bar – and don’t forget to look up, where it’s easy to get lost in the sea of interlocking fiberglass bricks.
ArchDaily is looking for motivated architecture lovers to join our team of interns for Fall 2016! An ArchDaily internship is a great opportunity to learn about our site and get exposed to some of the latest and most interesting ideas shaping architecture today.
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From the architect. The accelerated growth of medellin during the last five decades produced an unbalanced conurbation, lacking the most elemental services of public infrastructure. The project of urban transformation for the city advocates to overcome those aforementioned unbalances with regards the development of transportation systems as metrocable which connects the most isolated zones of the territory, as well as with the construction of hospitals, schools, libraries, kinder gardens and parks.
Diagram
This is how medellin is transformed due to a city project that is supported on highly relevant actions. It is a public school which is part of a spatial model that includes renovation, environment protection, public space, and new mass transport network. Then the project is become in generator of different activities and promotes the interaction of people in less favoured areas. The power of its presence into the city is clearly related to different scales.
It is located in a zone that has suffered big changes trought time. Even so, the place preserves some specific features, because of the presence of forest to be protected. The mayor’s office of medellin along with the ministry of education proposes this new public school to be located in a zone where the socio economic conditions make life difficult for children and teenagers during primary and secondary education. Due to those reasons, a proposal is made for a new building that fosters an adequate academic development in all levels of knowledge.
The building operates as an urban referent associated to the environment protection as it is placed next to an important river inside the hidric net of the city, thus defining the border of the metropolitan park, which, due to its vegetal species and fauna, becomes a fundamental piece of the main ecological net of the city. The different spacial atmospheres foster the collaborative work and generate multiple possibilities for the development of outdoor activities. The project is created focused in two determinants: first, highlights the strong relation between geography and territory. Second, it uses pure forms which are taken into account in order to divide the program into three buildings, thus creating open spaces linked to the surroundings. The articulation of the volumetric composition puts in evidence a double scale relation: a territorial one that establishes visual links along with the landscape; and a local one, where the spaces produced between the volumes, generate high impact relations in the urban and school life. Inside the three buildings, there are 27 classrooms, sports zones, libraries, labs, administration, food court and auditorium. The systems of climate and solar control are developed through double glass surfaces and poli-carbonate elements that guarantee the efficiency in terms of light in all interior spaces.
The school is an urban referent that integrates space and pedagogy and which also promotes an educational program where learning is established as a game and an adventure. The challenges and goals are overcome through science and technological tools that allow students to access to a transformative and creative knowledge.
Richärd + Bauer’s Arabian Library in Scottsdale, Arizona, won an IIDA Metropolis Smart Environments Award in 2009 for its groundbreaking approach to both sustainability and community needs. The building’s form and rusted-steel cladding were inspired by slot canyons in the Arizona desert. Image Courtesy of Richärd + Bauer
The city hall of my current hometown, Scottsdale, Arizona, gives no hint of any sort of civic function to the boulevard on which it sits. You enter it from the parking lot in back. The only reason I have been there was as part of a team presenting our credentials in a design selection process. My other dealings with government have been online, via mail, or at suburban locations where I have gone to handle such matters as smog tests. I vote by mail.
The big push in American local, state, and federal government is to take everything possible online and off-site and to make whatever remains as minimal and anonymous as possible. The actual operations of government have long taken place in back rooms where politicians and bureaucrats have done the real work. Yet they were often encased in grand structures that gave us a sense of identity and pride in our government while also serving as open sites where we could encounter our civic agents and one another. As a result, we live with a heritage of civic monuments that proclaim our investment in deliberation and democracy, but we build very few, if any, such structures today. Instead, we are looking to get rid of whatever relics of such a history of civic architecture we can—the governor of Illinois would like to sell the James R. Thompson Center, designed by Helmut Jahn in 1982–85, and only the specificity of the grand classical edifices that predate that Postmodern monument prevents other politicians from trying the same. Civic buildings cost money to build and maintain, and their formal spaces sit empty most of the time.
Chicago’s James R. Thompson Center, designed by Helmut Jahn and completed in 1985. Governor Bruce Rauner announced plans last October to auction it off. Image Courtesy of Jessica Pierotti
The same is true of the services the government supplies. Post offices are closing at a rapid rate, as are schools in inner cities. Train stations that are now served by the semi-governmental Amtrak lines are often sheds next to the edifices built during the height of that sort of travel. If you are looking for the physical representation of what brings us together and what we all share, whether as a heritage or an ideal, whether as services or in care, you will have to work ever harder.
Even our grandest structures—namely, the bridges, dams, roads, and other transportation and infrastructure components that literally brought us together and serviced us all—are now the subject of rebuilding and repair, rather than of new construction. We are way behind on the maintenance of our road and water networks, so that has first priority. When we do build something new and on a vast scale, it is often excruciatingly bad or boring, not to mention absurdly expensive, such as the new Bay Bridge replacement in San Francisco or the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge in Boston. Much of the work also goes on where we cannot see it, whether in the new water tunnel and subways being built under Manhattan, or the Big Dig and the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement in Seattle.
Recently, the State Department has been trying to improve the ways in which the United States presents itself to the rest of the world. Under the leadership of the architect Casey Jones, it has been striving to mask the intense security demands on every foreign structure with good architecture. I was on the peer review committee for the embassy we are building in Mexico City to a design by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and I saw how difficult it is to make such structures into anything other than fortresses that contain processing centers for thousands of visa applications a day. Now this program is under attack from Republican congressmen who see nothing but waste and vulnerability.
If there is hope, it is in small structures. That same Scottsdale where there is no civic heart has commissioned a series of public libraries, each named after a different breed of horse. Our neighborhood has the Arabian (2007), designed by local firm Richärd + Bauer. A Cor-Ten steel snake, it draws you into a hidden courtyard with slanting reddish walls before letting you explore lofts where books and tables doze under soft light from clerestories. A nearby fitness center, designed by Weddle Gilmore Black Rock Studio and finished the same year, shares much of the library’s aesthetic and grandeur.
Branch libraries seem to have become the one area where there still is an investment not only in civic architecture but also in experimentation. David Adjaye’s two libraries in Washington, D.C., stand as examples of such good design, and you can find other examples by less well-known architects around the country. They are often a chance for local firms to make good design in a civic arena.
New York City, under former mayor Michael Bloomberg, embarked on a program of new libraries, police stations, and other improvements (the salt storage shed on Manhattan’s West Side, designed by Richard Dattner, has received a great deal of attention), and we can only hope that this boon of good, shared architecture will be continued by the less visionary current mayor.
What draws these moments of hope together is that they are all relatively small, and that they have very specific functions. Contrast the success of the salt shed with the turkey carcass of the $3.9 billion transit hub Santiago Calatrava finally managed to finish at Ground Zero and you can see the success of the modest and purposeful as opposed to the kinds of grand structures that become magnets for critics of government waste.
In 1996, the California Department of Transportation proposed a replacement of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge at a cost of just over $1 billion. By the time the replacement finally neared completion 17 years later, costs exceeded $6 billion. The project continues to require cash infusions for upkeep—this past May the oversight committee approved another $12 million to replace some rods at the base of a tower. Image Courtesy of Oleg Alexandrov
I would argue that this is as it should be, and we should focus our attention on the very specific elements and services government provides in a manner that invests money wisely and only when and where it is needed. That is not to say that the resulting architecture should be cheap and banal. What we must rescue at that small scale is exactly what draws us out of the everyday, away from what separates us, and toward a common purpose, place, and sense of community.
We must also understand that civic space has to embed itself both in existing buildings and in larger complexes that serve other functions. We have a long history of using schools to vote and shopping malls as locations for certain services, but now we must try to understand how to take those opportunities and use them to draw attention to and ennoble—I am not ashamed to use that word—civic architecture.
In Sacramento, a private developer who is creating a new residential neighborhood across the river from downtown commissioned landscape architect Jerry van Eyck to design the Barn, a torus-shaped event structure that has no particular function, but serves to focus the nascent community and provides space for parties or concerts, or just shade. Its instigator, Fulcrum Property design director Stephen Jaycox, sees it as a prototype for such structures that do for smaller neighborhoods what stadiums and museums do on a civic scale.
In an even more commercial sense, Apple works hard to make its stores have an appeal that goes beyond, but ultimately enhances, the products it sells (see the company’s new San Francisco flagship). If it can do so even in shopping malls, why should cities and agencies not be able to do likewise? People gather and linger in places like hospitals and clinics, which are dismal spaces on the whole; could we not enhance them with places of pride and hope?
I realize this is overly optimistic. There is no reason for civic entities to invest in such good places because it will not get politicians reelected or bureaucrats promoted. We need to be even more tactical. Perhaps civic architecture can be temporary. Pop-up election information booths, or tents where hot propositions or candidates can be discussed, would seem to fit within the tenor of the times. The German cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk has proposed pop-up domes to enhance democracy, and perhaps that is something we could use in this country as well. In the United Kingdom, the multidisciplinary team Assemblewon the Turner Prize last year at least in part for its temporary theaters and event spaces, which it often constructs with the neighbors and out of material already on the site. There are pop-up “parklets” in many cities now, but they are on the whole rogue events. Why not make them into sanctioned temporary amenities?
We do this already by encouraging various sorts of fairs and markets in public spaces. The Scottsdale city hall has a regular market, and around the country we are seeing a rebirth of such once-a-week places where people gather, drawn by good produce, but lingering for entertainment and perhaps even social engagement. Why not formalize these gatherings by adding political elements? And if the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival can commission the likes of Jimenez Lai to create temporary structures for its gathering, why can’t cities?
During this year’s Coachella, the arts and music festival in Indio, California, Jimenez Lai’s 52-foot-tall installation, the Tower of Twelve Stories, provided some much-needed shade as well as an iconic gathering spot for attendees. The fun shapes, stacked together on top of a 20-foot-tall steel base, lit up at night with LED strips, while 12 other light sources projected shapes and colors onto the entire structure. Image Courtesy of Jimenez Lai
Which brings us, finally, to the one part of our civic infrastructure that is improving almost everywhere: public space. With so much of our work and play now online, the desire to experience real places, whether they are parks or squares, with real people, is increasing. Bike lanes and bike share programs open cities up to a use that is more social and experiential than what we have when we cocoon ourselves in our cars. Social networks make it easier to find one another for whatever reason, whether it is music, sex, or protest, and thus crowds can form in an instant. We might be over flash-mob performances, but the idea will reappear in some form. Through public-private partnerships, most cities have leveraged the investment of retailers and restaurant owners, who benefit from lively public space, to upgrade our streets and squares in business improvement districts. Even in suburbs, shopping malls are turning outdoors, mixing public and private spaces.
The question is how to activate all these small moments of hope. I would argue that a task for architects and architecture schools should be to devise civic forms that make use of and energize public services and gatherings, then lift them into a realm where they make us aware of where and who we are in relation to one another and our surroundings. Classical architecture, with its colonnades and domes, did this once. We need a new version of such a collective form-making that is more open, more resonant with different cultures, and cheaper to make, and can even reuse existing structures and materials.
Whatever we do, we should not aspire to make grand new structures like our own city halls and state capitols. We should rather take what we have and imbue it with civic qualities. We should open up our office buildings and shopping malls, which will become redundant as we work and shop more and more online, to collective uses and make them new kinds of focal points.
For all that, I do miss the Hoover Dams and the state capitols we once built. I dream that one day we can once again believe in our collective destiny and the importance of deliberating that future enough to make a true civic architecture. Until then, we must take solace in the small, the temporary, the lively, and the strange, in whatever form it might take to draw us together.
Sig Nordal 