A B S E N C E

The NADAAA Design Studio

Harvest Home: Solar Decathlon

Sketching in Turkey

Experiences In Architecture

Lectures from our Summer Speaker Series:

Nader Tehrani
NADAAA

Mark Sexton
Krueck + Sexton

Rhett Russo
NJIT

Andrea Leers
Leers Weinzapfel Associates

Lyn Rice
Rice+Lipka Architects
 D E A N
L e t t e r f r o m
t h e D e a n

This edition of our Summer Institute for Architecture
Journal at the School of Architecture and Planning at
the Catholic University of America engages the theme
Absence to explore the conditions found between
things and to explore the possibilities of what could
come. Our students were given the opportunity
to engage with internationally-acclaimed architect
renowned for exemplary work, Nader Tehrani (NADAAA),
in the intimate setting of a design studio. We were
4
delighted to welcome a respected cadre of architects,
Mark Sexton, Andrea Leers, Lyn Rice, and Rhett Russo,
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
the latest update, wondering what the next trend
will be. In this contemporary landscape of highly
visual, articulated noise, it is worth considering
the loud silence of purposeful acts of making and
building. As architects and planners, we can search
for an other kind of place, one that relishes in the
hidden, the echoes, and the spaces of absence.
Randall Ott, AIA

Dean
to share their work framed via a lens of absence.

As architects, we work in the realm of making things

present: buildings, urban interventions, furniture.
This theme of absence presents an interesting
opportunity to consider what is missing and to use
architecture as a mechanism to reveal what is hidden.
Louis Kahn spoke of the space between silence and
light. Inspiration is the feeling of beginning as the
threshold where Silence and Light meet. Silence, the
unmeasurable desire to be, desire to express, the
source of new need, meets Light, the measurable,
giver of all presence, by law, the measure of things
already made, as a threshold which is inspiration,
the sanctuary of art, the Treasury of Shadow ...

One of the most exciting prospects within architecture

today is to consider how to construct spaces that
allow meaningful interactions to occur. We live in an
on-demand world where we can pull information to
us at will. We are constantly plugged in, looking for
D I R E C T O R
L e t t e r f r o m
t h e D i r e c t o r
Pairs of opposites, in partnership, set up the
condition of understanding one because of the
presence (or absence) of the other. Embedded in
the removal of something can be the heightened
sense of yearning for it. As architects and
designers, we create situations to amplify a set of
conditions to alter our perceptions. Absence can
also be considered as the space between silence
and light. In a world where information and data
are a click away and the visual cacophony can
be deafening, it is worthwhile to step outside
of that place in pursuit of another condition.
The 2013 Summer Institute for Architecture
studios and speaker series speculate on the notion
of absence. Through an intensive design studio
and workshops, students rigorously interrogated
the multiple ways to test the ideas of absence.
We asked the question if these ideas can serve
as an operative logic to amplify a circumstance
while altering or denying access to another? Or
is it that our access (visual or physical) is simply
rechoreographed via skillful manipulations of
tectonic, infrastructural, and organizational
strategies? How can we find the layers of
complexity in the seemingly simple juxtaposition of
opposites? Critical discussions of the theme played
out between all levels of students, distinguished
guest critics, faculty, and guest speakers.
The SIA has always been and remains a unique
experience. It offers the promise of an architectural
academic experience, rich in intensity, and
unparalleled to conventional practice. The SIA
presents students with the opportunity to expand
their understanding of broader ethical, social,
cultural, technological, and historical issues via focused
study of an architectural situation. The 2013 SIA continued
to build on the tradition and legacy of the Summer Institute
for Architecture at CUA. We were honored to host award-
winning architect Nader Tehrani, NADAAA, as our studio
guest critic, and to welcome an incredible roster of invited
speakers: Mark Sexton, Krueck+Sexton; Rhett Russo,
NJIT; Lyn Rice, Rice+Lipka; and Andrea Leers,
FAIA, Leers Weinzapfel Associates. Their collective
presence in the design studio and at our school raised
the intensity and caliber of discussion, engaging 5
students in the critical process of design thinking.
This journal brings together the work of the students, the
guest critic, and the speakers to present a snapshot of an
incredible experience. I am certain you will see the intensity,
energy, and enthusiasm on the part of all the participants
clearly evidenced in the range of work presented in this
publication. As you share in the reflections on the complex
landscapes of practice, theory, and building, consider this:
Ignasi de Sol-Morales refers to absence as not just a void
but as the space of the possible, of expectation. Come join us
as we seek to reveal the spaces of anticipation and promise.
Julie Ju-Youn Kim, RA AIA
Summer Institute for Architecture
Director,
 E D I T O R
L e t t e r f r o m
t h e E d i t o r

Taking a closer look into the Summer Institutes

theme of Absence, we looked at how to properly
show, through images and text, the full experience
of the summer here in the architecture building at
CUA. Like the theme, we found it appropriate that
the journal would be one of minimalism. We found
it fundamental that it be simple and straight to the
point, leaving room for further individual thought.

Absence is found from the void of what has been

created making for a more diverse space. In the
6
journal, we laid out the text thinking of the absent
space that would be created between the text and
the images, creating diverse spreads throughout the
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

journal. The thought of making the text sit on the

page, as elegantly as each image, was one of our
ways of highlighting the text and giving it importance.

If we had to give one importance over all others, it

would be to give each reader the full experience of
the summer. We did this by immersing the reader into
the transcription of every lecture that was held over
the course of the summer. Along with the lectures we
sprinkled in visual shots from student action and work
that was displayed over the course of the summer.

Less is always more, which goes perfectly with

the summers theme and our choice of a white
backdrop and soft grey focus of the text with simply
placed images dispersed throughout the journal.

We hope you enjoy the work and feel inspired

to become a part of what is done here at the
School of Architecture and Planning at The
Catholic University of America over the summer.

Ariadne Cerritelli
SIA Journal Editor

Journal Design: Ariadne Cerritelli + Amirali Ebadi

Journal Editor: Ariadne Cerritelli
 C O N T E N T S
T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

NADER TEHRANI P. 10

8
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

NADAAA STUDIO P. 50

RHETT RUSSO P. 64

HARVEST HOME P. 82

All Images in this Journal 2013 CUA School of Architecture + Planning, unless otherwise noted.
 P. 96 MARK SEXTON

P. 134 SKETCHING IN TURKEY

JOHN HEARNEYP. 152

KRISTEN WELLER_critic
ANDREA LEERS
9

ADDITION

P. 164 EXPERIENCES IN ARCHITECTURE

P. 170 LYN RICE

10
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

N A D A A A
N a d e r T e h r a n i
 03 July 2013
Crough Center for Architectural Studies, CUA
Washington DC.

Tonights lecture is kind of like a midterm critique, if

you like. It is about three schools of architecture, all
in various stages of design, implementation, and
use. Those of you who know me know that for over
twenty years I have been invested in building up the
relationship between the academy and practice in a
more robust way. Bringing the world into the school
but, more importantly, taking some of the speculative
work that we do in school to transform the industry as
it is, to transform practice, and to, certainly, not take
for granted the modus operandi that we have come
to expect and that has calcified the discipline at large.
12
So tonights lecture is not so much about the
relationship between practice and pedagogy, per
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

se, but it is the spaces of pedagogy itself. We could

articulate and cite many examples of schools of
architecture, but I use these three, really, as a kind of
didactic instrument. They become emblematic because
of the certain circumstances to which they appeal. On
the left the extraordinary school of architecture in So
Paulo: the idea that the space of architecture is, in
fact, a public space. It is the place where everything
happens and it is the cross roads of where all of the
disciplines converge. It is a particularly seductive image
for what we do as a discipline and a practice. I do
remember myself at RISD having to select my major
after the end of the first year, and not being sure if I
was going into painting, film, or architecture. At one
point I went to the architecture department, never
having been there before, and I noticed that while
the lobby was completely empty, there were people
huddled in the far corner trying to get into a door,
almost fighting to get in. I had no idea what was behind
that door, but I went in there. I could not see anything
because, obviously, everyone is taller than I am, and
as I smuggled my way into the crowd, there was just
a lecture. Why would people line up to see a lecture?
But there was such a thirst that, in fact, that was one
 13

(top) University of Sao Paulo Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism

Nelson Kon

(middle) Harvard Graduate School of Design Studio Trays

Ken Mccown

(bottom) Cornell Architecture, Art and Planning, Milstern Hall

Jake Rudin
 of the most instrumental moments that lead me to the
school of architecture. There was something about the
urgency about what was at stake... and that urgency
can be argued to still exist, though in other forms.

The middle is more contemporary, but by now a

historic piece of architecture from the 70s, Andrews,
and it is the GSD. It is a factory where everyone is
visible to everyone else, but on top of that, whereas
the normative factory floor is normally flat, this one
is tilted into a series of trays producing the condition
of a theater or auditorium, and the optics, and the
surveillance, and the spectacle that is part of the
production of architecture becomes amplified because
of this configuration. The idea of seeing and being seen
is really part of it all. The third one is actually a new
building that is an addition to the two buildings that
14
Cornell wanted to connect. All of you who followed
the competition know that two competitions were
dispensed with before arriving to this project by
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

Koolhaas. The brilliance is that he made an addition

that happens to be stronger than both of the existing
buildings deferring to them, respectfully, but also
overwhelming them strategically all at the same time.

Of these examples, the last is the only one where the

notion of architectural pedagogy has radically changed.
We are no long bound to our table with a mayline, we
walk around with our laptops. The studio is everywhere.
The studio is in the auditorium. The studio is in the
library. The studio is at Starbucks, where there is WiFi.
The studio is in the Fab Lab. So notions of the centrality
of the studio space have, in a way, centrifugally been
spread throughout campus, and yet the space of the
studio is still what defines the pedagogy of architecture.

Remember, design thinking is one of the only

disciplines where the professor and the students are
on a horizontal plane debating over drawings, and the
Socratic Method, in a way, becomes central in the way
in which we impart knowledge. It is not a professor
lecturing to an audience, it is not a one-way street; it
is more of a process and it is a debate. The discursive
nature of education is central to the process of learning.
 15

School of Architecture, Yale University, Records Concerning Events and Exhibits (RU 886)
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
Art & Architecture building, section perspective drawing by Paul Rudolph
 Meanwhile, the economy, processes of globalization,
and digital culture have completely altered the way
in which we learn, teach, and communicate within
the context of architecture. Those of you who were
educated in my era had two or three journals that we
looked at Opposition, Assemblage, among others.
Now we wake up every morning and we log in to
Archinect, Dezeen, Dezain, and a range of other sources
where content might be less deep, but its horizontality
of access makes the democratization of evident also
blurring the line between knowledge and information.
All of this, at one level, has made architecture more
accessible to many more fields, many more people,
people of different culture and classes, and, at the
same time, it has made the idea of having that space an
incredible luxury, something that most other countries
16
do not have. Because schools of architecture in other
cultures, for the most part, are places where you get
educated but you do not have a dedicated studio space.
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

The three schools I will be presenting tonight really

are a map of a single institution but in completely
different guises, with very different political backdrops,
and, as a result, very different circumstances, but they
begin to display a discipline in transition. I show here
the section of Rudolphs Yale School of Architecture.
It is, really, an amazing building, not so much for its
brutality but the way in which spaces of production,
spaces of presentation and debate, are integrated
together. But so too are the systems of the building
where issues of structure, illumination, and the
mechanics of the building are somehow all encrypted
and imbedded within each other. Certainly this will
become omnipresent in the buildings that I will show
you as this emerges as a major concern in my evolution.

Not having really built that many buildings and being

thrown into the mosh pit of practice, it has become
clear that the power of the architect has diminished
incrementally in the last 50-60 years with the onslaught
of specialization. Architects more and more are
being asked to design the skin, but not the building
design the lobby but not the building, design an
 17

(top) Hinman Research Building

urban network diagram- Georgia Tech campus

(bottom right) Hinman Research Building

historic image of exterior
 interior, design the layout but then not the finishes.
This has come as a result of these artificial evolutions
of sub-disciplines: landscape architecture, interiors,
architects, urban designers, and then, furthermore,
with the evolution of technologies, from computation
to building technologies, mechanical and structural
engineering. We have become further and further
more divorced from that thing that we know of as
the cohesive project of architecture. These three
projects are an attempt to reconcile that phenomenon
and, in turn, to re-appropriate certain disciplines
to bring them back to an arena for which we can
maintain not only control, but also responsibility.

The Hinman Building at Georgia Tech was really

something I inherited after I taught there. We went in
for the RFQ and actually won the competition, but the
18
existing building had much to offer. One of the classic
modern buildings protected by heritage status in the
United States. This was designed by Paul M. Heffernan
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and it was not a school of architecture. It was a

research institute with an amazing high bay structure
that you see looming in the background really, a
factory. We have witnessed many ways of approaching
Heritage buildings in the past. One classic example is
the way in which Scarpa, at Castelvecchio, adopted
techniques of layering to articulate the relationship
between the new and the old; he set up a contrast
to produce a dichotomy between the existing and
the new, in essence using contrast to pay homage to
history. We opted for a technique closer to the tactics
of Judo: pulling your opponent with their force, and by
doing so you absorb their power for your own might.

We realized that this is a building that has a rather

unique nature. A composite structure composed of
brick, concrete, steel, and wood. It is of a generation
of buildings around the 1920s. Very few of these types
of buildings were built. Located at the heart of Georgia
Tech, it is part of an urban network and the building
really becomes a completion, if you like, of a variety of
architecture buildings that share a quad in between and
then divide up the institutions of the school amongst the
various buildings. The library is on one side, the shop on
 19

(top) Hinman Research Building, relationships of required program

(bottom) Hinman Research Building, rethinking the use and arrangement of desks to support new ways of working
 the other side, the auditorium yet another, and then,
in our building, the high bay. But also it becomes an
urban connection between various quads and courts.

We are also reminded that the studio of today has

to negotiate between a body of people that require
different kinds of intellectual support, and that
intellectual support is emotional, it is infrastructural, it
is intellectual, and it is cultural. The studio space, if you
are truly going to spend 24 hours there (I would expect
no less) has to have the necessary infrastructure like
shops, printers, wired connections, and so forth. It
needs to have research libraries, laboratories, and
things that, in fact, we often did not have, but in order
to produce new forms of knowledge you need those
resources. Culture, lectures, exhibitions, symposiums,
and other programs that invigorate the program, and
20
the whatever, is the caf, the movies, and all of
those other things that architecture through its own
instruments cannot do. Engaging popular culture out
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there and beginning to bring all of these things back

into the school. We are also, in a way, acknowledging
the fact that the desk on which you work [no longer
requires] the mayline, it is not the drafting board.
It has at least a computer, sometimes two. You still
need to build models. The way you used to roll up
drawings is no longer relevant, so storing them the
way we used to is no longer relevant either; a lot of
them remain digitally bounded or you can store them
in lockers. The economic ecology of the dimension of
the desk in relationship to storage and other elements
may be revised. Why? Because the most expensive
aspect of architectural education is space itself
and that is why we are almost always subsidized.

The question of Georgia Tech really became what to

do with that high bay. The truth was that they needed
a lot more programs and so we knew, somehow or
other, other activities would end up happening in
there. This is, of course, London Tate Gallery. The
same space interpreted in many different artists as
public space, as a city, as a universe, but underlining
the idea that this colossal space has this ability to be
read at multiple scales. In fact, programmatically, at
 21

Jonathan Hillyer
 one moment of the project we needed to insert an
entirely new building within the space. The budget
slashes and the value engineering, arguably, did
a good deed for the project. The big discovery we
made was that with the crane, with the trusses,
with the roof, the huge payback we got from it was
the notion, was the idea that you can hang the
project in there, instead of building from ground up.
By hanging the project you get horizontal and lateral
freedom, meaning the floor is for you to inhabit. You
can move all the desks and you can use it in many
ways. You can use it as a factory floor to build a forty-
foot installation; you can have the Beaux Arts Ball
there; you can have a cinema there; you can arrange
your studio desks any way you like, and, in fact, all
four of these have already been achieved in the last
22
two years now. But that means that everything needs
to be hung from above. And so we did. We hung our
project, essentially, from its ceiling, embedding new
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
structure up there but, essentially, repurposing its
most key element, which is the crane. Immobilizing
it, but instead giving it a new life. The ground, then,
is very simple. It is really a flexible surface. In fact,
we raised it so it is completely wired and connected,
but it can become anything. The most important
protagonist, of course, is the roof with trusses and
the track for the crane, and the most important
insertion in there is what we call The Crib. It is really
a hanging crib that only touches the floor, or a stair
rather, in one spot. A staircase that delicately drops
on the ground and, in a way, completes an urban
circuit between the second and the third floor, both
of which are linked to the campus, which is on the
side of a hill. The ground floors of this building are
at one, two, and three floors in the back at level
one, in the side at level two, and in the front at
level three. This crib is activating that promenade.
On the south wing there is a suspended spiral
stair, which gives a short cut between level two
and three and activated the southern wing. And
then finally the lights are suspended low so they
illuminate the drafting hall, but then are pulled up
for those moments when you have huge installations
or movies being shown in the overall space.
The lateral flexibility that this gives the architecture
school means that then this space of production is
connected to the exhibition spaces. It is connected
to the Fab Lab, it is connected to the computer lab,
the PhD spaces, and all of the specializations that can
impact the MArch program. Part of this has to do with
how we begin to interpret intellectual communities.
Why is it that we would separate the undergrad from
the grad program? Why would we separate the PhDs
from the grad program? This way puts everyone at
one level, forcing them to begin to teach each other,
learn from each other, and impact each others
thinking. The project, then, is insistent about the
notion of the hung. Even the door that separates the
exhibit space from the main hall is a kind of guillotine
wall that is suspended down over thirty feet long
that articulates the space. Everything in this project
is a piece of infrastructure and the architecture is
exposed engineering. It is very rough and tough.
It is designed for abuse and, most importantly,
for appropriation by the students themselves.
The spiral stair is an off the shelf piece held aloft by
a piece of millwork on the ground that serves as a
bench next to the crit area, but then the mesh acts as
a kind of container, a kind of shrink wrapped element
that gives it a figure that is then suspended from the
truss. The Crib you can see on the sides has
lateral bracing by paper clip-like steel struts, linking it
to the side walls. Very thin cables keep it up and the
bows of the t-beams underneath, in a way, articulate
the wrap that takes the forces back up to the I-beams
and then transfers them back to the cranes. The
overall space then is a collection of artifacts that
are suspended in the space. You can see the lights
here are lowered in relationship to the desks. Part
of the delicacy of this project is also the relationship
between the rough infrastructural, the industrial, and
the delicacy of the wire mesh, which is really like a
sartorial craft. On one hand it is an industrial product.
On the other hand it has a sensual quality due to
its lacy and ephemeral intricacysomething that, in
 23

(top) Hinman Research Building, hanging program and circulation elements, flexible ground

(bottom) Hinman Research Building, The Crib

 fact, big construction thugs were sowing together for
quite a few days and really did a beautiful job. It, for
the most part, is very transparent but then acquires
this kind of opacity in certain lighting conditions.
Opportunistically, we resurrected and restored the sign
that was for the original building that says research.
The only thing that we did was polish the ARCH to
indicate its transformation and transition, from not only
a school of research, but research in architecture.

Coinciding with the winning of that project, we entered

two other competitions. We got lucky I would say, and
we actually won two competitions at the same time.
One of them was the Melbourne School of Architecture.
The Melbourne School of Architecture is really in the
center of the campus adjacent to what is called the
Concrete Lawn. One could not be in a better location,
24
networked by circulation throughout the campus, and
at a critical moment in the competition Tom Kvan, the
dean, articulated the brief in a variety of ways, citing
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

the way in which architecture has changed. First and

foremost he articulated one point: Melbourne Uni has
always been in a kind of subtle competition with RMIT
with RMIT being the design school and Melbourne
Uni being the school of research. Very much like
Harvard and MIT, they went head to head for years
but he wanted to transform Melbourne Uni while also
expanding its design reputationand that begins with
a reevaluation of what it means to introduce design
studios as the central space to the school. I will go back
to that later because it is also the crisis of the project.

He wanted a school of architecture to exemplify the

discipline. A building that serves as a pedagogical device
for an audience of over 2000 students. 2000 students
effectively means 2000 critics 2000 knowledgeable
people of your craft and medium. And that does not
even include the faculty and others within the culture
of schools of architecture who are all are exemplary
thinkers in your arena. He also wanted to challenge the
notion of disciplinary segregation. Not only does he want
to bring together landscape, architecture, urbanism,
and planning, but much more. Bring construction
industry into the building, bring anthropology and
 25

(left) The Crib under construction Jonathan Hillyer

(right) Chandelier Nader Tehrani

 sociology there, bring material sciences into there, bring
engineering into there. This school of architecture is to
become the nexus of all of the ways in which we begin
to think of the built environment, and urbanistically
he wanted the building to absorb them like a sponge.

One of the key site strategies was to penetrate the

building as much as possible. In this case, diagonally
connecting the Lizzy Murdoch Building to my right
and the Concrete Lawn to the left and trying to bring
all those networks through the buildingto make it
more public, visible, and porous. This is a building in
the round; it has to have public spaces from all sides.
Masson Road, to the south, is the main road that
comes into campus and produces the first vision of this
building laterally and frontally as you begin to get to
the concrete lawn on the opposing end. The Elizabeth
26
Murdoch Building, that is mother of Rupert, is no longer
a backspace to the building. A dignified faade produces
a new court that offers the initial penetration into the
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

building from the east towards the west. The buildings

Piano Nobile, which is a public area hovering one level
over the street cascades down a series of bleachers,
linking the building back to Swanston. The services of
the building are then brought in by the northern street
and underneath a canopy that then links to the Fab
Lab, which has its own production court to the north.
And then finally, of course, there is the Concrete Lawn,
the main faade of the building. The main front of the
building connects to the student center right opposing
it. This is where everything of the campus comes
together and so this building on the round is kind of
a mass building it is deep, it is wide, it is broad, and
it is the only way to fit all of that programming there.

Composed of a series of courts, the building really has to

void itself with a new courtyard, in this case an interior
courtyard that becomes the hub of all design activity.
The faade of the building then mirrors an organization
on the inside with a monumental hall within certain
attributes begin to resonate and begin to take certain
characteristics within the interior. Of those pieces
three are remarkable: a floating ground that sponsors
a classroom; a ceiling, which is a structural coffering
 27

Hinman Research Building, The Crib section

 that absorbs day lighting functions and the visiting
critic studio suspended upside down; and the faade
on the west side called the Joseph Reed faade, which
was the one heritage piece that had to remain on site
to the left. Now the irony in this was that the Joseph
Reed faade is a beautiful piece of Neoclassicism that
was brought to the site some 40-50 years ago from
downtown Melbourne. In other words, it never had a
function on site as such; it was artificially brought there.
A building was put behind it, which never respected
the floor to window relationships, and this became
an opportunity to create a synthetic and meaningful
relationship between the inside of the building and the
concrete lawn for the first time. And so, this section
of the building then divides the lower floors. These
are the auditorium and the conference centers and
not just for the school of architecture, they are for
28
the entire school at large. The Piano Noble divides the
public realm, the library, the Fab Lab, and all of those
things that are part of the productive life of the campus
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

to that upper terrace, which is the hall of activities.

Here is the crisis. After all of the focus groups, after all
of the meetings, after all of the good intentions that
this would become a design school, we were unable
to house even one of the students within the studio
spaces. In other words, all of the studio spaces are not
dedicated, but merely scheduled classrooms. They are
scheduled from 9am-1pm, and another session starts
at 2pm-6pm, and another one starts at 6pm-10pm,
and students are constantly coming in and out of the
building, but they do not have their own desks. So the
question was where do you house all of these students
and how do you make them part of the culture of
the building? How do you make this building 24/7?
Being a mat building it meant that the donut on the
outside had to house all of the conference rooms, all
of the offices, all of the classrooms, which meant that
atrium that conventionally is a space of circulations
could possibly be widened in order to be programmed
in relationship to furnishings and programs that can
foster the kind of infrastructure for design activity.

The Piano Nobile that I refer to is this undulating

 29

Jonathan Hillyer
 ground that leaks out of the building. It is figurative;
it invites you in but it also brings the interior out.
It is a landscape piece in and of itself and it is a
kind of extended threshold into the building. The
ground is broken up into pieces of modular piece
and then those pieces are built up. The building up
of those modules are lockers. They are lockers for
those people that would otherwise not have desks,
but could get occupied all over the building. These
lockers are everywhere, not just here. In this case,
it is an object that houses a classroom underneath
it by bleachers, an open classroom above it, and
becomes one of the iconic pieces of this interior as
it occupies the public space of the atrium. Looking
up you begin to see the structural roof all made out
of plywood. There is a whole narrative about using
natural resources to build the building. In fact, the
30
formwork of the building is all cross-laminated
plywood that does not get replaced. It becomes part
of the conditions of construction as screws are taped
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into it and concrete is poured onto it, reinforcing it.
The formwork becomes part of the permanent
part of the building for this six-story structure. The
structural roof is a deep-coffered system that brings
in southern light, which for them is northern light,
indirect light. And this structural system sponsors,
much like Georgia Tech, the emergence of a deep
structural condition that transforms from a monolithic
structure to a veneer condition, as it suspends
down to support the visiting critic studio spaces
at the bottom. In other words, a kind of gradient
condition where thick laminated lumber at the top
essentially establishes a condition of veneers by the
time it arrives to the bottom and does not touch the
ground. The coffering at the bottom, then, is a kind
of acoustical receptacle that creates a helmet over
a control space undermined that within it recesses
housing, dividing the sprinkler systems and so forth.
The circulation system, then, is what we call the
Y-stair. It is the monumental system within the space
that enables you to go in both directions any time
crossing over, back and forth, engaging the atrium,
and activating its perimeter both north and south.
The plan is very straightforward, but the circulation
of the atrium as you go around it is widened so that
they become the spaces of occupation. In fact, the
furniture is not all moving, only some of it is. The
other furniture are inscribed, imbedded, and become
part of the permanent fabric, of the very same mesh
that we used in Georgia Tech, to give figure to the
program. As you begin to see the edges of the atrium,
all of the terraces have spaces of production. On the
first floor, of course, the Piano Nobile is all open and
huge lectures and alumni events and all sorts of things
will happen there. On the second floor, collaborative
tables for small seminar groups, work sessions,
collaborative projects, and model making happen on
that level with crit walls 10 to 15 feet away. One level
above that are deep shelves where laptops, stools,
and so forth will articulate the edge right outside of
the studio. So before and after you get into studio
you have your own space of production, again, in
the context of the widened corridor, and finally on
the next level you get benches for reading and small
activity for pin up space where pinups will happen.
There will be mobile chairs in the context of these
benches also. So in a way the furniture becomes,
not a kind of FF&E amendment to the project, it
becomes part of the main infrastructure to the piece.
Going then from the interior skin to the outside, it is a
really raw and brutal piece of architecture. A concrete
frame exposes itself on the southern elevation. A
scrim that conceals the building and moderates it for
the eastern, northern, and western light, and then of
course the woods system, which is structural, that is the
structure, which suspends down and begins to stack
up within the building. These three systems articulate
the way in which we begin to think of the tectonics,
which not only articulate its manner of construction
but its thermal behaviors and energy performance.
The concrete lawn is a special place. Not only
because of its public nature but many of its programs
are brought to that edge and then the Joseph Reed
faade, which has been inactive for almost fifty years,
 31

University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, urban courtyard diagram
 begins to be rearticulated, and circulated within, and
its windows once again become active. Many of the
contestants of the competition demolished that or
moved it to another site. We took a risk by keeping
it there, but, in fact, it became a significant sticking
point in the sense that we were aggressive about
acknowledging it for exactly what it was absolutely
artificial but also an exemplary piece of architecture.
That is not that unique to the School of Architecture. In
fact, they have many other archeological pieces that are
to be incorporated into the building. There are pieces
of sculpture, there are models, there are paintings,
and there is even a Japanese room, which is a full-scale
conference room. So in fact, the quirks of archeology
are all over the building, but the Joseph Reed faade
is arguably the most important and establishes a kind
of institutional presence within the broader campus.
32
The interior begins to exert itself into the campus,
opening its windows and essentially animating the
building after many years. The classical orders are
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articulately built. We had to insert a new structural

system behind to support it. We had to delineate the
location of the windows carefully on the inside and
use them as a guide for re-penetrating them and most
importantly erecting out of that faade new spaces,
in this case a lounge and a crit space that reconnects
back into the building. This faade too, just like the
ground and the structural roof, becomes a sponsor
for those things that become part of the pedagogical
environment of this new School of Architecture.

This brings us then to Toronto, which departs

significantly from the previous two projects. It has
combined all of the challenges and the opportunities
of the previous two schools within a very ambitious
project, which is essentially double the size and
the mission that actually took place in the original
competition. The original competition was not on
Spadina Circle, that circle that you see at the center
of the screen. It was an existing architecture building
at 230 Collar Street and it comprised of adding a
couple floors on top of the existing building and then
a new skin around it for energy conservation. But
with clever mobilization of funds, opportunities, and
 33

University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, section perspective

 an expansion of the undergraduate program, the new
Dean Richard Sommers was able to reserve this site
for a very ambitious project. A site that used to be on
the margins of Toronto is now at its center but also to
find the boundary between the institutional hub of the
university of Toronto, that you see on the right, and the
neighborhoods that support it and become part of its
community to the left. Spadina running north south
is one of the major civic axes of the city that connect
it back to the lake. You can see here in this animation
some of the major arteries that connect down to the
lake with the Spadina Circle being the main one. The
southern elevation of that building is complete but the
northern part of the building needs a face, an identity,
and the new school of architecture will become
that opportunity using the landscape as a mediator
between the existing conditions and the newly
34
proposed conditions. In fact, the site has gone through
many iterations it has been a monastery, it has been
a hospital, it has been an art school, but never has it
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been complete. This is the one opportunity to integrate

the relationship of the building, the campus, the
community, and the urban condition of Spadina Circle.

What is also important to recognize is that there are

a lot of buildings that have been built over time in its
backyard becoming part of its heritage, though they
are not of any value. With great debate we were able
to purify the building in the south in order to be able
to instigate an evolution of the circle by breaking some
rules ourselves. Taking the U conditions that ended
two pavilions and in essence completes the building,
wrap the building, and treat the new building not so
much as a new building but a completion of a type. By
doing that we get to provide the framework for a north
faade, if you like northern light. This is the perfect light
for studio space within which a new infrastructure has
to be placed (bathrooms, elevators, cores, etc.) that, in
a way, articulates the circulation space that needs to
go around. Within this gets nested the single darkest
space in the building which is the multipurpose hall,
the space that we are in, except, in a way, can function
as three or four lecture halls and a kind of multi-value
room. And in relationship to the site of the city, one of
 35

University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning

structural coffered ceiling and hanging studio
 the huge challenges was how to deal with an existing
easement that made it impossible to reach out and
build on to its edges. But with the series of aggressive
endowments there is the possibility of expanding
the building in the form of a landscape with a new
gallery, an extension for a Fab Lab, a city research
institute, a research center. All of these echo, in a
way, the pavilions that already exist on the building
articulating the edges, the corners, the south, the
east, and of course the entry into the campus,
reminding ourselves that the campus for the most
part is on the east so there is a kind of eastern bias
that comes into the building, through the building
to the west and reorients to the north and south.
In other words, if the north and the south are these
symbolic axes of this project, the everyday quotidian
active axes are the east and west, but these transition
36
in the north south in two ways. In the north, they
go up a set of bleachers, which is a crit space that
takes you up to the studio space looking up northern
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Spadina. But on the ground level, through the
multipurpose hall and through the southern wing, is
a terrace, a prospect that for the first time,reactivates
this building and looks down at the lake.
In essence, we restore the existing building, but
more importantly we develop a new terrace on
top of a cistern, as well as bike storage, which
infrastructurally refurbishes the site and then
provide this tray over which on a daily basis casual
activities happen on warmer weather but then other
public function, alumni events and so forth, begins
to articulate that edge. This is an important aspect
given that Canada tends to get cold. The street, as
we call it, is at the heart of this project, and it is a
street that penetrates north and south; if you like, in
forced perspectives, articulating all of its edges, not
only with programs beyond but lockers that frame
the space. The northern view is then punctuated by
a series of pavilions that are part of the landscape
that then connect you back into the building. Here
you can see the eastern counterpart to the west
and the eastern plaza populated also by an oak tree,
which is the symbol of the school, bringing you on
an axis into the school with a gallery that opens out
onto the plaza. The street, then, is really the core of
the urban experience of the school, the center of
which is a large oculus that brings light all the way
to the core of the building from northern Spadina
and symbolically connects you back through the Fab
Lab onto the north. On this street is everything. It is
everything that is public, that is part of the school
life of the building, the lounge, the caf, the Fab Lab,
the auditorium, the photo studio, the IT, the printing,
all of those things that are shared collectively. And
opposing the window that looks north on Spadina
there is the multipurpose hall. This multipurpose
hall, in a sense, is the form of the school but it
is not the black box that we are used to seeing.
All of the spaces of the school from the old and the
new, the undergraduate lounge to the right, the crit
space connecting to the studio to the north, smaller
classrooms to the south, and the connection back
to the old Spadina building, all of these penetrate
the space. In other words, this space is activated
by all of the activities of the school. On any given
day there are not lectures happening in there but
other activities such that these other conditions of
the building are constantly activating that center. A
key spot, then, is this bleacher system, a kind of crit
space, a lounge, or also the space that when you get
the big lecture series and if there is an overflow you
get to have a screen here where the overflow gang
gets to be participant to the lecture without actually
being inside there. The huge thirty-five foot long
wall slides inside in front of this opening in order to
do pinups for other events. The connection is then
from those bleachers down into the auditorium and
then back through. The interior of the auditorium
is actually a very economical corrugated acoustic
panel behind which there is LED, so it is a glowing
box on the interior. The darkest space of the project,
essentially, gets northern and southern light as we
smuggle all of those clerestories and oculi into the
space. And then finally, the flexibility of this hall.
What was considered as a single room is divisible
by three or four with many different configurations
 37

University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture Building and Plannning

terraces as spaces of production
 available to it. Most importantly the street, then, has
somewhat controlled connection into the studios,
going up a monumental flight of stairs, looking into the
auditorium, up the bleachers, and finally the pay back
comes in the form of a view towards Spadina where
all of this northern light is drawn into the space. The
building up of the landscape is very much part of the
foreground of this project. Using some of the natural
flora and weeds of the space; an articulation of the
exterior circumferential, the pavilions that are semi-
embedded into the foreground; and finally the northern
faade which houses, essentially, all of the studio
spaces articulate the northern front. Two different
approaches have been taken for the undergrad and the
graduate program. In the undergraduate program, no
one gets a dedicated space. Everybody has hot spaces
so the entire planning is gagged by kinetic elements,
38
screens that move, walls that move, curtains that
move, everything that reconfigures space constantly
with the critic being a central part of their pedagogy.
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On the upper spaces is the graduate program with both

of these penetrating each other because in section
they go up and down in relationship to each other and
the PhD program is between the two. The graduate
program does have dedicated spaces and there is
this ground hall that essentially brings the promise
of work, natural life, natural day light, a coordination
of the hydrology, and all of the integrated systems
into the space, and I will explain that in a second.

One of the challenges of the space was to stop the

structural system, in the most economic sense, at the
junction of the second and third floor and do a large-
scale truss above. That was hard because trusses are big,
they are heavy, and they are expensive. But we figured
out, based on the model of the firth and forth bridge,
that using the proposed cores we could cantilever two
triangles, essentially like the firth and forth bridge,
and basically hold the keystone, the in-between, in
another skylight that brings southern light in there.
So bring a combination of northern and southern
light into this space, and the chasm in the middle is
really the chasm that brings light into the auditorium.
 39

University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning

exploded diagram with hanging studio, coffered ceiling, Y-stair, Joseph Reed facade
 The project is then brought together in a combination seductive idea, of course, but it works out differently
of strategies all that brings synthesis to the project as it engages the different processes of the building
as not only a design idea but an ecological idea. The industry. It is one of those ways in which the narrative
amount of energy we use by renovating the building of the building goes full circle and begins to give
and bringing a population to it. Adapting it to green reason to the building, not only from a special, formal
roof systems. This animation really talks about the point of view, but from a material point of view where
natural day lighting, the structural system, the water the buildings sustainability is part of that narrative.
hydrology, and the control of the site, all essentially
become an index of how the image of the building
begins to resonate and project itself on the east and
west elevations. The performance of the building
and its flexibility for natural ventilation is articulated
here. The displacement ventilation operates within
a similar sense. Natural and artificial day lighting is
needed, high lighting as well as desk lighting. All of
the storm water harvesting is then collected and
brought down two drains, one on the east and one
40
on the west. You can see the large scuppers that are
punctuated in this video coming down through the
crack of the entry, and all of that, in turn, is then
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harvested in a cistern that is on the southern portion

of the site. Essentially, the argument of the building is
that for what seems to be a very economic situation.

We now had to find ways in which the environmental

systems of the building, the programmatic strategy
of the building, the structural systems, the hydrology,
all come to a form of synthesis in a minimal structure
that, in a way, defines the ethos of this new school of
architecture. This is in progress, so this has, in fact,
not completely been theorized by myself. We are in
the middle of drawing this. For instance, looking at
tectonic systems. We are trying to find the largest
precast panel that can then span from floor to floor
and between windows on the east and west that are
Nader Tehrani the Principal of NADAAA, a practice dedicated to the
advancement of design innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration,
and an intensive dialogue with the construction industry. He is also
a Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT.
Tehrani received a B.F.A. and a B.Arch from the Rhode Island School of Design
(1985, 1986), and continued his studies at the Architectural Association Post-
Graduate program in History and Theory. Upon his return to The United States,
Tehrani received a M.A.U.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Design
(1991). Tehrani has also taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rhode
Island School of Design, Georgia Institute of Technology where he served
as the Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design,
and University of Toronto as the Frank O. Gehry International Visiting Chair.

really just slits minimizing the amount of light that
gets in there from those areas and loss of energy as a
consequence. And then we are reminded also that in
the demolition of all of the brick that is in its backyard,
there is the possibility of recasting that brick with large
scale precast within those blocks and, essentially,
basically never taking the existing resources of the
site away. They get demolished, reorganized, and
then redistributed onto the building itself. It is a
As the principal and founder of Office dA, Tehranis work has been recognized
with notable awards, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award
in Architecture (2007), the United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture
and Design (2007), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in
Architecture (2002). Having won the commissions of three schools of architecture,
Tehrani has completed the Hinman Research Building at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, and is currently working on completion of the Faculty of Architecture,
Building, and Planning at the University of Melbourne, and the Daniels
Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
NADAAA would like to acknowledge the central role of both Lord Aeck & Sargent and
John Wardle Architects as collaborating architects for the Hinman Research Building
and the University of Melbourne, respectively, for their input on the two projects.
 41

University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

Spadina Circle with connection through site
 42
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 43

University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

interior street
44
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University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

section perspective
 45

University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

multipurpose hall surrounded by studios, classrooms, smaller lecture rooms
46
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University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

lecture spaces connected to studios
 47

University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design

studio space with large scale truss system above
48
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University of Melbourne Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning

northwest view with Joseph Reed facade
50
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NADAAA STUDIO
Pompidou Center. Paris, France. 1977. Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, and Gianfranco Franchini

S u m m e r 2 0 1 3
Interrogating Absence
Center for Interfaith Global Outreach at CUA

Instructors
Nader Tehrani
Julian Palacio

Students
John Abowd
Vivian Bayles
Alvaro Colato
Joseph Darling
Ademar Do Nacimiento
Rayan Hakeem
Nareg Khachadorian
Jake Morgan
Joseph OConnor
Sarah Rinehart
Complexity must be constant in architecture.
It must correspond in form and function.
Complexity of program alone breeds a formalism
of false simplicity; complexity of expression
alone tends toward formalism of multiplicity
an over-simplification rather than a simplicity on
the one handa mere picturesqueness rather
than complexity on the other. We no longer
argue over the primary of form or function; we
cannot ignore their interdependence, however.
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 1966
 P R E M I S
In his 1926 publication Les cinq points dune
architecture nouvelle, Le Corbusier enunciated
what were to become the guiding principles of
the modern movement in architecture. Of those,
the liberation of both floor plan and faade from
the regime of the structure arguably had the
widest impact in the development of a new formal
vocabulary in the discipline. The autonomy of the
plan and the faade allowed for the structure to be
revealed, portraying the ideals of the esthtique de
lingnieur while displacing the synthetic capacity
that architecture had embodied until then; in other
words, the objectification of the structural system
meant that its logic was no longer necessarily
registered in the formal expression of a building.
52
This lineage was carried forward and augmented even
further by the High Tech movement that emerged in
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E
Contrary to both of these positions, the studio will
explore a more tactical engagement with building
systems (i.e. fire safety systems, MEP, daylighting, and
structure) by pursuing an opportunistic approach to
their integration into the design process. Instead of
simply muting them or fetishizing their existence, we
will relentlessly embrace their instrumental potential
to achieve new formal vocabularies and organizational
effects, while we also investigate strategies that can
reinvigorate architecture by registering the tensions
that exist when the logic of these systems meets
programmatic, spatial, and material constrains.
P R O J E C T
According to the United Nations, the advancement
of multi-faith dialogue and religious understanding is
one of the most critical issues that we face today as
a globalized society. The election last March of Pope

1970s. The Pompidou Center in Paris, designed by
Franchini, Piano, and Rogers, is perhaps the most
illustrative example of that decade. At the Pompidou,
not only the structure is exposed, but also all the
other sorts of building systems in an interwoven
arrangement of ventilation stacks, pipes, stairs
etc. However, the plan and section of the building,
remained completely unaffected by the complexity
of these systems. These systems are, in a way,
absent from the act of spatial or formal invention.
During the 1990s, the stripped-down architecture of
the so called minimalism approached the problem of
integration using reductive strategies in a painstaking
design process to create a homogeneous and mute
space, concealing any evidence of the existence of
building systems in favor of a larger architecture
idea, an ironic position if we consider that typically
more than 50% of the final cost of construction
of a standard building goes precisely into these
systems. In these instances, we witness a paradoxical
situation in which most of the resources are
invested in things that are absent from the apparent
architecture, but that in actuality are at its core.
Francis I has been perceived by many as a clear sign
of the Catholic Churchs commitment to engage in
building warmer relations among peoples of different
faiths and beliefs. Indeed, on April 9th, the Secretary-
General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, visited
the Vatican to discuss strategies to reduce poverty and
advance economic development, and expressed that
he was heartened by the Popes commitment to build
interfaith dialogue and by his outreach to Muslim
and Jewish communities to deepen understanding
and promote tolerance, inclusion, and peace.
The Catholic University of America, established in
1887 as a graduate and research center by Pope
Leo XIII, is well-posed to lead this effort. The Center
for Interfaith Global Outreach (CIGO) at CUA will
be a new institution dedicated to inter-religious
teaching and scholarship. It will be located on the
southern edge of CUAs lower main campus on an
empty site, which is currently used as a parking lot,
between Father OConnell Hall and Maloney Hall.
At the scale of the city, the building must contribute
to consolidate a formal edge along Michigan Avenue,
helping to establish a more prominent presence
for the University within the neighborhood. At
the same time, the building will serve as a gate
to the campus, negotiating visual and spatial
connections to Crough Center and the Mullen Library.

The Catholic University of America - Campus Master Plan, April 2012, p. 80

53
 54
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 Joseph Darling is a May 2014 graduate from the Master
of Architecture program at the Catholic University of
America, School of Architecture and Planning. With his
concentration in Emerging Technologies and Media, Joseph

Joseph Darling employs the use of parametric and other digital tools to
assist in his dynamic design and fabrication processes.

Born and raised in India, Vivian Bayles completed her

undergraduate studies at The Catholic University of America
with distinction in 2010. In pursuit of becoming a professional
Architect, she continued her academic career in 2013 at The
Catholic University of America where she finished a Master
of Architecture in one year. In this studio she was able to 55

reflect on the notion of how simplicity and complexity can be

Vivian Bayles viewed side by side through careful manipulation of volumes.
Sarah Rinehart received her Master of Architecture from The
Catholic University of America in May 2014. Her thesis project
titled, Betwixt and Between: An Architecture of Liminality
was selected to present at superjury with commendations
from her committee. Before completing her M.Arch at CUA,
she studied for two years at the Tulane School of Architecture
where she participated in a design-build studio that received
a 2011 AIA Award for Interior Architecture. She credits much
of her design sensibility to her academic travels abroad in

Sarah Rinehart Rome, Vienna, Munich, and Berlin. She currently resides in
Washington, DC and is a project designer at WDG Architecture.

Jake Morgan Jake Morgan is a candidate for a Master of Architecture, class of

2015. He holds a B.A. in Economics and has worked in construction
before pursuing architecture. His hometown is Lexington, Virginia.
 Proposed as an independent addition to the
campus of The Catholic University of America,
the Center for Interfaith Global Outreach is a
forum for learning, practicing, and deliveration
of various faiths. In the form of a jewel sprouting
from the landscape, CIGO incorporates
strategies for creating flexible prayer spaces
in the upper volume that can grow/shrink
accordingly. Below the prayer hall is a large
auditorium fit for deliberation and education.

56
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Joseph Darling
The subterranean levels include a cafe,
library, and various support spaces. Finally,
its key placement and sitework make
it the long needed gateway to campus.

57
 Located on campus at The Catholic University
of America, the cultural center is designed
to incorporate both spiritual and academic
programs. Serving as a prominent street
frontage along Michigan Avenue, the academic
volume responds to the campus grounds. The
spiritual volume is slightly oriented north east
to face Mecca in order to create a Qibla Wall.
The inspiration for the design of this center
comes from the First Unitarian Church by
Louis Kahn. In his design, Kahn carved out

58
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Vivian Bayles
walls to create spaces and to house
service equipment. The idea of carving
of a space to inhabit program and
other functional elements is carried
throughout the cultural center. The
multiple series of poche walls not only
create a sense of space, but also house
light wells, structure, fenestration,
seating, and circulation. As a whole,
the cultural center has the academic
program carved into the campus
grounds while the spiritual program
is elevated to create a sacred space.

59
 The method for design in this studio was an
exemplar-based approach. Marcel Breuers
Begrisch Hall was first analyzed for its structural
qualities. Once an understanding of the structure
was achieved, the projects program and site
had to be incorporated to the scheme. An
iterative series of diagrammatic sections were
conducted to transform the original building
into something new and appropriate for the
site. While Breuers building was perched on
three columns with an exposed underbelly of

60
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Sarah Rinehart
FOLD
concrete beams, the new building is half buried into
the sites topography. The resulting scheme features
concrete beams that create an underbelly to cover an
outdoor seating area at the Michigan Avenue entrance
and a canopy for the interior space of the prayer hall.
Above the canopy, a third space is created which is an
artificial landscape formed by the canopy structure. It
serves as an outdoor gathering space for the campus.

61

ASSEMBLY
SPACE

PRAYER HALL

CONFERENCE
ROOM
SEMINAR
RECEPTION ROOM
CAFE SEMINAR
ROOM

SEMINAR
AUDITORIUM ROOM

SEMINAR
ROOM

OFFICE
OUTDOOR CAFE
SEATING OFFICE

OFFICE

OFFICE

Y
OFFICE RAR
LIB

OFFICE

OFFICE
 The development of the design is focused around creating
an adaptable space that could accommodate the wide
variety of programmatic needs specific to various religious
activities and services. A large central space was centered
on the site to serve as a multi-functional, light-filled main
hall that could serve the various programs. The space
has a transformable floor that is situated on a vertical
lift and surrounded by movable partitions. The floor can
rise, lower, or be transformed into bleacher style seating
depending on the program. The surrounding partitions

CENTER for INTERFAITH GLOBAL OUTREACH

at THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
TER for INTERFAITH GLOBAL OUTREACH
62

HE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

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Jake Morgan

I II

CITY CITY CAMPUS

CITY

III IV

CAMPUS CAMPUS
CITY CITY

I II

CITY CITY CAMPUS

CITY

III IV

CAMPUS CAMPUS
CITY CITY
 8

5
9
10 7

6 LEVEL TWO

allow for control of access to different levels,

DN 5. LIBRARY
6. STAFF OFFICES
7. RESEARCH
8. SEMINAR

and screens can drop from above to separate

9. QIBLA WALL
10. STORAGE

UP

10
9
5
7

7
the floor into distinct spaces. At the top level,
7

the main hall opens to an outdoor space

that integrates into the hillside through
6

6 LEVEL TWO

5. LIBRARY

surrounding steps and ramps. The building

DN
6. STAFF OFFICES
7. RESEARCH
8. SEMINAR
9. QIBLA WALL

has the potential to serve well beyond

10. STORAGE

UP

its intended purpose as a programmatic

machine, adaptable to multiple functions.

4
UP

2 LEVEL FOUR

4
63
1
LEVEL ONE

4 1. LOBBY
UP 2. CAFE
3. KITCHEN
4. STORAGE

LEVEL FOUR

LEVEL ONE

1. LOBBY
2. CAFE
3. KITCHEN
4. STORAGE

12
I II
11
I II
UP

DN LEVEL THREE

11. ADMINISTRATION
12. CONFERENCE CITY CITY CAMPUS
CITY CITY CAMPUS
12 CITY
11 CITY

UP

DN LEVEL THREE

I II
11. ADMINISTRATION

I II
12. CONFERENCE

IIIIII IV IV

CITY CITY CITY CITY CAMPUS CAMPUS CAMPUS

CAMPUS CAMPUS CAMPUS

CITY CITY CITY CITY CITY CITY

III III IV IV

CAMPUS CAMPUS
CAMPUS CAMPUS
CITY CITY
CITY CITY
 64
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Soundscape, Test tile M2, concave side 15 cm x 15 cm.,3d Print Specific Objects, 2013

R h e t t
Specific
R u s s o
Objects
 19 June 2013
Crough Center for Architectural Studies, CUA
Washington DC.

It is a pleasure to speak to the theme of absence. While

it is not something that we deliberately focus on in
our work, it does relate to the way we negotiate the
agency of material in the design process, and it is in this
context that I am going to discuss how we approach
the absence of matter within the digital environment.

There are several ways we like to think of absence. The

first pertains to the concept of Specific Objects, which
was introduced by the artist and sculptor Donald Judd.
In his 1965 essay, Judd identifies the ways that artists
66
had begun to move beyond the fixed forms of painting
and sculpture to explore three dimensions and he
points out that this shift introduces new opportunities
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

for artists to engage material and color. A similar parallel

developed in architecture, almost thirty years later,
with the introduction of the digital modeling software.
The onset of digital technology made it possible to link
form, surface, and color together in new ways, but
it did so by circumventing material, and introducing
software that had been developed for industry. This
has completely changed the way we make things.
Judds objects are a mixture of material, sculpture, and
space. His work gains its specificity from three factors:
the way that it occupies three dimensions, the way it is
presented as a whole through a limited expression of
parts, and the use of one material. We are interested
in the way this approach situates the experience of
the object somewhere between architecture and art.
Take, for example, Judds 100 Untitled Works in Mill
Aluminum fabricated by the Lippencott Company from
1982-1986. Each aluminum object gains its specificity
from the finish of the mill aluminum, the unique form
of each piece, and the repetition of the objects in space.
There is a deliberate approach toward the orientation
of the aluminum objects which acknowledges the
natural light in the shed. Judd uses the architecture
to shape the aesthetic experience of the objects. For
Giants Causeway Visitors Center, 3d view of the roof structure Rhett Russo, 2005 Orbigraphia, Digital Print Rhett Russo, 2012

67
 Judd, materials remain literal. We try to think of
objects outside of what we consider the everyday,
or the literal. I believe this is where our thinking
differs from Judds. According to Judd, Materials
vary greatly and are simply materialsformica,
aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglas, red, and
common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they
are used directly, they are more specific We prefer
to approach the materials we work with as strangers.
We like the fact that they can remain mysterious so
that we are able to tend to their specificity rather
than approaching their objectivity as something that
is fixed. For us, absence is something that is integral
to the idea of materiality. It is part of the process of
bringing a particular experience into focus. This is the
specificity that we appreciate in Judds concept of
specific objects, and it operates by placing material
68
and technique in a new context that is neither
painting nor sculpture, but something new. It is a
necessary aspect of making things real, and it seeks
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
to define a particular way of crafting an aesthetic
experience from the interactions of objects in space.
There are several material themes that we continue
to revisit. The first involves the use of textiles in the
design process. There are different material and
organizational aspects of the textile that we refer to
as alternative forms of malleability. These pertain
mostly to the organic and plastic properties of sheet
materials, but also include the development of
digital surfaces. The second theme is a contemporary
one that relates to the development of computer
software to represent the seamless behavior of
textiles and skin in video games. Alternative forms of
malleability are fully part of our culture, from video
games to movies. The softness of digital complexions
continue to introduce new levels of realism. Digital
technology has ushered in a new aesthetic that has
changed the way we imagine materials. The third
theme is evident in our more recent work with
ceramics. As our work has progressed we have
begun to consolidate the virtual and the physical
behaviors, often by deliberately combining the
different mediums of material and computation,
to make drawings, objects, and architecture.
Over the last decade our work has been divided by the
split that emerged in the mid-90s when an interest in
the computer separated digital design from material
based methods. Two distinct design methodologies
emerged. The first can be characterized as the
digital design process in which craft originates in
the computer, independently from the physics of
the real world. By default this has introduced a
disjunction between objects and their materiality.
Our design process often reverses this process by
starting with material, primarily because we believe
architecture relies on the complexities of interacting
with material, structure, and surface, and secondly
because we want to avoid the homogenizing effects
of software. Giving primacy to material is something
that has become a project for us and it provides us
with a critical means to address computation. I am
not suggesting that one approach is better than
the other, but that their coexistence represents
something relatively new. In both instances design
technique originates through craft, and the shared
experience of working with tools. We have situated
our approach within the real and the virtualand.
We try to take advantage of their synthesis to look
for new opportunities. We have been fortunate to
test and execute our work using specific materials,
and this has allowed our research to evolve from
an early interest in the abstract properties of
materials that are scalable, to an investigation
into the specific and transformative nature of
materials that are associated with fabrication.
Drawing plays an important role in the conceptual
development of our work. Over time our use of
projection drawing has been slowly replaced by the
use of surfaces and ordinate systems to produce
measurement. Working through this transition was
central to making the drawings of the Orbigraphia
and our more recent experiments with digital
embroidery to stitch the Moraine. Both projects
explore the conceptual framework of the textile as a
means for drawing and each are derived from three-
 69

Moraine, for Suzhou Fast Forward exhibition, Digital embroidery details, nylon thread
Specific Objects 2012
 dimensional models. Neither are architectural projects,
but each establishes a unique bridge between material,
drawing, and the organization of parts in the presence
of digital technology. The Orbigraphia drawings explore
the relationship between form, color, and structure
using a two-dimensional surface. We are generally
skeptical of what the computer produces, so early on
we used the computer to draw things that were either
tedious to draw by hand or computationally difficult
to rationalize, rather than approach it as a generative
tool. Each species in the series is developed as a
folded surface that has been profiled and constructed
using digital tools. I was interested in exploring how
the computer could be used to reinterpret and alter
the materiality of the organisms. The organism
provides a framework to test how the technology
and tools of the digital environment reformulate the
70
way we craft things using points, lines, and topology.

We are also interested in the potential of designing

SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

with code. This has made it possible to move beyond

surface based geometry to make things algorithmically.
Our interest has materialized mostly through a direct
translation of color data. By accessing the three
numerical inputs for RGB data in processing, we have
the ability to output data in an alternate form. By
sharing numerical data, the code makes it possible
to produce a direct correspondence between color
and form. It also provides a robust means to work
with large amounts of information. In 2012, we were
invited to participate in an exhibition to produce a
contemporary work in response to the traditional
hand crafted silk embroideries of the Suzhou School.
We began to investigate the limitations of the digital
embroidery machines and the traditional methods for
mixing colors that had been developed in the Suzhou
School. The coloring effects in Chinese embroidery rely
on methods of replicating the color gradients that are
typical of Chinese watercolors. The problem was similar
for us in that we had to develop a way to encode the
relationships of the threads color, geometry, position,
and sequence. It was the first time we had executed
anything like this and we were limited to two things:
the physical memory that the machine could handle,
 71

Newark Visitor Center, Newark NJ, Street view

Specific Objects, 2009
 which had to fit on a floppy disk, and a budget of one
cent per stitch. We had to reverse engineer what we
could get from the equation. We used a machine
with 15 heads, which limited the output to 15 colors.
What became interesting was that in traditional hand
embroidery you can work in a much less linear fashion,
but with the machine it became much more difficult
to execute the work in segments. We came to realize
that the machine reads the entire embroidery as one
giant continuous computational thread, a continuous
line that should not overlap itself. It was a very
interesting process for us to consider the organization
of color from the perspective of the machine and a
similar coding of colored objects would eventually
find its way into our architectural ceramic work.

We continue to use architectural competitions as an

72
opportunity to test new applications for ceramic.
The first project that we designed in ceramic was
our competition entry for the Giants Causeway
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Visitor Center in Northern Ireland. This project was

completed prior to having any experience with
ceramic. In this case we were interested in using the
ceramic to articulate the structural system and to use
it to emphasize the crystalline quality of the structure.
The center serves as arrival point for the Giants
Causeway, the world famous outcropping of basalt
columns that extend into the sea. The geology of the
causeway is an intricate network of seven-, eight-, and
nine-sided rocks. We envisaged the roof structure as
a crystalline matrix of hexagonal tiles. To achieve this
we developed a series of seven interlocking plates,
which repeat to define the roof plane. The building
offers a spectacular view of the North Sea. The layout
is conceived as a continuous gallery wrapped around
two courtyards. Elevated above the galleries is a long
narrow lounge that is oriented to face the sea. The
galleries form a loop that can overflow into the two
courtyards. We introduced an illuminated lantern on
the buildings exterior so that the building would be
visible from across the landscape. It is designed as a
rain screen of interlocking hexagonal ceramic units
that allow for light to filter through the surface. The
coincidence of the roof geometry and the orientation
 73

Museum of Underwater Antiquities, (MoUA), Piraeus Greece, View of the ceramic addition
Specific Objects, 2012
 of the tiles presented a challenge, and we found that
this relationship could be more readily addressed by
building physical models. Several themes emerged
over the course of project. The first was the
development of variable ceramic components. The
second involved the use of multicolored glazes to give
orientation to the surface, and third was the design
of the structure as a porous system that alternates
its density to effect the transmission of light.
In 2009, our competition entry for the Newark
Visitor Center Competition was chosen as a finalist.
The site is situated between two neighboring bridges
along the Passaic River in downtown Newark. The
bridges provide a remarkable backdrop for the
visitor center. The design of the building was inspired
by the open steelwork and the industrial nature of
74
the bridges. There is an openness and intricacy that
we wanted to extend to the building. This project
took on a different spatial configuration from our
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
previous work and we started to work from the
outside in and inside out simultaneously, but with
a much more conscious effort to extend the design
of the building further into the environment and the
landscape. At the time of the competition, much of
the land surrounding the river consisted of parking
lots and vacant brownfields that cutoff access to
the waterfront. We took the initiative to extend
the project to the waterfront and to add a water
collection feature that could be used all year round
for ice skating and boating. We also introduced a
bike hub to bring visitors to the site from the train
station, which is five minutes from the site. The site
includes a group of smaller elements, a bike shop,
bus dispatch, elevated bar, and a boathouse building,
that are clustered around the edges of the visitor
center. The disjunction between the onsite activities
and the open work of the envelope contributed a
heterogeneous character to building. This makes it
possible to link the program of the building to different
activities along the waterfront throughout the year.
In 2012, we entered a competition for the Museum
of Underwater Antiquities in Piraeus, Greece
(Figure 6). The theme of material absence played
a significant role in this project. The proposed
museum is situated within an abandoned cereal
silo. The concrete silo is a remarkable structure and
its location on the coast makes it a good candidate
for adaptive reuse. The central section of the silo
is filled with roughly five-meter concrete cells that
are 26 meters deep. The strangeness of the silo
presents an interesting opportunity to approach
the design not only as an addition but to develop
it as a subtraction, an absence, within the existing
building. This approach is only possible if we accept
the building as something neutral, like the way we
accept material. The museum was developed as an
archeology that nestles a building within a building.
We explored the possibility of using a series of
lines, prescribed through the use of a diamond saw
to carve out a terrain within the gridded structure
of the silo. We sliced out a three-dimensional
landscape from the top of the concrete cells and
cut a few simple holes down through the section.
At the bottom level, below the silos, are labs, caf,
bookstore, lobby, and a large grid of existing concrete
columns. We wanted to develop an excavation on
the inside of the building that would allow visitors to
move from the small spaces to the large open spaces
above. The exhibition requirements were diverse,
including the display of pottery fragments, objects
such as acorns, coins, statuary, and shipwrecks,
with the requirement that some of the objects be
submerged in water or kept wet for conservation
purposes. We took this as an opportunity to think
of the display as an adaptable array of suspended
objects. There are three large environmental spaces
located within the addition: one for ship wrecks,
one for boats, and a third horizontal seabed for
artifacts that sits on top of the excavated cells. This
shallow exhibition tank provides a large horizontal
layout for artifacts so that visitors can walk into
the wet environment to experience the objects.
For the exterior of the building we returned to the
effects that we developed with the Moraine. The
design of the variegated blue ceramic exterior reflects
T-Stool. Press molded stoneware, with pink crackle glaze T-Stool. Preliminary Finite Element
Sunday morning @ EKWC Specific Objects, 2012 Analysis by Adam Deskevich. Specific Objects, 2011

75
 two aspects of the building, its relationship to the sea
and the history of ceramic traditions that make up the
collection. We wanted to develop a ceramic surface
that would reflect on the material tradition, but also
be contemporary. The skin of the addition is designed
as a system of architectural precast concrete panels
finished with ceramic tiles. The code used to design
the color of the ceramic tiles is similar to the one
we developed to organize the stitches for our digital
embroidery. We adopted a similar sequencing of the
colors to develop a shallow relief on the surface. The
theme is similar to the ideas we had developed for
the ceramic design in the Giants Causeway visitor
center, but in this case the color variation could be
met by a technique of firing the tiles at different
temperatures to alter the color of glaze. Similarly we
developed a contrast between the smooth parts of
76
the envelope and the relief of the colored areas so
that the quality of the specular light would change
during the day as the light tracked across the surface.
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
In 2009 we were invited to participate in an exhibition
entitled Useless. The exhibition brought together
a collection of industrial objects that had been re-
appropriated or developed as design prototypes.
With this exhibition we began to embrace the idea
that failure and variability introduce a unique set of
aesthetic possibilities. This approach has evolved
into a more robust fabrication technique as we have
incorporated waterproof membranes to design
our ceramic work. We have continued to develop
techniques to cast objects inside of folded surfaces.
Even with the computer this becomes a very difficult
thing to achieve. With the design of the T-Stool we
developed a workflow between our analog work
by scanning it in three dimensions and bringing it
into the computer to refine the object, and this has
presented new fabrication opportunities for us. It also
meant that we had to start using different software.
Rather than relying on curve based geometry we
began to use polygonal modeling to work directly on
the surface. I first started to develop rubber molds to
press mold ceramic at the European Ceramic Work
Center in 2010. Rubber molds make it possible to
produce objects with undercuts and the deep draws
that are native to the topology of folded surfaces. With
the T-Stool we were able to fabricate a continuous
hollow ceramic shell that is a meter long and 15 mm
thick. There are three versions of the stool, each
with a different glaze. The glazing process led us to
appreciate the chemistry of the surface and the way
that it can alter the appearance of the object. The
glaze recipes that we developed made each version
of the stool unique and they introduced a different
texture and depth to the surface of each object.
The absence of materiality in the computer requires
new tools for analysis. We were curious to know
how strong the ceramic shell would be and what
the structural benefits of the folded surface might
provide. With the computer we were able to test
the structural integrity of the surface and we were
also able to refine some of the surface features that
were present in the analog models. Being able to
realize the T-Stool in ceramic was a big step for us.
The interplay between the features of the analog
object and the virtual object are balanced in this
work in a way that we had not been able to achieve
before. The combination of mediums brings a unique
specificity to the object. We went through a digital
process of intensifying the important features, and
removing others that were undesirable or too frail
to manage in ceramic. The furniture engineer, Adam
Deskevich, who performed the structural analysis
on the T-Stool had never analyzed a ceramic object
before and there was very little data available. Before
we could run the simulation we had to conduct
tests using clay bars to obtain the properties of the
stoneware clay. We started by changing the thickness
of the shell from 2 cm to 2.54 cm, and as the dead
load increased the stresses emerged in two places.
The neck at the base of the stool is a place where
we expected a problem, but with the nose we did
not anticipate that there would be elevated stress.
The compressive forces were concentrated at the
tips of the stool and the stress increased in these
areas. What we learned from the analysis is where
the stresses might be elevated, but until we made
 77

(top) LT7 LT Series, 55 x 35 cm., Sintered Porcelain,Sundaymorning@

EKWC
Specific Objects, 2010. Photo by Nathan Sayers

(bottom) Acoustic test M2, convex side 15 cm x 15 cm., plaster

Specific Objects, 2013
 tests and set the clay recipe, we would not be able
to determine the outcome using the computer.
There is often a misconception with analysis that the
computer is going to be able to clearly define the
problem. The analysis can help visualize the problem,
but it cannot solve it. The only way to be sure was to
test it in ceramic and let the process play itself out.
In this regard the production of the object becomes
a repository for knowledge that exceeds the benefits
of analysis. Its this relationship that is fundamental
to conducting fabrication research. There is another
aspect of computational analysis that was overlooked.
With most materials it is simple to overlook the fact
that the stresses and strengths of the material may
change over time. This happened to be the case
with the clay, where the shrinkage stresses proved
78
to be more significant than the design loads. We
went through a series of working mockups and the
computer was useful in helping us work out how the
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positive would be put together. Because we used a
three-axis mill to make the positive, we had to extract
pieces with a flat side and we used the computer to
devise a method to cut the stool up and put it back
together. The added benefit of the digital modeling
process is that it allows us to reverse the process
of fabrication and consider alternatives. The virtual
model allows us to efficiently work around changes
to the design in midstream. The most satisfying part
of making the T-Stool was hearing an experienced
ceramicist make the comment that ceramic is
not supposed to do that. For us, this is where
ingenuity, craft, and the technology are capable of
changing our perception of what material can do.
In contrast to the effort and planning that was
necessary to fabricate the T-Stool we also conducted a
parallel line of research that investigated the sintering
of granular ceramic. It was interesting because the
material can be formed without using molds and it
can be obtained by grinding up used china. Granular
ceramic behaves like sand; it can self-organize.
In this case we looked at the design process and
asked, What if the material just does what it wants
to do? How can we use technology to participate,
and play along? I have been experimenting with
granular materials since 2009 and I spent time
studying the types of formations you can achieve
with it as it self-organizes. This interest came from an
admiration of metalsmithing techniques, especially
the development of the Japanese swords where
the artisans fold in different impurities to produce
signature markings. It is a process that resembles
the simplicity of baking a cake, and it is incredibly
nuanced. By altering the chemistry it introduces
new possibilities for individuality and variation.
Sintering is a strange process for ceramics because it
can produce bonds without water. Hence no drying is
involved. The Heap Tiles are the result of a ceramic
process that we have developed. At the start we
developed a test matrix of different clay bodies to
determine which variety of clay would produce the
strongest bonds at the lowest temperature. We began
with three candidates: bone china, reused china that
is dry and pulverized into little granules, and granular
porcelain. Dry clays like the ones made from discarded
china are commonly used as add mixtures to give
the clay more tensile strength. By simply circuiting
heaps of this material through a series of holes, the
resulting grains self-organize into distinct formations.
We were able to acquire spherical porcelain grains
and this allowed the material to produce the most
consistent morphologies. While the flow of the
heap produces sharp concave features on the top
of the tile, the excess material that flows through
the holes produces convex features, and we have
become interested in both aspects of the heap as the
process has developed. An opportunity to investigate
both formations eventually became possible in the
computer. We began to use the computer to generate
different hole patterns and varying densities. This is a
special kind of porcelain that would not be available
without the modernization of the manufacturing
process. It is remarkable that through design the
specificity of industrial processes can reveal new
avenues for matter. The mechanologist, Gilbert
Simondon, wrote an essay entitled On the Mode
of Existence of Technical Objects, (1958) in which
he describes the process of industrial innovation as
a process of individuation that culminates with the
production of technical objects. The refined porcelain
is a technical object. It is not something that exists
in a natural state and its manufacture into spherical
grains gives it a special set of technical properties.
When it is fired at high temperature it bonds. The
grains always obey the same geometry the same
type of organizational slopes and this behavior
can be repeated. In Specific Objects, Judd describes
the objectivity of materials as obdurate (stubborn
or unyielding), and this is what he accounts to
their specificity. Most ceramicists would agree that
obdurate is a valid assessment of clay, but in the case
of the grains their stubbornness is a positive attribute,
an alternate form of malleability, which is open to
negotiation. There is a sustainable ethic at work with
the tiles that extends beyond the reuse of material 79

and it offers a new approach for how we make things.

As the process developed we started to test the

granular behavior on sloped surfaces so that the
holes and the pitch of the surface could be in
dialogue with each other. This is where we started
antagonizing the material into specific formations.
To achieve a basic understanding of the correlation
between the pattern of holes and the heap we had
to test the patterns using templates. Without the
tests it was impossible to visualize the corresponding
three-dimensional surface. Because the axis of
gravity is straight down, the heaps develop at oblique
angles to the curved surface. Even when some of
the curved tiles collapsed during firing, they did so
very slowly. Because the granular structure is so
consistent the mixture could stretch and many of
the details were preserved even when the surface of
the tile became completely deformed during firing.

(top) Soundscape ceiling reflector, convex side

Specific Objects, 2014

(bottom) Soundscape detail, Combination of surface tiles with large

scale reflecting surfaces Specific Objects, 2014
 We have entered a new phase with this research and
we are developing architectural applications for the
Heap Tiles. We are continuing to use the ceramic
process as a design tool and we have developed a
script to generate the same behavior in the digital
environment using a two dimensional pattern of
holes. Much of the work we are doing now involves
correlating the morphology of the surfaces. There is
a fractal quality to the formation of the surfaces that
we believe we can pair with different frequencies.
We are investigating how this correlates with the
scattering and diffusion of particular frequencies.
The goal is to develop ceramic units for a concert
hall setting. The inspiration for this idea comes from
the design of the Grosser Musikvereinsaal where the
ornamental features of the plaster walls and ceilings
contribute to the acoustic quality of the performance.
80
In our case the difficulty with this approach is
determining what each formation does and where
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the features that we can produce based upon the
dynamic behavior of the material. We are using the
computer script to include fine scale details to scatter
frequencies of sound with different wavelengths.
There are currently nine 40-inch samples, each
comprised of about 60 tiles that have been made
for acoustic testing. The samples consist of the
same tile to regulate a measured response, and
what we hope to obtain is a coefficient that we
can apply to the analysis of a space. If we try to
calculate the entire space computationally, there
are too many calculations. It remains a process
that we are continuing to pursue through mockups.

it belongs in the space. The architectural tradition

that relied on ornament was replaced with a desire
for smoother surfaces as modernism took over.
In response to this, diffusers were introduced as
acoustical treatments that are independent from the
architecture. The idea that the ceramic can become
a completely integrated architectural formation is
fascinating to us. The process allows us to produce
unique tiles and to reuse pulverized clay. We are
revisiting the geometry of existing halls to study
reflection and absorbtion . There is a unique capability
that is afforded by the presence of the holes in the
tiles. It is possible to leave the holes open to absorb
sound, or produce versions without holes that can
diffuse sound. We are also interested in applying the
morphology at multiple scales not only at the full Rhett Russo is an Associate Professor at NJIT and a Principal of Specific Objects
in Brooklyn, NY. Rhett has received numerous awards including the SOM
scale of the ceramic tiles, but at the intermediate scale Fellowship, the Van Alen Institute Dinkeloo Fellow at The American Academy
of the walls and ceiling. With the capability to rapid in Rome, and the Young Architects Award from the Architectural League of New
York. His work and writings have been published in Second Nature, 306090, VIA,
prototype parts we can now intersperse the analog and Matter: Material Processes for Architectural Production. Rhetts current
research involves the design of acoustical ceramic surfaces. This approach
and virtual features and we have begun to apply parallels his interest in alternative modes of digital craft and its role in the
the morphologies to the overall formation of space. development of complexity within the discipline of architecture. In the summer of
2010 and 2011, he was a resident at the European Ceramic Work Centre in the
Netherlands where he fabricated full-scale prototypes of his ceramic designs.
We have been conducting tests, both with plaster His work has been exhibited internationally as part of the Beijing Biennale
in 2010, Suzhou Fast Forward Toronto 2012, and OBJECT Rotterdam in 2012.
models and curved surfaces, and we are investigating
82
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HARVEST HOME
SOLAR DECATHLON
S u m m e r 2 0 1 3
HARVEST HOME is the 2013 Solar Decathlon entry by Team Capitol DC. It is
an ecologically responsible house that harvests and replenishes natural
resources to forge a deep-rooted connection with the natural environment.
A habitat for renewal and regeneration, the house features sophisticated
control and biomedical systems to serve returning U.S. military veterans
and help them adjust and flourish in a sustainable civilian community.
HARVEST HOME reconnects the veteran with the American environment
and community, through the creation of an interconnected lifestyle with
both the houses functionality and its relationship with nature. The home is
separated into two modules, public and private, whose primary goals are to
create a physical and sensory connection with nature. Surrounding the home
are various decks that extend the living spaces, blending the interior with the
exterior and expanding our overall footprint. By treating these outdoor spaces
as additional living and dining rooms, we can double the usable space of
the home. With rich landscaping, easy to use energy-efficient systems, and
net-zero initiatives, HARVEST HOME will create a healing environment for the
veteran to calm the mind, body, and spirit. By fostering interaction with the
houses energy systems and edible garden, HARVEST HOME promotes a greater
appreciation of life, personal strength, and recognition of new life possibilities.
 84
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85
86
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Harvest Home is a fully accessible house that facilitates
a lifestyle of healing and rejuvenationa need seen
especially among war veterans. Complying with the
Americans with Disabilities Act, the house provides
maximum accessibility to its occupants. Designed
to foster not only healing but also growth, HARVEST
HOMEs energy-efficient systems design and direct
connection to nature and gardens makes it an inspiring
retreat for reconnecting with community and family.
After the Solar Decathlon, Harvest Home was donated
to Wounded Warrior Homes for use to promote a
healing environment through the harvesting of natures
many sustainable resources. The organization also
owns a four-bedroom home in Vista, California, that
serves as transitional housing for four veterans and their
service dogs. Harvest Home will be situated adjacent to
this house, with common outdoor spaces connecting
and promoting interaction between the homes.
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Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, faade Bill Zbaren

M a r k
S e x t o n
KRUECK + SEXTON
 05 June 2013
Crough Center for Architectural Studies, CUA
Washington DC.

Tonight I am going to talk to you about something that

I am particularly interested in: the art of making.
Making is a very interesting component of the
practice of architecture where conceptualization is
the first step and having it come to its realization is
the second step. The complexity of making is full of
challenges and opportunities which we fully embrace.

We are a Chicago firm and do not have offices all over

the world. We are just a 10-person firm. We have been
as high as twenty but no longer, given the current
economic conditions. Ron Krueck and I graduated
98
from the Illinois Institute of Technology, a school that
Mies van der Rohe founded, and coincidentally the
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first project we designed was a steel and glass house.

This was in 1980, when postmodernism was the raging
theme. It was a departure from that, because I think
it showed the idea that modernism actually had a lot
of expressive potential that was untapped. We have
always thought that material composition, light, and
space have an extraordinary amount that could be
developed by embracing the tenants of modernism
and not going into representational-type work.
We are very interested in how space is perceived;
how transparencies, translucencies, and opacities
change,;how you can journey though space and time
with those materials. We are always interested in the
continuation of lines and planes, the idea that a sinuous
curve can link a soft material with a hard material, that
light plays an actual role in all that we do. Actually, very
early in our careers we only did residential interiors. It
certainly was not by choice, it was just what you did as a
young architect struggling for clients. You get what you
can. Slowly we started getting into more commercial
type work. Toward the end of the 90s we were hired by
Herman Miller, the furniture manufacturer, to design
 99

Interior Steel and Glass House Hedrich Blessing

 their Chicago showroom and effectively re-brand their
image. We realized it was a great opportunity because
we understood how their values of design and ours
were linked by the elegant use of simple materials.

Our practice quickly became a practice of one of

everything. We did one factory. We did one office
building. We did one house. We actually come to each
project with a particular innocence and really try to
find something unique and simple in its execution.
We do not come in really knowing very much; we
research it and develop solutions that are simple and
straightforward, we hope even frugal, while still having
expression and a play of natural light. Whether it is the
faade of a dance company, with a scrim of metal that is
almost like a curtain, or a house that is in the gulf coast,
100
elevated because of hurricanes, our interest in light is
central to our design thinking. All of it is a continuation
and an exploration of material, space, composition,
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and expression of structure and really trying to get

more out of what seems to be very simple components.

Our practice grew and we were fortunate in winning

competitions for cultural institutions and larger
scaled buildings. Im showing images of a childrens
museum in Chicagos Grant Park and our design for
the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial. Both proved to
be very controversial projects. Finally, Im showing a
design for our first high rise mixed-used project that
one day might get built. This is an introduction to our
work and what we have done, but I now want to talk
specifically about three projects because I want to dial
down to show you what we go through as architects,
and why I find it so thrilling. It turns out that what
you learn at university might become a reality in the
real world. There are no classes that teach you a lot
of the things that you will encounter in the practice
world, but at the same time what you will encounter
here is similar to what you will encounter in practice.

The first project I want to talk about in a little more

Herman Miller Chicago Showroom Hedrich Blessing Shure Technical Center Hedrich Blessing

101

Hubbard Street Dance Bill Zbaren

 detail is the Crown Fountain. Anyone that has been in
Chicago recently may know this particular piece. We
were first introduced to the fountain and started to
work on it about 10 years ago. With almost everything
interesting, there is a great history of the site. This area
of Chicago in 1930 was not so beautiful. Any of you
that have had the opportunity to see Millennium Park
knows it does not look like this, but this is the beautiful
lakefront of Chicago. The world famous lakefront you
can see is just one big rail yard and the piece in the
center is Buckingham Fountain. I do not think there is
one tree in the entire park, but you can see the historic
boulevard in the front left, which is the Michigan
Avenue Boulevard. This was the area as little as 15
years ago. It was just a big hole in the ground where city
workers parked for free right in the middle of the city.
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This is the park area between Michigan Avenue and
Lake Michigan. This is the way the city had treated it.
Certainly it had been transformed with the park opening
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in 2004. It has just celebrated its 9th anniversary this

past July. The park has transformed this piece of land
and Chicago has really been transformed by this piece.

We were approached by a real estate developer in the

city to work with an artist in building the fountain. We
are a design firm and we do not necessarily do other
peoples designs so we did not see how this would work,
especially with an artist we didnt know. However, the
more we looked at the artists sketches and started to
see this outrageous motion of faces with water, which
was something so unusual and totally out there, we
decided maybe we should accept the job. Perhaps
we talked ourselves into it, but, frankly, this artist was
no different than any client we work with that has
an idea. We need to make physical the idea, and at
the end of the day this is actually what we do. This
particular artist had no idea how to build the fountain,
but he had the concept. The city of Chicago, being
the forward thinking city that it is, had the assistant
Commissioner of Cultural Affairs weigh in. This was
a letter we got soon after we started the project:
 103

Jaume Plensa sketch, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 The scale of the fountains are colossal and
inappropriate at fifty feet. The towers dwarf the
visitors of the park. The public sculpture was
not a pissing contest. It was terrible to perceive.
The fountain was an exercise of pomposity.
We liken this piece to ballet. It is supposed to look
easy; it is supposed to be very graceful, floating, and
effortless. But anyone who has tried ballet knows it
is anything but easy. So, in some ways, that is what
the fountains are. They look very light and easy.
We went through an extraordinary process of making
art. We were taken on by the fountains patron,
the Crown Family. The Crowns of Chicago, like the
Rockefellers of New York, are a very prominent and
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civic minded family. They were asked by the founders
of Millennium Park to support the design and
construction of the fountain. After a competition,
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Jaume Plensa, a Catalonian artist, won the commission
but needed an architectural firm to complete it.
We were hired and started working on the design of
glass blocks. Jaumes idea was that the towers were to
be 50 feet tall with glass blocks which had video and
water. How do you start designing the piece without
losing its essence? Some of the technical aspects were
quite interesting for us because it was not our idea
so there was no starting point. We did not conceive
the notion of twin towers with water and video. It
was Jaumes idea. But as an architect, I believe it
does not matter where the idea comes from. If it is a
good idea, you move forward with it. The real issue,
I think, as an architect is how do you actually make it
physical, how do you make it better when it becomes
real, instead of a compromise? I cannot tell you
how many times I have seen renderings of buildings
and promises of things that when you actually see
it, it is many times less than what was promised.
Our goal was to make it more. We embraced the
technical side of the fountain without a great deal of
experience, as our largest water feature were some
urinals and sinks. It took approximately six months
to develop the glass block. We went to Pittsburgh
where we worked with a very specialized crystal
company pouring glass into molds and then making
the blocks and working on how to put it together.
One side of the fountain is clear for the image, while
the other three are translucent with a texture. The
structure of the blocks was one of the fundamental
challenges of the piece. It is a steel skeleton that, like
the ballerina, is supposed to be effortless. Anyone
that is at all familiar with a sailboat knows that a 20
foot wide by 50 foot high sail has a lot of wind load
on it. We attempted to make the glass block walls
light and thin. The towers basically rest above a two
level garage. The water is pumped up to the top. The
air is also pumped into the towers to cool the LED,
which I will talk about in a minute. And all pumps
and fans and computer systems rest in the parking
area below. The entire area between the two towers
is a reflecting pool with only a quarter of an inch of
water on, it but below there is a two foot reservoir.
It is a highly engineered piece that needs to be
carefully maintained. We started working with how
you put these glass blocks together each of them
measuring five inches high, ten inches wide, and two
inches deep, like tiles. We had a great idea. We were
going to take it and put a compression ring around it,
put clips on the compression ring, and clip it to the
structure. We thought, in this scenario, we could go
four-foot-two by two foot one. Since we could not get
the glass blocks done in time we made a full size mock
up out of wood, added the compression ring around
it, albeit a very crude form of compression ring. Steve
Crown, the patron, came into the conference room,
we proudly propped it up, and he walked over and
touched it. It moved about a sixteenth of an inch
and then all the blocks flew out onto the floor. It was
a complete failure. Oh God! we said. As a great
patron that he was, he seemed unfazed and said it was
 105

Crown Fountain Bill Zbaren

 a good thing this happened here in the conference
room rather than on the completed fountain.
We spent three months on that idea and had to start
all over again. But in the end it was a breakthrough.
What we had always thought was we had to use the
blocks as structure. When they fell to the floor, we
said, Lets forget the blocks. The blocks do not exist.
The whole tower can exist without the blocks. That
was the breakthrough! That was when we looked
at it black and then we looked at it white. When we
got rid of the blocks everything changed. It was the
failure of the blocks that really opened the door. We
said, We are going to build a grid and that grid is
going to take the gravity load and lateral load. The
blocks will be infill. Who cares if a vandal comes
106
along with a sledgehammer and breaks the blocks
because the grid takes all the load. It is really a tee
grid and the blocks just lock in. You can see how the
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gravity load is taken, and this is effectively how it
sits. The glass is white, the tee is there as a grid, and
then the lateral load is handled by this standoff. So
for us the failure is what got us to think about this
completely differently. There is the tee that ends up
being a stainless steel tee. This goes back to that first
form. You can see what we have done with the glass
itself; we mortised the tee into it. We have actually
formed the glass block so the edge can just be
siliconed. The amazing thing about it is you do not
actually see any of this because the internal refraction
of the glass makes the entire structure appear to go
away. Again, it fulfills the idea of the ballerina that
is weightless. So then we bring these pieces to the
corners and, voil, it all comes together. Here is the
fabrication: in this case it was all fabricated full size
in Florida. The stainless steel tees were cut and put in
a jig on the floor because the relationship between
the glass block and the LED, which I will talk about
in a minute, were very tightly controlled. They were
actually shipped to Chicago with pieces missing and
then holstered into place. Again, that entire piece
ends up being, in this case, a 20-foot long beam.
So it is really an entire structure now that can take
both lateral and gravity load without relying on the
blocks. I can blow out blocks and it still works as a
structure from the grid. The lateral load is handled
by small standoff pieces that come out and end
up being bars with turnbuckles handling that load.
The LED lighting, which now is a very common
technology, was fairly new when we started working
on it twelve years ago. The LED side, the entire
clear side of the fountain, has to have the image
come through and still have the lateral load. How
do you handle the lateral load? What we did was
we put a little bit of a gap between the LED to allow
tabs to pick up the lateral load and for air flow.
You can see both block and LED coming together.
This photo is the shootout that we had behind our
office with a couple of manufacturers. This is the
artist, Jaume Plensa, on the far right and the patron
Steve Crown. The patrons always seem to wear suit
and ties. And here are the other people involved. This
just shows the technology of the LED embedded in
the piece. We started the project very leery of each
other. Jaume had just gone through a year and a half
with other architects not paying any attention to his
ideas and I knew every good artist is an ego maniac.
I asked, How are we going to deal with this? But,
I have to say the two of us and our two teams got
along famously. He was incredibly practical and
communicative, leaving to us what we did best. At
some point he said, I dont even mind if there are
columns on the corners of the towers because I dont
want to make anything heroically structured. I said,
You really would not want columns! You do not want
that. You want it pure. It was that kind of dialogue
between the two of us that was quite wonderful.
So then what we did was mock it up in Millennium
Park, full size. We went to Salt Lake City to mock
 107

LED test Crown Fountain, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 up the LED panels, and this is what I call the art of
making, which is so much fun. The requirement of
the contractors was to have us approve the panels
before they were shipped to Chicago. They said,
Come to our warehouse, we will show it to you on
the floor. We said, No! It has to be vertical. They
said, We have to have a 50-foot high by 20-foot wide
screen stand vertical. We cannot do that. Well then
you are not going to get the rest of your payment.
It turns out, next door to them, was a rollercoaster
fabricator. They knocked on the door and asked. Guys,
can you help us? They said, No problem, piece of
cake. These cowboy rollercoaster guys got this thing
up in a day and a half. So it is that sort of development
out in the fields of Utah that was quite good. Once it
was erected we could see lines from the LED so we
108
had to re-engineer that component. Again, it is very
important that you do things like this before it is built.
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Now the water feature, which is in the center of the

fountain. The concern is how it actually works. These
are the images that Jaume had, the images of the face
spouting water. We called this the gargoyle effect of
the fountain. In a meeting on October 4, 2000, I wrote,
dead people on the LED and Steve Crown actually
wrote, over x-million killed. We were quite concerned
about what the water would do to the audience and
user. Imagine, Aunt Millie walking in the fountain and
all of a sudden the gargoyle goes off and she is thrown
to the ground and cracks her head open. Jaume said
if that happened he would be liable for nothing since
he is a Catalonian artist. However, I would be in jail
because I am the licensed architect! We all traveled
to Toronto to partner with a fountain consultant and
actually got into a pool with them to make sure the
spray was diffused enough not to knock anyone over.
We were also worried about the opposite effect, water
dribbling from the gargoyle. We developed an oversize
showerhead assembly with the fountain person that
solved all these problems. So this is something they
do not teach you in architecture school, whether
 109

Crown Fountain Hedrich Blessing

 undergraduate or graduate, how to figure out a
fountain shower head. It was quite challenging trying
to figure out all these components and how it all goes
together. We also mocked up the top cap, full size,
to see how the water flows down the fountain and
we saw sheets of water were peeling away. We were
concerned about gusts of wind blowing that water
and that it might just hit the steps of the Art Institute
right across the street. We ended up convincing the
glass block guys to curve their top block. Attention
to detail and purpose, even at the very top of the
fountain, is critical. At one point, the project manager
said, You can do that out of sheet metal, but the
notion of having a line up there is a total antithesis of
what the project is all about. To ensure this would be
exactly what we wanted, I would go back and forth to
110
Pittsburgh often, becoming a true glass block expert.

Finally, the lighting of the piece is, of course, very

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important because that is how you experience it,

especially at night. So instead of down lighting it, we
actually up lit it, using the top of the fountain as the
reflectors. Again, 10 years ago these were fairly early
LED pieces. You can see how the transition of the
fountain changes, and even those lateral supports
become a scale mechanism and point of light that are
quite attractive in the piece. It is very pure, structurally
quite sound, and beautiful as it goes through its
rhythms of light. Finally, the School of the Art Institute
got an HD video camera and worked on filming (1,000
Chicagoans). Jaume Plensa was impressed with the
diversity of Chicago, compared to Barcelona. He wanted
this fountain to express the citys diversity of age, race,
and ethnicity. There were only two requirements to
get your face on the fountain: one was you had to
be from Chicago, and two was that you could not be
famous. He did not want Oprah Winfrey, Mayor Daley,
or Michael Jordan to be on the fountain but rather the
everyday Chicagoan. The School of the Art Institute
had to beg people to be filmed for the fountain.
Next year, to celebrate the ten year anniversary they
 111

Crown Fountain Cesar Russ

 are starting a new campaign to get new people on
the fountain. It is interesting how things change.
They could get not get anyone to do it the first
time and now everyone wants to be a part of it.
In this case, we were a perfect fit for Jaume, because
we actually believe that architecture is the finest of
the arts, and what he was trying to do and what we
are trying to do in our daily practice are identical.
Basically, inspire the world; try to create a physical
pleasure and a visual pleasure. We never expected it
to be embraced this way. That quarter inch of water
that these kids are playing in has become Chicagos
back yard pool or slip-n-slide. How it relates to the
great architecture of the city is also quite beautiful.
The other aspect is that the fountain does not go
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quiet in the wintertime like so many others that
seem dead in in the winters of Chicago, New York,
and even here in Washington. In the Crown Fountain,
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even though the water goes off, the images and
lights are still displayed. It is actually quite nice.
What is wonderful about it is that it is framed by the
gilded architecture of Michigan Avenue. I was struck
when Julie was talking about the space between.
The most important part of the whole Crown
Fountain experience is not so much the towers but
the space that exists between them. That is where
isolation and tranquility exists. The water cancels
out all the traffic noise and you are in the magical
space where you see the rest of the world going
around you but you no longer hear it. So that space
in between is quite important, quite wonderful.
I end the piece here saying that the influence that
both art and architecture have are conceptual,
spiritual, and sometimes, it is quite physical. So I
think for our firm, although we had been practicing
at this time for over twenty years, this was a real
change in how we thought about things and how
we thought that art and architecture could actually
change things as long as it had the credibility,
craftsmanship, and the materiality that were truly
authentic. I think that is one of the things that, if
you go to Millennium Park, can be fairly abstract.
These are two towers with faces on it, yet totally
approachable. How it changes your perception of that
space and your place in the city is quite interesting.
The next example of our work, the Spertus Institute
of Jewish Studies, is a project that we were fortunate
to win in a competition and coincidentally it is
actually just down the street from Millennium
Park. This site was actually the last open site on
the historic Michigan Avenue. That entire length
is the historic street wall of Michigan Avenue runs
about twelve blocks. All the faades of the buildings,
with the exception of a couple, are now historically
controlled. In our case, the site was empty so what
you could put there had only three requirements:
one, that it respects the street wall, whatever that
means; two, that it have a base, a middle, and a top,
whatever that may mean; and three, that it have a
verticality to it, again whatever that means. There
was no requirement for materials or composition. The
competition started with 75 architects, then 25, then
ten and finally four. We were still in it, not because
we were the best, it is just that everyone else was
thrown out for some reason or another and we were
one of the four left standing. We were the only ones
left from Chicago, which we thought would be an
advantage, however we learned it was no advantage
at all. And the reason we got there was because we
had done so little work, we had no questionable
work that could disqualify us. For us, this was a
major breakthrough in our careers. We finally have a
cultural building that was in an ideal location and had
an incredible program. This was our chance to do it.
The site is wedged with a historic building on the
right and a not-so-historic building on the left. In fact,
Spertus headquarters were in the building to the left
and they owned the adjacent site. It is only 80 feet
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Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies Bill Zbaren

114
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Y Mullion and Curtain Wall Axon

courtesy Krueck + Sexton
 115

Model Section, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 wide and has one face. This is like school, where you
have a blank sheet of paper and you wonder what do
you do here? How do you start? We started looking
at the research of the area where there are these
incredible buildingsGage Block by Louis Sullivan and
the Chicago Athletic Club by Henry Ives Cobbs, one
of his great buildings was just down the street. It is a
street with a Whos Who of American architecture.
Benjamin Marshalls Blackstone Hotel, Louis Sullivans
famous Auditorium Theater, and Daniel Burnhams
Transportation Building. And we had the chance to
be a part of that historic wall, to be a part of it in a
different century but still be part of that architectural
dialogue that makes Chicago so wonderful and open.
So one of things we looked at was the notion
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of faades forming a wall. You think of a wall as
something flat, but what we realized was that
Michigan Avenue was anything but that. It is actually
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vibrating with movement. The wall is like a plant,
searching for the same thinglight. Maybe light
more than views, but you can see what happens.
Louis Sullivans Auditorium Theater projects out
and creates great openings. Daniel Burnhams
Transportation Building has all of these bays and
movements. So we were very struck by what we
saw. These were all 19th and 20th buildings and
ours was going to be a 21st century building.
All of our projects begin in model form, just like
every architect and student has done. What can it
be? We started looking at something like this. What
is the new bay window? How does it work? We did
a lot of interesting forms and a lot of questionable
forms. Like here, the attempt of making it a vertical
break of the building between one-quarter and two-
quarters, one-third and two-thirds. Even though
it is not very attractive, it actually comes back. I
believe that the art of making is actually making,
exploring, and making, and judging, and refining. I
know there are some architects that have a stream
of conscious design process. We are anything from
that. We are always erasing and rewriting. But I
hope that gives it some amount of substance and
some amount of credibility because of the work
that goes into it. What we see every day, whether
it is a picture, movie, or what we hear, affects us.
Ultimately, we got a call from the Mayors office and
he wanted to see us and our building design in two
weeks. So we had two weeks to figure this out, do a
rendering, and go to the city. We had already shown
the Jewish Center a few ideas and we thought, Oh
well, this was one more design they wont like.
We walked in to present to them and they said we
totally captured their organization. They did not
want anything referential like the Star of David or the
Torah. They wanted a sense of openness, community,
and dynamism expressed in their building with really
no precedent. They wanted to be of this century, it
was 2004-2006 when we were designing this. We
presented our design to them and overwhelmingly
it was accepted, much to our surprise. We knew
the Jewish community would accept it but we were
afraid the City of Chicago would not. We thought
there was no way they would like anything but a
redbrick building with wrought iron railings. The City
asked us to present day and night renderings and
again, much to our surprise, it was overwhelmingly
accepted. As it turned out, this was October of 2004,
just after Millennium Park received great reviews.
There was a sense at the city that contemporary
art and architecture was now suitable. The only
problem, after it was voted on and accepted, was
that we had absolutely no idea how to build it. We
had never done any amount of faade work like this
but we were confident we could make it work. Just
like the Crown Fountain. we had to figure out this
faade. And I think that is a different approach. There
are architects who say you have to have a structural
reason to do it, which is a valid way of working.
What we did here is we said, Lets create something
 117

Spertus under construction, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 unique and then figure out how to build it. We love
that because it is a way of working that isnt set by
precedent. We love going down to the last detail.

So this is what the building actually looks like straight

on: it is a very simple grid that is based on a four-
foot-four inch by seven-foot-tall window opening that
mimics the windows of the avenue. Then all we do is
bisect the grid with fold lines that converge at nodal
points. The problem is when you break the plains apart,
as shown in this axonometric, the faade is actually
three-dimensional because it is moving in all three
dimensions. If I have a piece of glass and a frame that
is four-foot-four by seven and I tilt it from the bottom
to the top it simply gets a little bit longer. If, however,
I tilt it and twist it, it becomes a parallelogram, so all
118
the glass on the faade appears to be a parallelogram
even if when looking at it from the front it seems
to be all rectangles. So the big conundrum with
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the structuring of the faade was how can the

support mullion be in two places at the same time?

To solve this issue we came up with something called the

Y-mullion. The other name we gave it is a femur bone.
The ability of the mullion staying in the same place
and having the glass rotate is sort of a fundamental
discovery that changed everything. This did not
happen overnight though. It was a good five month
process to figure all this out. The result of it can be
seen in these images of the faade under construction.
The Y-mullions simply span floor-to-floor and become
the bones of the faade. What is exciting about the
practice of architecture today is we talk about things
being constant. The one great thing here is that this is
very much like nature, in that we have one tight frame
where it makes the adjustment, but the adjustments at
first appears endless. In fact, there are a finite number
of adjustments, so each piece ends up being between
14 and 21 feet tall. Each of the Y-mullions have the
same cross-section but have a unique vertical profile.
That is where the technology of fabrication and analysis
really comes into play. So it is like bones and skin; once
the bones are placed, then the skin comes into place
and is simply clipped in place. The skin is comprised
of 750 pieces of glass, with 500 of them being unique.
You can see some of the pieces here. The piece and
how it relates to the street wall is very important.

I also do not want to forget this. While it is certainly

about the faade, that is only just the face of the
building. What is actually the heart and soul of the
building is what is on the inside. Since it is a mid block
building, I only have light coming in from one side. So
the other area that we looked at is how do we drive
light deep into the space. We created a vertical slot
through the building to act as a reflector to bounce the
light and at the base there is a 450-person auditorium.
I maintain that what is promised on the outside of
the building, with its dynamic faade, has to also be 119

fulfilled on the inside of the building. It is very open

and filled with light in the lobby. As you ascend into
the space, the folds at the back of the auditorium
expresses its use. The upper part of the floor is where
space is filled and drenched with natural light coming
in and opening up through those spaces. These are the
gallery spaces on the top of the building, again very
simply detailed and expressed. It is fundamental, the
idea of light changing the space. Then, finally, how
does it work on the street? How does it fit in? You can
see again the relationship of the windows just on the
building to the right of ours. Ours is flush with just one
material. It is in this century, where you get to use less
but it is more expressive. It does have verticality, it is
10 stories tall, and it does have a base, middle, and a
top, and finally it relates to the landscape and skyscape
of the city. It is boldly of this century, compatible
with the great architecture of the past, expressing
values of openness, transparency, and inclusion.
Ultimately, what the Spertus Institute is all about.

The last building I am going to show is a project that

we presently have underway. It is an interesting
 project for a completely different reason. With
the Jewish Center, completed at the end of 2007,
we thought it would be our entry onto the big
stage. Then something called the Lehman Brothers
financial collapse happened in mid-2008 and
with that, everything was basically wiped out for
architects, certainly for our firm. We were working
on projects in LA, New York, and India. All of them
came to a grinding halt so the financial collapse hit us
particularly hard. We thought we were diverse and
had different types of work but it turned out we had
one source of clients. Clients, and therefore work,
from the private sector only. This meant whether
it was an institution, an individual, or a company, it
was all in the private sector. We had no other work
so we had to scale back our office a bit and reinvent
120
ourselves. What we decided to do was to go after
federal work. The first introduction to that was what
I showed earlier, the Eisenhower Memorial, which
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has been quite an interesting competition project.
We also participated in a Design Excellence
competition for a federal office building in Miramar,
Florida. I want to show you the process which was
actually part of our submission to the government.
The government never asked for design ideas,
they only wanted a design approach. This is a
slightly shortened design approach. As background,
Miramar is just north and a little west of Miami,
locating it between Miami and Fort Lauderdale. At
first blush, there doesnt appear to be much of a
difference between Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
What we like to do, which is fairly common practice,
is to view the site from above, which in this case was
about 8,000 feet above the site, to understand the
natural context. The site was just off the ocean but
it was also just off the everglades. We started doing
research and we realized that the site, looking very
non-descript currently, was all Everglades a 100 years
ago. So we used this as a major point of approach
to design. We thought the site does not want to
be 18 inches of gravel, it actually wants to be the
Everglades. So that, for us, was a huge turning point
of our understanding of a design approach. If any of
you have ever been to the Everglades, it is one of the
most exquisite environments in the world and totally
unique to south Florida. There is no other place in the
world that has everglades. That is why as an architect
making a place that is unique is so important. As
you look anywhere in the world, anywhere in the
USA, things can begin to look the same. There is a
GAP, there is a Chipotle, there is a McDonalds. It
does not matter where you are, it is all the same.
So what makes place is actually, of course, nature,
landscape, and architecture all working together.
So this was quite an insight. We thought that all
of the other competitors would have the same
approach, but, to our surprise, that was not the case.
The site is between an interstate on the left and a
busy road on the right. It is an east/west site on 20
acres of improved land. This was the improved land
we wondered about. So we asked, in our submission,
what is a 21st century federal office building? What
should it be? So we thought, Lets go back to
Senator Daniel Moynihan who actually set up the
guiding principles for federal architecture and the
design excellence program. We actually pulled out
statements that Design Excellence architecture is to
reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of
the American National Government and embodying
the finest contemporary American architectural
thought. Very few projects that the government
builds are Design Excellence, but the ones that are
picked to be examples of the guiding principles should
also reflect the regional architectural traditions. So
we researched the regional architectural traditions
of Miramar and found that most buildings resembled
Taco Bell. Architecture is all about environment,
so switch architecture to environment and you
have it. Again, I do not buy that Spanish Colonial
Mediterranean fake is an architectural style that we
 121

Wetlands site plan with building footprint, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 would want to emulate or reflect. Also per Design
Excellence, An official style is to be avoided. We
always remind the government that design must
flow from us to them, not the other way around. The
building site analysis should be considered as a first
step in the design process. One of the great building
and art pieces that the design excellence program
has is the Federal Center in Chicago, by Mies van der
Rohe, and this great Calder sculpture. This is a low
point, not of design excellence, but of all of federal
architecture. The Frank Hagel Federal Building, built
in 1975, is another example of the thought process
of making buildings big, square boxes with dark glass,
thinking that will keep the energy in the building. It
is a disastrous building in every way. The 70s were
unkind to federal architecture. The Indianapolis
122
Federal Center, another example. Just make it as
big as you can, put a courtyard in the middle, make
it totally nondescript, and have no relationship
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to site, to highway, parking, or anything else.
Our approach was to review the site, which we had
limited knowledge of other than the dimensions, and
understand how the program of 500,000 square feet
for about 1,200 people with parking for 1,000 cars
would best be accommodated. After the Oklahoma
City explosion, it was required that all federal office
buildings be highly secure, regardless of who occupies
them. In this case, we knew the user for the next 20
to 40 years was to be a high security tenant. A secure
building starts with a secured parameter which
requires the building to be set back 100 to 120 feet
from the secure perimeter. All these requirements
for security, set back, and parking seem like a terrible
program in the middle of nowhere on this improved
land. Given the conditions, we thought there was
a lot of opportunity to think about it differently. We
started to crystalize an idea of restored wetlands
and create a nature preserve and start to restore a
damaged site. As architects, we are very interested
in promoting sustainability but a rational and
common sense form of sustainability. We do this
in a very simple way called effective environmental
design. The first and most important thing is how
you orient your building. It actually does not cost one
cent more to orient your building in an optimal way.
Obviously in an urban setting many times that is not
possible, but in this case, in a green field, we knew
it could be accomplished. The siting, massing, and
orientation have the most profound effect because
its life cycle is 100-500 years. The building enclosure
is the second priority so we ask how tight and what is
the performance of that enclosure? Like our skin, the
enclosure of a building is a huge element, the largest
individual component. The third priority is the HVAC
systems and lighting controls however, it has only
a 30 year life cycle. The last priority is alternative
energy sources. Whether it is solar, PV, fuel cells, all
of these things that are so much in the news today.
We give this the 4th priority because it has, at best,
only a five year life cycle. Additionally it is also the
most expensive and difficult to maintain. It does
not cost you more for a building to run on a correct
east/west orientation rather than a north/south.
Again, fuel cells, PV, putting up wind towers, those
things are very expensive, hard to maintain, and take
special knowledge. So actually, to the surprise of
many, alternate energy is the last thing you do. Get
your skin and your orientation correct and you have
gone a long way to making it a sustainable building.
Our approach was to think of the building and
property and say, Ok this is a standard office building
on a great site. We have seen them before, we know
the program, it is just office space and core. We can
take it and push out the core to the end, again not
a novel idea, allowing for a more flexible program.
Orient it so that north/south are the main sides
of the building and the east/west sides, which in
South Florida are very tough because of solar heat
gain, are the core elements. This is a very simple
and sustainable approach to massing. It also works
 123

Everglades courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 quite nicely from the standpoint of government office
building with mitigating bomb blast. That is just the
reality of the world we live in today. The problem
however, with this massing is that it is just too big. We
slice the building mass into elements that are 60 to 80
feet wide. The reason that the actual bands are only 60
to 80 feet wide is our desire to drive natural light into
the space, because that is where you find orientation
and that is where you really harvest natural light at no
cost. This allows the user to connect to the landscape.
Unlike that very large federal center I showed you in
Indianapolis, this is the current thought of how office
buildings should work. Then maybe they are connected
at the ends and we have courtyards that are developed.

We then take a section of that and we find ways to

124
develop it further. We are doing this without even
knowing the details of the program because that was
not given to us. But this is the way we took it. We have
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a secured perimeter, you know. Unfortunately Tim

McVeigh changed how secure perimeters must now
work. There are ways to do it by putting in a fence or,
alternately, a moat. Rather than just a moat or fence,
cant we think of something a little different? The
idea of, wow, we can actually use the wetlands, use
the Everglades, and have it be our secure perimeter.
The condition of security is actually integrated into the
natural landscape of the site. In thinking about a bomb
blast, we angled the faade so that a blast force would
be reduced. We might even put a screen in front of it so
it further reduces the force of the blast on the facade.
This can also help the solar gain because it can screen
the sun. All of these images presents a development,
or tells a story, of how we would approach this project.
You still need views out and connection to landscape
but now you are behind the screen and area that is
protected. Courtyard/interior court images seen here
are examples of how you can actually present a lot of
design ideas without doing the design. The courtyard,
again, is very important because that is where light and
air and, most important, connection to the landscape
happens. But the courtyards can also work to shade the
building. A courtyards solar heat gain can be excessive
but by enabling the buildings architecture to create
shade, you are using the architecture to mitigate the
direct sun. We have just completed a building down the
street here in DC where we have used this technique.
Only half is finished; there is another building that is
going to be added to complete the site. But, again, here
is an example where we bring diffused light into that
area. In addition to these approaches of bringing light
in, you also need to make sure that air is circulated.

We came up with this idea, something that actually

modern architects rarely use: it is this idea of comfort.
Comfort is very important, especially in South Florida
because there are two experiences that you have
probably all had, whether in California or, especially,
South Florida. You walk into a building from the 125

outside and you are immediately freezing because of

a huge temperature change. You go from 95 degrees
with 95% humidity to 75 degrees with 20% humidity.
It is a shock. The other thing you are experiencing
is being in an area that has 10,000 foot candles, the
intensity of the sun in south Florida, and then walking
into the lobby where there are 50 foot candles and
you are completely blinded the second you are in the
building. So we said that should not be an every day
occurrence for the 12,000 people that walk into our
building. We as architects should have control of this
condition and make the entry experience comfortable.

The design notion that we had is as you come from

uncovered, outdoor space, where people are parking
and it is 90 degrees and ten 10,000 foot candles,
we create a building where we have some reflective
surface. We design an outdoor covered area, and then
a semi-covered area where the temperature drops
from 90 to 88 to 85 degrees. The foot-candles are cut
in half now and all of a sudden there are 5,000 foot
candles. Now you go into a semi outdoor controlled
space where it is now 81 degrees because you have
 some native vegetation and some amount of light
coming in and you drive your foot-candles from
5,000 to 1,000. You are now in a conditioned relief
area. When you enter a courtyard you are now 79
degrees and your light levels are now 5,000 to 1,000
foot candles. Then finally you enter the building
and your eyes have had a chance to adjust to the
light and your body has had a chance to adjust
to the temperature. Comfort was basically one
of the legs of our design approach and what we
promised the government if we were selected. We
thought this was really a sustainable approach to
both light and temperature mitigation and control
and how that can be designed into the building.

This is something that we use as a sustainability

126
check, as you go with conventional design on the
left, all the way to climate positive, which you know
everyone is talking about. You can notice, as you go
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through, the steps are very important. You start with

a high efficiency envelope, the skin of the building.
You then design high performance systems and finally
you put in solar thermal. Each one of these systems
starts to become more expensive and more difficult
to maintain. Actually, your first couple of steps can
do so much more to make it sustainable than the
last ones. This was the whole assembly of what we
were promising the government if we were selected.
Finally the GSA told us that the building was to be
iconic. The idea that this building was going to be in
South Florida and become such an iconic piece of
architecture was part of the program. We all know that
Washington has a lot of historically iconic buildings,
so it was our task to design one for this century.

Amazingly, we won the competition and I would

probably not be here today giving this presentation
if we had not. This is the only job we have won in
nearly four years. It is a $1.5 million project and
quite important to an office our size. We started
with this idea of three bars and the idea that the
 127

Sunshade model/building section, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 landscape runs through it. The bars and landscape,
without even understanding how the landscape
works, is important. The bars, just for program of
the office space, are going to be 60 feet wide. That
is a little bigger than the width of this room. In
the private sector you could never do a building so
narrow. There is not an office building in Chicago,
Washington, or New York that is this lean. The federal
government, however, in their Design Excellence
program, will support new ideas of work space. The
furthest an occupant is ever from natural light and
a view is 30 feet. Most people are only 20 feet or
even only 10 feet from the glass wall. I believe that
natural light and view outside are a fundamental
element of work space. I went into the Frank
Hagel building in Oakland and it is exactly opposite.
128
A user could be 100 feet from the window of black
glass. It is not a happy environment. I maintain that
the federal government, like Apple, like Microsoft,
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has to be inventive and innovative, and they are
not going to get there in a dank environment.
The length of our building, 400 feet, the length of
a city block, can be a bit of a problem so what we
did in order to make it work was twist and turn the
building. The twist and turn results in a final design
where one enters the site bound by a water feature
that contributes to the secured perimeter condition,
because vehicles cannot drive through that or
around it. I have a canal on the south side of the
site, a big parking garage and PV on the upper right,
and a maintenance facility on the upper left. The
whole site is dedicated to biodiversity of plant and
wildlife. These are the images of the adjacent site, a
protected wetlands that we are pulling into the site.
The question of why we would do a glass building
in South Florida is a question that might come
up, given the solar condition. Certainly natural
lighting is great, but what we found using glass as
the envelope, we can do a very efficient, very high
performance envelope and connect completely with
the landscape. Unlike Chicago and New York, and
maybe even less so in Washington, I only have about
a 20 degree temperature swing. Glass is not a great
insulator but when I only have a 20 degree difference
that insulation value is not a problem, especially in a
tropic climate. It is actually a lot more of a problem in
a cold climate because of the sometimes more than
100 degree temperature change. The orientation of
the building is east/west because in South Florida the
problem you have is the early morning and afternoon
sun, which is very intense. Although the narrow parts
of the building are facing east and west, I still have
those faades and they really put a tremendous
load on the systems of the building. So what we
ended up doing was just very simply putting all the
exiting/communication stairs at the east and west
ends, so that ends up being the buffer. It is not as
important if those stairs are 85 degrees so I position
them and put a lot less energy in those spaces.
It is a transition space so I use that area as a huge
insulating unit. I need the exit stairs, so placing them
at the ends of the building wings works quite nicely.
The summer sun in South Florida is actually very
high in the sky, which doesnt really put a load on
the faade. The problem is in October and March
where it can be 85 degrees and the sun is low in
the sky. We did a lot of research and development
with our exterior sunshades. I will give a general
overview of the glass make up, which is a very
interesting assembly. First of all, we put a perforated
solar screen on the front of the building. We used
very thick 3/8th inch temperate glass where we put
a ceramic frit, basically a dot pattern, on the number
two surface to lessen the sun load. We used a low-e
coating, this high efficiency coating, also on the
number two surface. There is a one-inch air gap
between the two glass members. The backside glass
is laminated because of hurricane and bomb blast.
Then finally we have an RF/IR shield because it is
 129

Interior view sun study, March, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 a high security building and this shields electronic
signals. All these separate elements go into this
special assembly of faade glass. The government
project manager asked what glass we had specified
and we said we have not even picked it because wed
have to first do a mock up. He said, Whats the big
deal? Just pick the glass, all glass is the same. We
actually convinced him to put 12 samples on a truck
and drive it around the site to look at it in all the
orientations. No one left that meeting saying all glass
looked the same. Since this building has only one
material, glass, we wanted to make sure it was right.
We created an animation illustrating how the
sunshades are assembled and perform. They are
laced together as a series of V and inverted V shapes.
130
They are made this way to duplicate the trace of the
sun. In the morning we can have eastern sun and
in the afternoon we can have western sun that the
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shade controls. This is not just a horizontal. It is a
rhythm piece that moves like the sun. You can see
how it all comes together in this image here and it all
has to be hurricane and bomb blast proof. You can see
some of the animations we produced to convince the
GSA that this is all going to work and that birds were
not going to land on the shades and cause all sorts
of maintenance problems. We also created another
animation to prove to ourselves that it was going
to work. December 20th, when the sun is lowest
in the sky, even in South Florida you can see the
dappled light move on the floor from 9AM through
the afternoon. I can have the sun penetrate in the
building on December 20th. Sometimes it can be 80
degrees, but many times it will be 65-70 degrees so I
can have a little bit of sun. The real problem is March
20th when the sun is still low in the sky but it can be an
outdoor temperature of 85 degrees. You see almost
none, just a little dapple here and there. So it just
shows the effectiveness of that architectural element
interrelated into the skin and what it does to the space.
Finally, here are some images of the sort of integrated
sustainable approach that we used to harvest water
from the site for use in our cooling towers and
irrigation and collecting the water on the roofs, or
pumping some on the land. This graph shows how
the electrical use goes down. There is some PV on
the site. Actually, about 12,000 square feet of it. This
shows how net zero energy can be achieved by PV
on the building and, ultimately, in all the parking
areas. We also planned net zero water use. Water
in South Florida is a very scarce commodity, so the
idea of holding onto the water and containing that is
an extremely important point. This idea of not using
any supplied water but harvesting the water of the
site and using it in our cooling towers and irrigation is
central to our sustainability effort. Storm water, well
water, and grey water are all used. There is a possibility
that this approach was not selected by the design
builder so as an alternate we also looked into using a
municipal wastewater treatment across the street to
obtain the water to run our cooling towers. This shows
the multiple paths to water usage. It is interesting
working with an environmental engineer because
they pointed out that water is every bit as important,
especially in South Florida, as energy. In this case,
we are able to get down to a 95% water reduction.
These are the final rendered images of what the
building will look like upon entering the site. We think
for a government building to be a dynamic, even an
optimistic building, it does not have to have a lot of
Ionic columns and limestone on it. It actually has
the materials of today, the technology of today, but
with the notion that it connects to the site. We talk
about the site as being the 5th faade, and in these
images you can see how it relates. This is the building
as of yesterday. It is fully under construction, which
is surprising given what happens in Washington
these days. The notion of a highly efficient, high
performance building nestled in the Everglades,
and in some ways elevated by the Everglades, will
 131

Perforated sunshades, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

 really resonate with the usage. I will leave you with
this. The challenge for an architect is we always think
of the building, but I think our greatest responsibility
is to the land. We will know that as this gets built we
had some hand in transforming 20 acres of land from
gravel back to everglades. I will say it is our greatest
accomplishment. It is probably not the building, but
the land, and how the building gives back with the land.

132
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Mark Sexton is a founding partner of Krueck+Sexton Architects and, along with

Ronald Krueck, designs and manages all of the firms work. He is responsible
for the development and execution of design ideas, and for the coordination of
project teams. His dedication to craftsmanship, material, and detail enables the
firms built work to express the values of modern design with a timeless quality.

In 2013 Krueck+Sexton was selected by the US Department of State

through their newly inaugurated Design Excellence Program to renovate
and rehab embassies, consulates, and diplomatic facilities worldwide.
 133

Rendering of FOB Miramar FL, courtesy Krueck + Sexton

134

T U R K E Y
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S u m m e r 2 0 1 3

Instructor
Eric J. Jenkins, AIA
Walter D. Ramberg

Students
Mohammed Al Saqer
Thomas Burke
Jennifer Butler
Anthony DiManno
Liz Marie Fibleuil
Hannah Irby
Toni Lem
Photographs contributed By Eric J. Jenkins, AIA

Jeffery Mclnturff
Phooko Phooko
Emily Pierson
Sandra Pinto
David Piraino
Christian Porfido
Matthew Simeone
Paich Strobel
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost

On the road again,

Going places that Ive never been.
Seeing things that I may never see again,
I cant wait to get on the road again.
Willie Nelson
 Starting in the only city that bridges two continents,
the Summer 2013 Istanbul and Central Turkey travel
program was an intensive, three-week sketch analysis
course in which students examined Turkish vernacular
and sacred designed environments. From Istanbul,
the program moved into the Black Sea, Anatolian,
and Cappadocian regions rich with designed
environments and even richer and often unfamiliar
cultural traditions. Mosques, houses, furniture, tea
glasses, textiles, ceramics, urban spaces, and material
assemblages became the focus of the students
daily analytical studies and personal interaction.
Yet the sketching and the sites and places sketched
were only the means to a far greater end. A higher
intention of the Istanbul and Central Turkey program
was to help raise the students architectural, urban,
136
and cultural awareness and, hopefully, their own
self-awareness by deliberately guiding them out
of their own physical and psychological comfort
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zones. It was hoped that through dislocation they
might discover and transform. This transformative
dislocation, of course, is part of long tradition. From
aboriginal Walkabouts to Grand Tours, or even
a childs cautious steps away from her parents to
moving away to college, dislocations are, quite
literally, paths toward intellectual, spiritual, and
emotional development. (Joseph Campbell) For
architecture students, a peripatetic education
removes them from a normative educational
path in order to inculcate poetic awareness in
the context of the design environment. (Norberg
Schulz) It was, in some respects, less about
what they saw, but how they saw and how they
might see themselves within the greater world.
While the goal of any education is knowledge,
an ultimate goal is wisdom. Found through self-
assessment, wisdom usually emerges from
awareness aroused during or just after students
engage situations that highlight or question normalcy,
or at least what is thought to be normal and in the
background. By up-ending the normal of everyday
lifefamiliar sounds, smells, sights, tastes, and
texturesthe background becomes foreground. In a
phenomenological sense, this overt re-attending to
lifeworld or background of life to which we pay little
or no attention. (Merleau-Ponty) The inattention
on our part or the natural attitude in which we
accept without question, either consciously or
unconsciously, given conditions, methods, and
solutions gives way to a conscious awareness of
the experience as experience. (Merleau-Ponty) By
engaging in a conscious awareness of the world,
we begin to attune ourselves to that world and
how we may be able to design in it and for whom
we design. As an architect it is worth developing
a sense of the unseen and the seen. The seen in
that we should develop an ability to analyze and
appreciate the physical aspects of a site or place. We
begin to look for and attune ourselves to those things
around us that may be hidden often in plain view.
This awareness has a literal an impact on practice.
Research into higher education substantiates what
any teacher would tell you: off-campus programs
that heighten personal awareness contribute
significantly and distinctively to career development.
Travel programs are inherently active and
collaborative and expose students to more diverse
communities. Additionally, off-campus programs
introduce or reinforce independent thinking and
learning, personal autonomy and responsibility,
and can better predict workplace competence. In
comparison with on-campus peers, off-campus
students are often more assured in their career
choices, were able to link causes of problems or
issues to structural rather than personal factors,
and showed increased civic responsibility and
engagement. (McKinney, et al. 2004; Kuh, 1995)
Travel programs, obviously, place students
in unfamiliar, even frightening contexts and,
correspondingly, help precipitate awareness of the
lifeworld through an arousal of the world that is
normally unseen. Within new settings, that which is
normal becomes abnormal or new so that when they
return to their normal world, they and the things
137
 are transformed in some respects. As any traveler or
teacher knows, travel awakens that which we put to
sleepoften a necessary sleep. Inundated with sites,
sounds, tastes, textures, and scents, we gradually
desensitize ourselves to these stimuli to survive. We
let our senses doze so that we have clarity of our lives.
This is only natural. Without a filter or method to
keep all stimuli from over stimulating our senses, we
would more than likely develop neuroses or psychosis
or at least be overloaded. Unlike children who engage
with the new, adults often cannot react as a child to
the stimulus avalanche. While this desensitizing
helps us survive day-to-day, it also reduces ability to
experience life and our appreciation for stimuli that
may need attention. Turkey is ideal for this shift.

As one of the most critical geographical crossroads in

138
the world, Turkey has witnessed civilians rise and fall.
Like a tides ebb and flow, these civilizations emerged
and subsided leaving behind architectural and urban
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legacies that have remained relatively intact. The link

from central Asia to the Mediterranean, a significant
part of the spice route from Asia to Europe and the
sea-lanes between Europe and the Middle East,
civilians such as the Hittites, Seljuks, Frisians, Greeks,
Romans, Persian, English, French, and Turks created
a rich palimpsest that is quite visible and accessible.
Likewise, Turkish architecture is inherently layered.
From mosques to houses, the architecture and
urban design layered in solidity and spatial intensity.

As a crossroads, Turkey offers a both/and experience: it

is at once European and Middle Eastern, at once western
and eastern, occident and orient. There are times and
location when a student may feel that he or she is in
Europe when a few minutes later within a distinctively
Middle Eastern setting. This duality is a kind of Rosetta
Stone in which the students can experience the
translation of place, culture, and architecture and urban
design. Students enter and exit or move between the
two which allows for a kind of cultural buffer for many
students who have never traveled beyond western sites.

- Eric J. Jenkins, AIA, Associate Professor

139
 drawings to understand the designed worlds
multifaceted nature. A drawing and its theme are a
type of lens through which designers can discover
P R O G R A M
hidden patterns that inform their own processes.
Depending on the site, students are given a range of
The 2013 Istanbul and Central Turkey program
direction that alternate throughout the day and with
was the second in a three-part Turkish program of
each students particular needs and abilities. From
study. United by discussions of Turkeys Islamic and
carte blanche self-directed exploration with little
vernacular architecture and urbanism, each of the
interference from the instructor to specific sketch
three programs focused (and will focus) on distinct,
assignments or exercises, the students are brought
if overlapping, themes and associated geographies.
through a series of sites, topics, and themes .
In 2010, the focus was western Turkeys Greco-
Roman classical sites including Troy, Ephesus, Priene,
A second aspect of the program is student-based
Miletus, and Didyme. In 2013, students focused
research. The intention of this research is to prepare
on vernacular and sacred architecture of the Black
students for the program, to help them develop a
Sea, Anatolian, and Capadocian regions. Traveling
more robust understanding of particular sites, and to
by chartered bus, we visited, among other smaller
link them to the program as a whole. This last point
sites, the following cities and towns: Istanbul,
is important for the responsibility of even a small
140 Safranbolu, Yrk, Kastamonu, Amasya, Tokat,
portion of the itinerary transforms the students into
Divrii , Sivas, Kayseri, rgp, Konya, Kasaba, Atabey,
active contributors. Research begins three months
Afyon, Ktahya, Bursa, and Cumalkzk. (A third
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before programs start. With faculty guidance,

program in 2015 will focus on coastal Turkey and
students select a specific site and an associated
include southern Anatolia, Cappadocia, and Cilicia
topic that may be directly or indirectly related to
regions with visits to Antalya, Silifkye, and Antayka.)
the site. Students research the site and topic and,
over several weeks, prepare a 500-word illustrated
In the syllabus, the official learning objectives of
essay. These essays are then combined into a trip
these intensive, three-week sketch analysis courses
booklet and distributed at the programs start. Each
is three-fold. First, it is for students to engage in and
student then presents their research at the site and
learn from Turkish architecture, urban design and,
suggests sketches that might examine the topic.
in general, cultural production through observation
For example, in 2010 a student selected Istanbuls
and reflection primarily through freehand analytical
Hagia Sophia and discussed the building in relation
sketching. Second, like other travel programs, it
to sacred light. Rather than a simple factual site
allows students time to reflect on their architectural
description that one might find in any guidebook,
education as they make connections between what
the student placed the building within a conceptual
they might have learned on-campus with what they
and historical architectural context. Several students
see in vastly different situations. Finally, the program
then sketched shadows and light within the building.
helps them develop their analytical abilities through
daily sketching that is both specific and open.
The three-week program coincided, interestingly,
with start and climax of the 2013 Taksim Square
The teaching methodology is based on the overriding
and Gazi Park protests. Arising from a planned
idea that through freehand drawing, designers can
development of Istanbuls Gezi Park into a shopping
develop a greater understanding and awareness of
mall within an Ottoman-era barracks replica,
the designed environment. Designers can do this by
the protest focused on the loss of public park to
engaging in varied and/or specific freehand analytical
development and the environmental concerns. But
beneath this the protests became much greater. The
protests became part of a larger debate on the use of
and future of public space physically, politically, and
socially. Moreover, it was about conflicting visions of
Turkeys past and futurevisions that are conflicting
as they are subtle and overt. The conflicts varied
widely but included differences between urban and
rural, between tradition and modernity, between east
and west, between secular and religious, between
liberal and conservative, or between young and old.

While they steered clear of Taksim, they did encounter

protesters throughout the city and especially one
evening on the Bosporus ferry between Asia and the
European. As they stood inside the Asian side Kadky
ferry terminal preparing to take the ferry back to the
old city. The waiting room filled with excitement and
protestors wearing make-shift tear gas masks and
bandanas carrying photographs of Mustafa Kemal 141

Atatrk and Turkish flags heading to Taksim Square on

the European side. Chants recalling Atatrks vision of a
secular modern Turkish Republic filled the air. As the ferry
from Europe docked, cheers erupted from inside the
terminal and the arriving ferry. Those heading to Taksim
cheered those returning from the days protest; those
on the ferry cheered on those who would soon take their
place in the square. The fear of the gas and police did not
dissuade those heading to Taksim. The future was theirs.
They confronted the dichotomies of past and the future.

The students on the trip engaged with Turkeys

condition and will continue to do so in their lives as
they confront the global environment in which cultural
differences become increasingly real. The differences
and similarities between east/west, old/new, historic/
contemporary, and even Muslim and Christian will play
an important part in their lives and careers. The Istanbul
and Central Turkey program asked students to engage
in the dichotomies, dualities, conflicts, resolutions,
and perhaps the dialectics of a global environment.
From Istanbuls Grand Bazaar to an isolated family
farm in central Anatolia or from subterranean
Byzantine cisterns to mountain top fortresses,
the students witnessed Turkeys width and depth.
 142
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Paich Strobel
 143

Thomas Burke
 144
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Anthony DiManno
 145

Phooko Phooko
 146
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Matthew Simeone
147
 148
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149
 150
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152
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE

LEERS WEINZAPFEL ASSOCIATES

A n d r e a L e e r s
 31 July 2013
Gensler Washington Conference Center
Washington DC.

When Julie proposed the theme of absence as part of

your summer institute investigation, it gave me pause.
After all, architecture is often spoken of as having
presence, not absence, and its thingness is perhaps
its most characteristic quality as compared to, say, a
piece of music, a theatrical performance, or a work
of literature. So I began to think about what could be
the architectural implications of absence. The more
I looked, the more I found evidence that even those
attempts to portray or convey absence left a strong
echo of the thing missing. Often absence was
made evident by the traces left behind in shadows
and after images. Finally, I concluded that reflecting
154
on absence could be the provocation for a series
of architectural ideas. So what I would like to share
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with you this evening is some of our recent projects,

seen through the lens of absence and presence.

The first pair of projects I will show you I call Missing

Pieces. These are projects which actually create a civic
or community focus in residual or void spaces that are
absent of activity or place. The second group I call Urban
Camouflage. These are projects whose envelopes
conceal or cloak their contents while carefully controlling
what is revealed. The final three projects are grouped
under the rubric of Marking the Center. Their function
is to mark a crossroads or center point of activity for
which only the faintest trace has previously existed.

Beginning with Missing Pieces, the first project is

(top, opposite page)
MGH Museum of Medical History and Innovation, Boston, MA
At night the museum is a glowing beacon
at the gateway to the hospital campus.
Anton Grassl/Esto
(bottom, opposite page)
MGH Museum of Medical History and Innovation, Boston, MA
The roof garden is a quite refuge with views of Beacon Hill.
Anton Grassl/Esto
a museum for the Massachusetts General Hospital
(MGH) in the center of Boston. The idea, conceived
by a senior surgeon and donor, was to create a small
museum of this hospitals historic accomplishments
and future research. The campus of MGH is a city
within the city, with many buildings. However its
main point of entry is deep in the middle of the block,
Photographer: TBD Photographer: TBD

155
 largely hidden from view. What was missing, what
was absent, from the campus of MGH was a front
door, a presence, a street address. The site available
for the museum was a tiny parcel, nothing more than
a traffic island really, left undeveloped because its
footprint was less than 5,000 square feet. It was in
this space that we were able to create the front door,
the welcome space, and the museum for the entire
hospital. While it is very small, it has tremendous
visibility on the street. It brought an unknowable, hard
to comprehend, complex into visibility for the public.
The program for the museum was barely defined when
we began, centered around a very small collection. In
fact, it was a building in search of a program requiring
no more than two stories of exhibit and meeting space.
Because of its important location and function with
156
respect to the whole hospital campus, we were able to
develop a virtual third floor, a roof garden, with pergola
on top to bring it into the scale the city required.
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The building is wrapped in a site assembled copper

sheathing as well as a fritted glass in the lower gallery
areas. There is a core area at the back of the building,
a gallery at the main level, with double height entry
space, a flexible meeting space on the second floor,
and a roof garden. It is a very simple plan with a
tremendous amount of transparency to the city. It
sits immediately next to Beacon Hill with views of the
state capitol. It fulfills a purpose for the institution
that was absentopening the hospital to the city.

The museum is open to the public most days of the

week, including the roof garden, and despite its tiny
size it is highly visible and it has made a tremendous
impact for the hospital in the city. At night the
building glows. Its copper has aged, becoming a
darker brown, and eventually it will turn green. We
were amazed to find that the museum has found
its way onto a website called the Innovation Trail in
Boston, a supplement to Bostons many historic sites.
 157

Taunton Trial Court, Taunton, MA

The new courthouse has a clear identity and approach from the street.
Anton Grassl/Esto

Taunton Trial Court, Taunton, MA

The main entry, a glass tower set back from the street, provides a welcoming universal access while representing the openness of civic society.
Anton Grassl/Esto
 The second Missing Piece project is a courthouse.
This is the third courthouse for the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts we have designed. It is for the city
of Taunton, south of Boston. Taunton is a small mill
town, with a lovely town green surrounded by two-
and three-story buildings. In the 1890s, inspired
by HH Richardsons Allegheny County Courthouse,
a very grand and very imposing courthouse was
built facing the town green. Our task was to build
something four times as big without upstaging the
historic courthouse. The site for the courthouse was
the missing piece part of the block adjacent to the
historic courthouse. A grand three-story wooden
hotel, the Taunton Inn, once occupied the site. It
burned down in the early 1800s leaving a hole in the
city. Small commercial buildings without a significant
158
presence were built on the site and our task was
to fit a courthouse into this missing piece block.
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Our strategy was to create a new courthouse which
was a contrast in both form and material, but with
a glazed tower similar in proportion and height
to the historic building. The new tower forms
the courthouse entry and the security zone. The
rugged stone masonry of the older courthouse is
translated into a smoother, textured limestone.
An interesting part of this challenge was to use the
entire site to bring the old and new courthouses
together. We did this through an inner garden.
Behind the tower the garden joins the two buildings.
The security area in the entry tower is treated like
a public room. Glazed waiting areas on upper floors
project into the voluminous grand bay window. The
main stairway rises along the window and garden
edge. The stone from the exterior lines the inner
corridor wall. Courtrooms are announced with wood
portals. The courtrooms themselves are illuminated
with north facing skylights. This was a very complex
urban site and the new courthouse creates the
missing connection between the parts of the block
which were so separated and damaged over the years.
A second way of thinking about absence is to evoke
the notions of hiding, concealing, and revealing, and
we have been engaged in a number of infrastructure
projects, which take their inspiration from this issue.
At the University of Pennsylvania we won a design
competition for a very large chiller plant and baseball
field at the rivers edge and gateway to the campus.
The site was an athletic field and the only place
available to locate a large infrastructure installation.
The plant is a piece of equipment 450 feet long
and 50 feet high and there was simply no hiding it.
Our strategy was to make it bigger, not smaller, by
wrapping it in a very light elliptical screen providing
space on the inside for the vehicles to move around
and an undisturbed area outside for the baseball field
and stadium. It was a puzzle to locate both the stadium
and this very large infrastructure element within the
teardrop-shaped site along the river. The curved form
helped to place it on the site leaving space for the
ball field. The screen itself looks very delicate but it is
actually constructed with industrial strength material
and detailing. The screen of corrugated perforated
stainless steel is fastened with exterior and non-
concealed fasteners on a steel frame. The whole
screen wall is 60 feet high. It is structurally strong
enough to withstand stray baseballs as well as wind
pressure. The building behind the screen is a very
simple curtain wall structure around the equipment.
By day, the plant is a shimmering silvery object
resembling a boat pulled up alongside the river. It is
about 600 feet long and 60 feet high and so big that it is
visible from the train, the highways, and coming across
the bridge. By night it is illuminated on the inside.
The equipment is color coded and the upper crown
of the ellipse is illuminated to sustain the memory of
the whole form. It is both an absence and a presence.
 University of Pennsylvania Gateway
Chiller Plant Complex, Philadelphia, PA
At night the illuminated screen wall emphasizes
the southern gateway to the University. 159
Peter Aaron/Esto

The Ohio State University

East Regional Chiller Plant, Columbus, OH
Soft illumination at night screens the equipment
within and lights the pedestrian way.
Leers Weinzapfel
 At The Ohio State University, now under
construction, we have designed another Chiller
Plant. Our site is at the very heart of the campus,
very near the main Oval and Peter Eisenmans
Wexner Center. It faces the main street of the town
across a broad lawn area. The challenge was to
imagine a very large piece of equipment as a positive
asset and an important face of the University.
We began our studies with a large enclosed
volume, similar to our approach at the University of
Pennsylvania. After looking at several versions, we
concluded that it either projected into the main street
lawn area too much or created a massive long wall.
Instead we discovered that if we were to offset the
two parts of the program, the cooling towers above
160
and the chiller equipment below, we could alter the
scale of the large volume and articulate the difference
between the two parts materially. We enclosed the
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upper volume with a perforated screen system and
the lower volume with a translucent fritted glass.
In this case we were interested in exploring a palette
of materials for both the glass and the screen that
would give it a basket weave of texture. We used
three perforation sizes of screen and spaces between
panels to achieve an overall woven fabric, which
was 50% open for ventilation. The glass is variously
fritted or clear so that it partly reveals the equipment
inside. Utility infrastructure is an intriguing building
type for us and one that we treat as research. We
are able to push the formal boundaries because we
understand how the equipment works. We have
been experimenting with a variety of ways to wrap,
cloak, and reveal these large equipment volumes.
Another way to think about absence is where
there is a trace of a center but it is weakly defined.
Architecture can strengthen those traces and
improve their legibility. We were fortunate to be
involved with two buildings at the very heart of
the University of Connecticut which demonstrates
this strategy. These were buildings for the social
sciences, including classrooms and departmental
offices. After studying a single big building for all of
these functions, we concluded that it was better to
divide the program into two buildings, one mostly
for class rooms, the other for classrooms plus
department faculty offices and research. Together
the two buildings could define a campus center. The
University was originally an agricultural campus at
the center of Connecticut in a rural area. When it
began, the campus faced the main road but as the
campus grew its planners wisely decided to leave
the cars at the periphery and to turn what had been
streets inside the campus into pedestrian walkways.
However, the crossroads of a former roadway at
the center was hard to perceive. With the two
buildings we were able to create a clearly marked
center. We thought of the buildings not as separate
entities, but as a pair working together formally and
materially. The classroom building is divided into a
lower copper-clad volume with big lecture halls and
a higher brick-clad volume with medium and small
classrooms. The S-shaped departmental building
is formed around two interconnected courtyards
with classrooms on the ground floor and offices
above. The courtyards are lined with copper cladding
while the outer walls are clad in brick. An important
dimension of the design is the sustainable landscape
weaving the two buildings together. The landscape
fulfills an essential storm water management role
with the use of bioswales and native plant materials.
Together the two buildings direct movement
across and through a newly defined center.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is
planning a new research campus on the site of a
decommissioned private airfield. The proposed
campus plan uses the former runway as the green
spine of the new campus. Our task was to create
the first building for collaborative research on
 161

University of Connecticut Oak & Laurel Halls, Storrs, CT

Academic Way view to Laurel Hall from Oak Hall
Sustainable landscape connects the buildings across the pre-existing oval.
Anton Grassl/Esto

University of Connecticut Oak Hall, Storrs, CT

Oak Hall, View into sunlit North courtyard and Academic.
Anton Grassl/Esto
 the campus, marking the cornerstone at the
intersection of the greenway and the entry road.
The design concept is a layered series of spaces a
conference and meeting zone facing north onto the
greenway, a linear top lit atrium zone, and a broad
fan-shaped workzone facing south. The meeting
spaces are gathered in a highly transparent volume
overlooking the greenway and inviting views into
the activity spaces. The workspaces overlook a
densely planted rain garden and are protected by a
series of sunshades which allow light and view while
protecting from the strong sun. The atrium zone
joins meeting and workspaces with a generous and
open stair. Small conference rooms project into the
atrium at different levels. At the ground floor, a two-
story Commons space the greenway and a generous
162
caf opens onto the dining terrace and garden. As
at the University of Connecticut, the landscape
development plays an essential role in managing
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stormwater on the site and in healing the scar created
by the airfield. Together the building and landscape
set the framework for a new campus center.
The final project I would like to share with you is
the design for a new campus center at one of the
leading business schools in France, on a site on the
periphery of Paris. The campus was created in the
1960s as space became too limited inside Paris.
It is clearly divided between a compact academic
center and a loosely dispersed group of residences.
The division between the two parts of the campus
was made more complex with the plans for new
academic and residential building in a third sector.
Our studies for the development of the campus plan
suggested that a campus center be located at the
nexus of the three sectors. Although small in size,
the new Totem, as it was dubbed, creates a clear
destination among its larger neighbors. A crystalline
object, the Totem houses a caf at the ground and
mezzanine levels, a level of student services, and
a generous multi-function space at the top of the
building overlooking the campus. From the entry
approach, the academic center, and the residence
halls, the Totem is a clear marker and orientation
point within this dispersed campus setting.
From these few examples I hope to have shown that
sometimes architecture is motivated by creating
something which is missingan absencefulfilling
the desire to make visible a history, a social entity, a
pattern of activity. At other times architecture needs
to conceal, suppress, or only partly reveal the nature
of its contents. And sometimes architecture simply
clarifies that which is only faintly perceived. In The
Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck put it more
poetically: Its so much darker when a light goes
out than it would have been if it had never shone.
Andrea Leers is principal and co-founder with Jane Weinzapfel of Leers Weinzapfel
Associates, a Boston based practice whose work lies at the intersection of
architecture, urban design, and infrastructure and is notable for its inventiveness
in dramatically complex projects. Andrea is an internationally recognized leader in
urban and campus design, and building for education and civic institutions. She has
led the design of many of the firms most prominent and award-winning projects.
The firms award-winning projects include the Expansion of the Harvard
Science Center, the Harvard New College Theatre/Farkas Hall (formerly
Hasty Pudding), the University of Pennsylvania Chiller Plant, and several
courthouses including the Federal Courthouse in Orlando Florida and the
Taunton Trial Court in Taunton Massachusetts. Leers Weinzapfel Associates
has received over 65 design awards and was honored in 2007 with the AIA
Firm Award, the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm.
A monograph on the firms work, Made to Measure: the Work of Leers
Weinzapfel Associates, was published in 2011 by Princeton Architectural Press.
(top, opposite page)
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Collaborative Research
Transparent offices and meeting spaces overlook green space
Leers Weinzapfel
(bottom, opposite page)
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Collaborative Research
Sky-lit atrium provides various workstations and meeting spaces
Leers Weinzapfel
163
 EXPERIENCES
in Architecture
164

S u m m e r 2 0 1 3
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Director
David Shove-Brown, AIA

Co-directors
Aidan Fredericks
Kristen Weller

Teachers
Dylan King
Corey August

Students

Ryan Bartucci Bradley Lois

Khaleef Bradford Victoria Poindexter
Falere Fagoroye Erica Possumato
Bridget Farley Melissa Schaaf
Nicholas Goldman Carlyn Schaeffler
John Hearney Mohammed Sheikh
Alfredo Hernandez Gloria Umutoni
Kevin Huberty Robert Vince
Glenn Lauzon Tanner Waide
ADDITION
The Experiences in Architecture program at
The Catholic University of America is an intense
three-week workshop for students interested
in architecture or other design related fields.
Students are exposed to both the academic and the
professional sides of the architecture arena, as the
city of Washington, D.C. becomes their classroom.
Participating students begin their design journey in
the studio with lessons in drawing and model making
fundamentals as well as vocabulary of the student and
professional. Over the next several days, students are
taught to look and draw at the world as architects;
field sketching and documentation take on lives of
their own. As the students get used to their new
tools and skills, they are brought out into the city for
multiple field trips to buildings, monuments, offices,
construction sites, and landscapes in which they work
their craft. Over the next several weeks, the students
spend half a day out exploring the world of design.
As the students venture further into the city and
design discipline, they are also introduced to the
studio environment. In this world, the students begin
by designing simple collage boards exploring the
dialogue between the man-made and the natural. This
collage assignment spans two days, following which
the students design a landscape with a basic kit
of parts and design concept, but no client. A week is
spent crafting and recrafting models and drawings of
this designed landscape. Following a formal review,
the students are presented with a client. With this new
element, the students must not only redesign their
landscape, but introduce elements specific to each
clients need. The Archaeologist requires a Gallery
space for found artifacts, while the Astronomer needs
and interior / exterior observation space. The Secret
Agent desires an enclosed hide-out and the Rock Star
demands a practice area / performance stage. The last
week of the program is used to perfect the design for
each particular client concluding with a formal review
by professors, practitioners, students, and parents.
Evenings are also spent out in the city with adventures
to monuments, movies, local restaurants, and sporting
events taking place. Weekends maintain the same
energy level having journeys to the National Zoo,
Eastern Market, and other local favorite locations.
The program is nothing short of exhausting, but
mentally and physically rewarding. The Experiences
in Architecture program very successfully prepares
each student for the rigors of architecture school as
well as campus and city life at the university level.
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 168
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Dia: Beacon south galleries; Fred Sandback installation view Nic Tenwiggenhorn

L y n
R i c e
RICE + LIPKA
A R C H I T EC T S
171
 17 July 2013
Crough Center for Architectural Studies, CUA
Washington DC

It is good to be here at Catholic University to discuss our

work and especially to have the challenge of relating
it to the theme of absence. We have a small studio in
lower Manhattan that I direct with my partner Astrid
Lipka, and we are a group of inspired pragmatists. We,
like all architects, search for opportunities encoded
within the restricted yet, admittedly, comforting
structure of complex project restrictions. However, as
good new pragmatists we share Bernard Tschumis
provocative yet masochistic assessment that the
tighter the constraint, the greater the pleasure. And
in a way, the people and organizations that hire us do
bind us up in their sometimes twisted and contradictory
expectations and then leave us, tied to our studio like
172
hostages on a deadline. Somehow they have full faith
that we will make something amazing their instructions.
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In fact, this resistance that they provide us does offer

us something to test, to provoke, in response. We have
never felt more uncomfortable than when working on a
project with no client a speculative house to be sold
after it was designed, alongside 99 other houses in the
middle of the inner Mongolian desert. And, no joke,
a sense of panic hit us in the absence of user desires.
There was very little off of which we could push, and a
substantial part of our job our reason for being
was lost and with it the pleasure undoing, of operating
around and through its constraints of the project. Rather
than being bound up in constraints, we were left naked
with no problems to solve and no compelling reason
for invention. Then of course we realized that this lack
of constraint constituted a really serious problem
so that cheered us up and we were able to proceed.

So we liked the struggle. We, like minimalists, work

to strip away excess and yet we conversely re-tangle
issues by questioning whether some of the perceived
excess might actually have critical performative
characteristics. So we discard nothing we just set
things aside for examination later. We work not so
much to reveal an essential core of the project, but
 173

Dia: Beacon north island gallery; Warhols Shadows partial installation view, Bill Jacobson
 rather to expose that what is thought of as essential is
possibly not, and may even be standing in the way of
innovation. So we equally question assumptions that
a) define excess and b) dictate what is essential. We
try to identify the hidden and unarticulated desires
that are behind a set of articulated constraints, and
then we speculate about the different ways we might
satisfy those desires to exceed expectations through
clarity, possible cleverness of our propositions, how
the project looks, but most importantly in what it does.
As Stan Allen contrasts with theoretical constructs,
how a project operates in and on the real world. And
hopefully we do this in ways that the public may not see
coming and that may provide a new kind of satisfaction.

Absence is not a theme that we consciously explore

in our work, yet I realized as I was preparing for this
talk that we are constantly exploring it. Absence is
like that. Though it seems as if it would be, absence is
174
not absolute. It can be partial, intermittent, diluted. I
am sure you have been having these discussions. The
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experience of absence can be gradual and subtle, or it

can be shocking. Joseph Beuys Fond series are large
stacks of felt separated with enough space to walk
around and through them. The effect is penetrating, or
actually just the opposite. Somehow the ambient sound
around the work is subtracted from the environment.
It leaves one with a sense of depressurization in which
the inner ear is somehow being drawn out of the head
into this vacuum of the gallery. What is important
here is that ones normative experience is disrupted,
and it is through this disruption that something
new is revealed to us. These oversized works fill the
gallery visually, spatially, but actually empty the room
aurally, leaving a negatively charged space where ones
idea of silence and sound are profoundly expanded.

So it seems that the profoundness of absence is

made possible through presence in a way maybe
that perception of light is reliant on surfaces, forms,
and atmospheres to be revealed. We cannot see the
effects on light in a total vacuum like deep space.
Absence, in this way, can be extremely tactile, rather
than an abstract idea. It can frame, shape, color, and
heighten perception. Turning that thought around
for every presence one can imagine, that there
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Dia: Beacon southeast gallery; Heizers North, East, South, West partial installation view, David Joseph
 must be an absence that accompanies it a
sort of silent companion to presence. If we are
conscious of this silent companion, of what our
projects are not, and if we can be as articulate
and specific about what is intentionally excluded,
accidentally omitted, or partially hidden, we
perhaps are able to use absence generatively
to expand our understanding and enhance
our likelihood of producing true innovation.
We, as a studio, work iteratively producing and
testing many alternatives for projects and at the
end of our design process, as you know, the reality
is that only one variation or alternative or scheme
is realized. In this way, there is always much more
evidence of what the project conceptually is not
than what it is. Of course, there is a tremendous
amount of detailed evidence of what the
project is, including the built form itself. What
176
we will do is take a look at some of our work in
terms of absence with the hope that, even after
completion, we can learn about the work, how
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absence may have informed the process, and
perhaps something about the nature of absence.
Dia:Beacon, at first glance, seems to resonate
well with the theme of absence. The project is
the conversion of a former Nabisco plant located
on the Hudson River about 90 miles north of New
York. It is about 300,000 square feet with nearly
200,000 square feet of sky-lit space on the main
floor. It is a former box-printing plant and they
needed the daylight to make these precision
printing alignments. In this photo I took when
we first arrived on site, you can sense the long-
term lack of activity and sense of abandonment,
emptiness, and neglect. And that sense extended
off-site over to the Hudson River. You can see
here the dumping ground that the Hudson was at
the time for both domestic and industrial waste.
In preparation to start work on the project, we
familiarized ourselves with the work of the artists
of the permanent collection which, for the most
part, was in storage and needed a new public
home. We flew to Marfa where we saw the Judd
aluminum cubes. We looked at the works of Serra,
by Michael Heizer, and by Fred Sandback. These
works share a decisiveness, a timelessness, and
a sense that only the essential is present, making
their context a silent, yet significant, companion in
the works reading, in the establishment of ground,
height, and texture in ways related to the partnership
of presence and absence that I just described. So,
from the onset we knew that what would be required
here was an architecture of absence, though we did
not describe it in that way at the time. Vera Lutter is
an artist who captured pinhole camera photographs
that are two-or-three day exposures I must be
somewhere in both of those photographs and
they offer a ghostly presence that speaks to the
buildings industrial past. The building provided
what was essential for the production of the boxes,
but it was cluttered with a lot of machinery, pipes,
ducts, etc. With the new use, we needed to look at
this silent partnership that was to come between
individual works and their immediate context,
between the different artists of the collection, and
between the public and the building as a whole.
Lets take a look at what we actually did to achieve,
what one of our colleagues described as nothing
with absolute precision. We were working with
the artist Robert Irwin on the exterior surrounds
and the entry sequence. One of the first things we
did was to separate large groups from everyone
else. Large groups enter though the caf, everyone
else enters directly into the art space through Irwins
veil of flowering trees, laid out as a normative grove
or orchard, but one combined with the logic of the
parking lot. Even though the permanent works here
do not cycle or change often, based on the time of
year or the time of day and the weather conditions,
one can have a different experience. We architects
anticipated, with such an enormous building, that we
would create a generous lobby, but Bob asked why
not consider the forecourt the lobby an exterior
room in this amazing Hudson River valley for these
people coming up from the city. It was a fantastic
idea. Instead, we created a compact passage in a
way that people physically cannot enter as a group.
Visitors enter one at a time and are confronted by this
existing fire wall which presents what Michael Govan
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Dia: Beacon with exterior surrounds- aerial view from north, Michael Govan
 has called a pseudo-existential choice of entering
into the east building or the west building. Originally,
two parts of a single DeMaria work occupied both
sides of the wall, so there is no right or wrong way
to proceed. That passage we created is a dark and
moody space that contrasts the existing skylit
spaces, so when you pass through that constricted
threshold, the space really bursts with the natural
light from the sawtooth skylights you see here.
It is an enormous building comprised of three major
art compartments, each about 8,000 square feet
and accompanied by a train shed, where the trains
loaded the boxes and transported them via the rail
line back to Manhattan, via the old Highline, to the
Chelsea Market building where they were making the
Oreos and Saltines. There is also an administrative
building with a caf, bookstore, etc. I think our entire
apartment fits in one of these structural bays, just
178
to give you the sense of just how large this space
is. To untangle circulation, to make sure that people
feel oriented in this major space, we created gallery
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islands for paintings, which receive only indirect north
light from the skylights. Around them is situated
sculptural work that receives a mix of indirect, but also
direct, west and east sunlight. Walls on the painting
side have a continuous surface, but we articulated
the columns on the sculpture side to express the
strength of the existing industrial shed structure.
We spent a lot of time on details like where exactly
the top of the new gallery walls would be in relation
to the existing structure. Each decision, each rule,
would ideally extend 300,000 square feet throughout
the building, so each decision was a big decision.
We mocked up at full scale several variations of the
wall, including versions pushing up into the skylights,
but this idea, that the beams would continue over
the top of the wall, gives one a sense of the whole
shed, even as it defines individual gallery spaces.
We covered the entire roof in a new white
roofing material to maximize the amount of light
reflecting into the space. Here you can see the
mix of west sunlight and indirect north light on
these Chamberlain sculptures. The building has a
tremendous amount of glass and we preserved all
of the original delicate steel frames, but replaced
the glass with a locally obtained obscuring glass that
maintains a sense of interiority with a focus on the
art. So we did not completely deny the outside, but
did leave an impression of it combined with a limited
opportunity to clearly view the exterior surrounds.
At the back, south, part of the building we have a
different kind of skylight rectangular monitors
and we maintained the same principle of reflecting
light through them into the galleries. This is the south
building, where we removed ink-damaged maple
flooring, salvaging just enough to repair the north
two buildings floors. Our central task perhaps, to
minimize distraction from the works, was essential to
the project. Working with Arup, we situated all of the
mechanical equipment on the roof, nestled between
skylights. They shoot air out directly into the galleries
via high velocity diffusers with no interior ducting. At
the south building, it was a little more complicated and
we dumped air down into thickened walls and then
leaked it out over the top. You can see in this image
the importance of context for these Fred Sandback
pieces they are they are just so delicate. It is easy
to see how any willful architectural manipulation or
expression of systems would overpower that work.
Here one really just sees a gap where the air flows out.
We digitally and physically modeled the space
for the curators to use in situating and organizing
artwork for all the artists. They in turn developed
the territorial strategies for the space, and we
then worked architecturally to respond to those
specific work/space pairings. Here, we surgically
removed the center of the south building and
re-spanned it with industrial trusses to provide
a column-free space for Judds plywood boxes.
So the task of doing nothing with absolute precision
was quite involved. There was in truth a lot of work to
do there, including the negotiation of the installations
of various artworks. This is Michael Heizers piece,
a component of it, as it is being set. We poured
our concrete flooring precisely to the works steel
edge. This is the only gallery space where the glass
remains clear. Beacon Mountain, which is sloping
down here from the east, can be visually related to
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Dia: Beacon Reconstructed south central gallery with Donald Judds Unititled, partial installation view, David Joseph
 this new artificial ground plane, reinforcing its original
conception as an earth work. We worked with Richard
Serra to calibrate the proportions of the renovated
train shed. We removed the train tracks, which meant
we could establish the floor height of whatever level
we wanted. We mocked up different proportions of
space for him to evaluate. We all were asked for our
opinions and we architects thought one thing and Serra
and the curators thought another. They were right. The
Torqued Ellipses are monumental sculptures. I love
this image. These works weigh something like 45 tons
each, so it is fascinating that he so seemingly casually
positions the works in plan with masking tape and then
thirty very conscientious workers make certain that the
pieces are located precisely per this plan. The works
monumentality is partially dependent on the amount
of space around it, how tightly it fits in the space. Serra
and the curatorial team recognized what we initially
resisted, that the higher floor level would better
180
amplify the effect of the work in that particular space.
At Beacon, it was the tactical partnering of precisely
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edited spaces, materials, and light with specific works
of art that does approach an operative logic that can
be linked with the notion of absence as a series of
quiet relationships that together have something of
the sublime. The architectural deference, the restraint,
amplify the art to give the space a sense of permanence
and timelessness. For us, a measured architecture in
which all that is there, and all that is not there, is essential.
Shifting to New York City, we designed a new home for
the Parsons School of Design: The Sheila C. Johnson
Design Center. Parsons found itself in a strange
situation. They were in an extremely vital creative
institution in the middle of a vibrant Greenwich Village
neighborhood, but they were completely cut off from it.
The goal for our project was to reconnect with the city,
to make a common space (they had no space where
all the different schools of Parsons could congregate),
and to create a new contemporary identity for the
School. This is an image of the existing building. It is
hidden in the urban fabric with these dilapidated bay
windows and is completely closed off from the street,
so it was no mystery why no one knew where it was.
We energetically went to work to create this new
identity very exciting to create a new identity for a
in important design school but we quickly realized
that this was not the right approach and that the
problem was the very idea of applying an identity
to this building. We opted instead, for this creative
institution, to maximize views into the space, to the
student life within, and to work toward creating
visual depth at the faade. We worked to make
the faade visually porous all around and opened
up the 300 linear feet perimeter. We performed
some surgery on these large granite sills that we
admired, but then cut out. We lowered the sill height
to a more lounge-y seating level and created new
windows that function as indoor-outdoor seats.
We were happy with this new direction, the idea that
somehow Parsons problem of not having presence
in the city could be solved not by complicating or
adding to the faade, but by visually dissolving it
and with it the distinction between inside and out.
And by further undermining the border by making
it occupiable. Here the faade performs as a lens to
the student life within, and we set up opportunities
for students to display their work at an urban scale.
We created what we called pedagogical billboards
that wrapped each existing stair and elevator core,
in this case a photograph by a fine arts student who
at that time was working as a manager at Starbucks.
So he was pretty thrilled to have a public exhibition
of his work at this scale. Works are changed out
over time and the school is constantly evolving its
image. We also made that corner of 5th Avenue at
13th Street a space for design reviews, so that it is
not only the product of design but also the process
that is put on display and constitutes the schools
identity. We needed signage, but the zoning
restrictions along 5th Avenue only allowed for 12
inch high characters (we were looking for something
more substantial), so we extruded these four foot
high letters to a 12 inch depth and then turned them
on their sides to make a kind of graphic canopy.
The four buildings of the campus block each had
separate entries and there was no interconnection
except through a trash alley. We created this
extremely sophisticated diagram locating the center
of the complex and found that it had some resonance
with the idea of a traditional campus quad a space
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Sheila Johnson Design Center at Parsons-central quad with diagrid daylight roof, mesh elevator, connecting ramp and bark wall, Michael Moran
 where people will come together, surrounded by the
elevators and stairways that provide access to all
12 floors of the complex. Our diagram became this:
scooping out a very messy center to reveal the juicy
programmatic fruit around. This is an image of the
actual scooping-out process. There was a one-story
shed in the center that we demolished and this is the
same view afterwards creating a daylit core in the
middle of the complex. From this open center, all
the other programs gallery, archives, auditorium,
more galleries, orientation center, and that little
pedagogical critique area are accessed. Overhead,
we covered the space with a diagrid-framed glass
roof that opens the space up vertically and provides
it with daylight. The framing is supported by
beams that connect two different building grids,
interweaving with an irregular spacing that makes
explicit how these two logics are being bridged.
182
We connected the 13th Street and 5th Avenue entries
and there was something else not a little thing. We
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
negotiated something like 12 different existing floor
levels in the project. This is the trash alley that used
to occupy the center of the space before. The after
shot is this, where the end of the trash alley used to be.
It is worth mentioning that the graphics of the space,
with the exception of the canopy, were integrated
into the fabric of the space not applied signage,
but rather carved into the surface of the architecture.
There may be something to say here about absence.
We wanted to make sure that in the Johnson Center
that you know what you are not seeing. In other
words, if all the structural and mechanical systems
were hidden away there would be no way of knowing
of being conscious, that they exist. In this room, where
we are tonight, I do not know where the structural and
mechanical systems are and it is sort of impossible to
know. On the other hand, if everything is exposed a
space may take on an specific industrial character. So
here we wanted to suggest how the building worked,
but retain control of how we respond architecturally
to each of the programs, very conscious of the
dialectic between the existing building and the new
intervention. These two components, existing and
new, have become partners, but one does not exist
in service of the other so neither of them remains
silent. This image illustrates this balance of the
strength of the existing masonry construction and
the new drywall and construction of the gallery.
We conceptualized each programmatic component in
relationship to the existing raw shell, treating each as
a half shell, liner, box-in-a-box a different strategy
for each element, and we worked opportunistically
to tease the most out of the sectional variation that
we inherited. It was remarkable in this space that the
Meeting Pod came out of this room which is one of
my favorite before slides, a former housekeeping
closet that was positioned to overlook the campus
quad. And it now does have a spectacular view.
We just cantilevered the space out, enlarging it
to seminar room size. You can see the contrast
between the new and the old supporting each other.
From the street, the gallery was completely
embedded and we opened it up as the articulated box
you see here. You can see the beams of the original
building above this box, which maintains a sense
of strength around the new lighter construction.
This new proscenium also creates a very close
relationship between street and gallery. In the back
of the gallery, we did not want to lose a sense of
place within the existing structure. We tipped up
the ceiling, the lid, of the gallery box so there is a
glimpse the existing building beyond. A walkway
winds around the back of the gallery, so if you need
power or AV you just drop your cable down that into
the gap and walk around and plug it in the back.
There are no outlets on the gallery side of the walls.
In the auditorium, both the bamboo shell and rear
graphic wall are perforated to control the acoustics
of the space. At the front wall, we used a slate that
performs doubly as a chalkboard and as a surface
that helps to project a speakers voice. The bamboo
shell is treated as an insert within the raw shell of the
building. In the archives, we created a bathtub-like
sound sink. The space has a lining of felt with rubber
athletic flooring and a ceiling that is open to expose
a series of existing masonry arches and mechanical
systems. By dropping this datum of lights, we
were able to bring down the scale of the space.
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Sheila Johnson Design Center at Parsons, new 13th Street entry, pivoted window seat faade and graphic canopy, Michael Moran

Back in the quad, we aggregated all of the systems
that connect from the basement to the upper
floors around an existing elevator and wrapped it
all in an aluminum mesh so the systems are semi-
exposed. We liked the idea of having a traditional
campus clock in the quad and because the New
School has a regimented three-hour class schedule,
we were able tweak the idea to create a count-
down clock. So when you arrive and it says plus
13 minutes, you know youre running a little late.
Okay, so enough with renovations. We needed to
do some major ground-up work, so we entered
the competition for the Museum of Polish History.
When we got the brief we were a bit surprised to
find that the site was in this beautiful historic park
that is currently bisected by a highway. Like an open
wound, it cuts right down the parks middle. The site
184
has a cliff, or Scarp, alongside it, a historic castle here,
and a lot of small-scale historic houses adjacent to
the park. This is our site plan. The program suggests
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a scale that is huge in comparison to the existing
structures, and so we responded by hiding all of the
programs below grade, allowing just these six points
to push up into the landscape to capture light for
the enormous spaces below. So we deferred to the
landscape and to the historic structures and scale
of these buildings around and we covered over
the highway here so that the park is restored and
can flourish in and through our project. It is more
like planting a seed and letting it sprout up through
the earth, than burying the program underground.
This diagrams the earth cut that is necessary to
accommodate the building and its relocation as fill
over the highway, creating a vehicular tunnel. At
the Scarp, we were able to create access for both
museum levels and on top create a public forum
space. You can see here this excavation work,
parking below, and then the six major programmatic
elements clustered around it with a contemporary
art gallery, two permanent galleries, an entry,
education space, and office and visitors tower. There
are large oculi to admit daylight in the common
indoor forum space. The landscape folds down into
that space at the park entry. The lawn, the park,
remains intact. At Beacon, walking on the roof through
the glowing monitor skylights is a magical experience
and here in the park, we created these seven foot
high monitor skylights to provide daylight to the
permanent galleries below and to create a park level
maze. Inside the galleries below, this maze is inverted
and creates unique gallery character and lighting.
Each gallery has a specific lighting identity. Here is the
exterior public park forum that is perforated with light
cells that illuminate the contemporary gallery below,
which offers a full glazed wall view of the city from
its position overlooking the Scarp. Sadly, our scheme
did not win. An architecturally challenged scheme
did, but it thankfully looks like it is not happening.
MOCAD, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit,
is a project we are currently working on, and it is only
in the early stages of development. It involves this
very raw building by Albert Kahn. Originally, it was a
car dealership and has been renovated multiple times.
You can see on this map; downtown Detroit is here.
Woodward Avenue constitutes a cultural corridor
leading up to the Detroit Institute of the Arts. MOCAD
is located in midtown, which is currently undergoing a
revitalization with a new pedestrian green belt under
construction around that area. For us, developing the
site, one question is what is MOCADs contribution
going to be to that green belt and how might the
loop contribute to MOCAD? MOCAD has robust
art and event programming that will resonate with
and help revitalize this neighborhood as this project
moves forward. And it is adjacent to this Sugar Hill
Arts District walkway that ties into the midtown loop
along south edge of the property. MOCAD is situated
on this southeast corner of Woodward at Garfield
and the museum is working to acquire the property
to the south. We are working with James Corner
Field Operations, who designed, with DSR, the High
Line in New York, to develop an exterior surround as
a garden for outdoor art and events programming.
We examined, from a logical perspective, different
entry scenarios. The land to the south of the museum
and the solar exposure are good to the south and the
east. With those exposures that we have available,
it makes sense to have a south entry rather than the
north entry that they currently have. Also, it was clear
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Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), new Woodward entry art garden, landscaped bleachers, and rooftop exhibition/event gallery
Rice+Lipka Architects and James Corner Field Operations

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), new visitor desk and interior component of the Culture Hub
Rice+Lipka Architects
 that the current annual exhibition cycle for the
museum, which consists of three major exhibitions,
and in-between, short-term closure (because
they do not have enough preparatory space) does
not work. So we need additional space to make
continuous operation possible, about 130% over
the current footprint. Aside from these logical steps,
the list of desires from the client and users were
contradictory and we can understand why. They
want to preserve the very down to earth character of
the space; they want a new contemporary identity;
they want to have a complexly flexible space, yet
somehow a space that is determined specifically for
each use. These conflicting desires, in a way, cancel
out many possibilities. Henry Kissinger has said that
the absence of options brings with it great clarity,
and it is true. We did eliminate a lot of possibilities,
which did make our path more clear in some ways.
For the major planning effort, logic drove the concept.
186
The building is bound on two sides, the north and
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west, by streets. The existing east parking lot and
south parcel constitute the only areas available
to develop a meaningful landscape or outdoor art
zone. The corner of the resultant L shaped garden
becomes then the new hot spot. We knew we had
to add 30% more building and we obviously cannot
do this in the street or in the garden, so we are
proposing to add it on top of the existing building,
and we wanted to privilege that most desirable
southeast corner so we are sliding that addition
to the L corner. Now you cannot really align the
foundations in that way, so we offset the rooftop
addition further to the southeast, to avoid the
existing footings, and thereby creating an in-between
zone between the existing and the new a new
colonnade with columns that incline to encourage
or accommodate circulation in particular spots.
This is important in another way as well. One of the
most significant programmatic spaces the musuems
board is interested in is this this large event space,
what we call the culture hub, which can sponsor music
eventsof up to 1,000 people. MOCAD wants to have a
more defined space for those programs, yet they still
envision these housed in the raw industrial context
of the existing building shell. So this corner layering
offers both a new identity via the colonnade and the
overlap into the existing space. The galleries then are
essentially where they are now, but supplemented
with adequate support areas here, and these galleries
are subdivided to create three scales of space: a
large gallery, a gallery half that size, and a gallery that
is half again that size. So everything falls together in
that way. We are not even at schematic design at this
point and our work thus far has been to provide a
roadmap and vision for the hopefully near future.
On the rooftop level, the new exhibition and event
pavilion is extended to an associated roof terrace
and garden. Directly below, the Culture Hub is
conceived of as an indoor/outdoor space that
opens into the exterior garden to create a thickened
threshold where inside and outside come together.
You can see in this view of the east side how the
border conditions are rendered indistinct in a field
of columns and trees and glass. So when different
events are staged in that space, from concerts to car
shows even, those spaces can bleed to the outside.
The threshold then becomes not at the building
line, but at the street, opening out and extending
the threshold of the museum to the neighborhood.
People can spill out and in on a daily basis. The
Culture Hub space hosts the normative welcome
desk and smaller events, music events, and caf.
Extending out to the garden, where we are working
with Field Operations to develop ideas like these
landscaped bleachers for the screening of outdoor
films and events, we retain the gritty character. We do
not scrub it. We retain the the character and actually
add to the accumulation of previous renovations, of
artwork, and more. We add to those previous cuts
and encourage future modifications and additions
as well to this building with an evolving identity.
On a smaller scale back in New York City these
projects are getting smaller in scale so I will go
through them a bit faster we renovated a single
floor of this McKim Mead and White Carnegie
Library. His libraries were built in the early part
of the 20th century, and today the third floors of
these libraries are sometimes, if not often, unused.
This floor was abandoned as well, but it was a
beautiful, light-filled space. We set up for ourselves
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Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), new Woodward entry art garden, neon graphics, and urban-scaled landscape/portrait windows
Rice+Lipka Architects and James Corner Field Operations
 a generative rule: a no partition rule. We did not
want to clog the space with partitions, so we said
whatever we do to break the space down, it had to
be done without adding walls. In this existing space,
we relied on independent programmatic elements to
keep it open and organized and to keep light filling
the space but also to unhide these teenagers so that
they interact with one another and to encourage
hangingout. Each one of those elements suggest
a zone around it, without having walls. These step
bleachers bring the space a sectional characteristic
and we stepped up these bookcases and dropped the
ceiling in the middle so we create this inverted valley
section here. The L-bracket seating is movable
for performances, which you will see. In that dark
zone, we have the ideal projection condition for film
screening. Compositionally at the faade, McKim
Mead and White set the sills about seven feet above
the floor, so the bleachers actually allow kids to go
188
up and look out those windows. They can hang out
on the bleachers or use them for performances.
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The Media Vitrine idea inverts the normative idea
of the typical media room and what we have seen
built in other branches. These rooms are where
kids come and play Guitar Hero and Wii, etc. These
loud gaming systems that teens love to engage
were hidden away in completely enclosed ancillary
spaces. We worked to put on display the physicality
of these activities and literally showcase them.
That worked. We specified Holosonic speakers that
project sound straight down rather than dispersing
the sound as conical speakers do. It creates a sound
shower that drains into carpeted floor. If you are
standing under the speaker array it is very loud, but
if you are standing just to the side, it is not so loud.
So you get to see these kids going crazy while there
are other people having quite conversations and
looking at books right next to them. We tried to keep
the scale down, more in line with the user, keeping
the bookcases low and wrapping the space with a
constellation graphic and graphic wall that enlivens
the space and helps further break down the scale.
I referred to this project, a residence, earlier, built
on nothing. 100 Architects were invited to design
houses in Inner Mongolia. Our site was lot 007.
There were certain site characteristics upon which
we could base our project, so it is not entirely true
that we had nothing to go on. We knew we were in
the desert and we wanted to, as a response, privilege
landscape. So we pushed the exterior site into the
interior of the house via three interior courtyards. We
sliced the roof to respond to the southern exposure
due south it is quite cold there in winter. And
then we still have this kind of sticking point with the
program. We came to associate the lack of user input
with the notion of drift. We thought about the word
and Situationists notion of derive, of unplanned
journeys within the house, and we worked to prompt
unconscious acts of domestic migration. The owner,
whoever it might have been, is encouraged to wander
from space to space, floor to floor, depending on
the time of day and time of year. Not in a stratified
organization where you are living on one floor or
another, but rather where all floors are considered
living space. All floors have kitchens, all floors have
living rooms, and all floors are sleeping areas.
The ground floor is incised in the landscape and has
more active programs. It tends toward the physical.
It has bedrooms and kitchen. The courtyards start
here along with a kind of super-stair, which we
considered a vertical room itself a social space,
a very gentle but large stair, about 20 feet square.
It is essentially a spiral stair that has been cropped
based on the buildings geometry. The courtyards
shape the spaces and these spaces are not so much
defined by walls, but rather with these nature
voids, the internal volumes and the outer shell, and
between the internal volumes themselves. And
here, on top, is a living space on the occupiable roof.
Some smaller scale works: an exhibition called
Beyond the Catwalk that we did outside of Seattle
in Steven Holls museum. This was a show that
featured the work of compelling contemporary
fashion designers, and it was divided into five
curatorial sections: substance, statement, science,
spectacle, and structure. Again, like the teen center,
we made a rule where we cut a normative element
of most fashion exhibitions, the mannequin. So this
problematized the project and our understanding of
the body and the garment is intentionally disrupted.
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Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), new rooftop art/event terrace with green roof surround
Rice+Lipka Architects and James Corner Field Operations

For some sections, we did not have access to actual
physical garments. In this case it was a Viktor & Rolf
nested doll dress. We just had images of it and we
designed an apparatus where visitors could see the
detail of the garment. These panels were folded in
against the light box, but they could flip out to show
the dresss many layers in relationship to one another.
Viktor & Rolf have other complex ideas. They created a
blue screen dress series where, in their actual runway
show, they staged a line of dresses superimposed
with stock footage of planes taking off and more.
So we recreated this condition with live blue screen
technology in this, what we called a U-turn runway
apparatus. This long table display was created for
a group of designers whose work was critical of the
fashion industry. Their works did not have too much
do with the garments, so we created this split light
examination table, which is illuminated from above
190
and below to reveal the objects in light all around.
We created this specimen container in response to
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
the Science Section that focused on the technology
of garments and fabric. We obscured most of the
garments so you never see the garments forms in
totality. View windows, some with magnifying lenses,
focus on the detail of fabrics within, obscuring the
whole and emphasizing the part. For the Spectacle
Section, we went to London and filmed an Alexander
McQueen show from five different camera
viewpoints and then recreated the show virtually in
the gallery to manufacture the sense that you can
never experience everything simultaneously. Each
screen documents a unique perspective, something
different going on, so viewers are constantly turning
to avoid missing something. This was the feeling
of the show that there was more going on than
could be fully registered. Finally in the Structure
Section, which featured a Margielas flat panel series
and a Kawakubos bump series, we had to come
up with an apparatus that could accommodate
both thin and thick works. So we designed these
X-press collapsable displays that are fully expanded
for the bump dresses and very compressed for the
flat panel dresses. When we needed to refer to the
body, we only did so using photographs rather than
mannequins. We also created diagrams of garment
structures and designed how to physically support the
garments so they visually floated within these cases.
Next are two art works on which we collaborated
with artist Ben Rubin. He is a fantastic artist who
invited us to work with him the New York Times
lobby, which he completed on his own. The first idea
we had was for a kinetic sculpture that consisted
of columns of implied text on this interior curtain
wall virtual columns and texts that were only
revealed by these scanning devices that track up
and down the mullions in a choreographed dance,
mining the information they display from the New
York Times daily database, so it is all about todays
news. The LED displays scrolled text at the same
speed, but in the opposite direction that the units
were moving, so the text stands still. The units
move to reveal the invisible column of text, the
absent content made present with these devices. At
the end of the day, these units were put to sleep,
but allowed to dream by periodically waking
to display not the days news, but news from the
papers past archived news from the database.
The second work for which we were short-listed is
this installation for the Fulton Street Transit Hub
that is just about to open in lower Manhattan. It
was designed with Ben and graphic designer Lisa
Strausfeld. There were three site components.
One was this domed closure through which people
move quickly, the Dey Street passage, and at several
subway platforms. I do not know if you are familiar
with Craigslist and Missed Connections? Missed
Connections documents those lost moments when
you are on the subway and making eye contact with
the guy or woman across from you and there is some
perceived chemistry between you and then they get
off and you realize that, OMG that was it, she/ he was
the one. So as a last ditch effort, people go online
and post these beautifully composed texts trying to
reconnect with these people in hopes that they might,
too, be looking for that lost connection. This is a mini-
tragedy played out in very beautiful and public way.
The idea was to reconnect these people by making
more public their postings. We looked at the likely
receptivity for each site of the project, so at the
 191

Dia: Beacon Northwest perimeter gallery with John Chamberlain partial installation view
Richard Barnes
 dome we knew there would be very low receptivity
with people moving through the space, while on
the platforms there would be very high receptivity
because people were static, just waiting for their
train. In the dome space, we post highly edited
headline snippets to somehow mark the collective
loss that is happening in real time. This LED
display grid would be connected back to servers
and Craigslist database. This would be constantly
changing like the normative rail departure board. In
the Dey Street concourse, a very long, wall-mounted,
single-line split-flap display also using the normative
transit signage, displays a longer version of the texts.
For the third site, on the subway platforms, a kind
of hard copy of the full texts that are mined from
the Craigslist database. This was actually fabricated
by the subway signage people and for an exhibition
sponsored by the Whitney. And finally we could
not resist attempting to actually manufacture new
192
Missed Connections in some way we created
these stillness areas opposite each other on the
SUMMER 2013 ABSENCE
platform, such that if you stand across from someone
for more than 10 seconds, a little audio alarm goes
off on the platform and a frame mounted between
the tracks is illuminated to draw your attention to
that person standing across from you an LED time/
date stamp provides you with the information they
will need to post online to help find out who you are.
The year 2000 marked the end of the Votomatic
voting machine it was used in the Florida elections.
You may not remember this, but this was the device
that affected the presidential election and their use
was soon discontinued. A curator in New York got
hold of these voting machines and asked a group of
artists and architects to do something with them for
an exhibition on democracy. Our response to this
potential loss of the Votomatic, which is a completely
dysfunctional machine that historically had thrown
elections, was not to attempt to fix it, but rather
to amplify its dysfunction in order to raise public
consciousness of the power that these machines have
in our democracy. Rather than making something else
out of it, we proposed to extend its life as a voting
instrument, but tailor it and market it to different
demographic regions of the country that shamelessly
wish to ensure culturally consistent election results.
We named this new fictional line BuyUs Brand
Reconditioned Voting Booths, booths with a built-in
cultural bias. We built only one physical version for the
exhibition. Here we produced attributes that would
help sell this model in a conservative Texas market.
This particular model, the American Sportsmen, has
a strong cultural resonance with rural conservatives.
The rifle format is familiar to most hunters and
sportsmen and the adjustable target range affects
the legibility of the target, which is key. The target
is any given years election ballot and voters shoot
for their candidate, the target. Conservatives are
allowed to shoot from 50 yards, while liberals are
made to shoot from 100 yards making it a little less
likely for them to hit their intended target. We also
made a model for California, the Zen Zone model.
This comes with a yoga mat and candles. Liberals are
allowed to light a candle for their candidates right
away, while conservatives are asked to meditate for
60 minutes before lighting theirs. If you are in a swing
state we thought we should give you the opportunity
to get your state off the fence by gambling away
your vote with the Good Odds model. Here voters
have the potential to gain up to 35 votes if they
are lucky. And of course a model for New York, the
Capitalist Elite. This works using an ATM format
where voters could buy votes, or sell them if they
are feeling disenfranchised. A little LED ticker shows
voters the current trading value of each candidate.
The last project I will show is a garden pavilion that we
created for the Philbrook Art Museum in Oklahoma.
They have beautiful, newly reconstructed grounds
and they commissioned a series of temporary garden
pavilions. We quickly realized that we had only about
a quarter of the money that we needed to build a
full pavilion, so we decided to build a quarter of a
pavilion and edit the most expensive component,
the floor which would need to support the weight
of visitors. What we were left with was a head-shell
that serves as a viewing device, adaptable to various
terrains. We experimented with different sites on
the museum grounds. Essentially, the installation is a
doorless elevated box where non-child visitors have
to duck to get inside and then look out through pairs
of mirrors that recombine the landscape. The back
is a sky viewer that has a full-width mirror mounted
at a 45 degree angle to frame and multiply the sky
and tree canopy above. Here is an amazing image
of how we first imagined the mirroring effects, but
that is Photoshop, and in real life, the optics do not
work like this at all, so we traveled to the site and
mocked it up full scale and identified an appropriate
site. In this installation photo, you can see that only
this bit is the actual view of the landscape, and
this is a single mirrored view, and that is a mirror
image of that mirror, and to further left is a little
bit of the mirror of the mirror of the mirror image.

In terms of absence, we take what is essentially

an object in the landscape and conceive it as a
viewing device that manufactures a fictional view
of the landscape a fake that raises the awareness of
the original. At least that is the idea. One example
of how that works is evident with the sound of an
existing waterfall which emanates from the left, 193
from a place where the view of the falls is replaced
by an image mirrored from another spot. To the
right, visitors see the water fall and to the left, they
can hear it. It disturbs the normative and these
breaks with reality, making you more aware of your
surroundings. Looking back into the hillside, one
expects to see the opposite landscape, but instead
visitors see the sky and the tree canopy above. An
overview here shows the contrasting horizontal
form of the viewer itself registering the irregularities
and slope of landscape above which it sits.
Lyn Rice founded Lyn Rice Architects (now Rice+Lipka Architects) in 2004,
I am sure I demonstrated tonight that absence is not a developing an iterative design approach that takes pleasure in teasing out
unexpected project potentials by inventively embracing their practical constraints.
theme that we have consciously explored in our work.
Still, foregrounding ideas of absence in reading the Rice was selected as one of the Architectural League of New Yorks Emerging
Voices in 2002 and named part of the 2003 Design Vanguard by Architectural
work does inform it. The theme that I see repeating Record. His work has been published widely and recognized with ten American
here with regard to absence is that we often rely on the Institute of Architects Design Awards, the Architectural Review Future Projects
Award (2013), and a NYC Public Design Commission Award (2012), among others.
full, potential, or partial withdrawal of something, a
controlled absence, in order to disrupt the normative. Rice was a design principal-in-charge and the architect-of-record for Dia:Beacon,
We remove some piece or part of a project or project a 300,000sf contemporary art museum while a partner of OpenOffice
art+architecture collaborative (1999-2004). Rice holds a Masters in Advanced
program, and through this intentional disruption, no Architectural Design from Columbia University and is a LEED Accredited
matter the scale, something new is revealed to us. Professional. Rice currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Architectural
League of New York and has led design studios at the School of Architecture at
Princeton University, Columbia University, Barnard College, and The Cooper Union.
Summer Institute for Architecture Journal
School of Architecture and Planning
The Catholic University of America

Dean:Randall Ott, AIA

Director: Julie Ju-Youn Kim, RA AIA

VOLUME 9
Editor: Ariadne Cerritelli
Journal Design: Ariadne Cerritelli + Amirali Ebadi

John Garvey
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