Petter Dass Museum

By Peter MacKeith

Until his death in 1707, the parson poet Petter Dass wrote prolifically from the medieval church of the small shoreline farming community of Alstahaug—hard by the western slopes of Norway’s dramatic Seven Sisters mountain range. Celebrating the sacred virtues of what inhabitants refer to as “the kingdom of the thousand isles,” Dass paid reverent homage to the people and landscape of northern Norway in his most famous work, Nordlands Trompet (The Trumpet of Nordland):

It seems that, far out on the edge of the earth
Old nature has found its good way to give birth
To rare and splendid abundance.

Three hundred years later, Dass’s life and work are themselves dramatically celebrated and exhibited in Snøhetta’s Petter Dass Museum in Alstahaug. Addressing the growing tourist and visitor needs of the existing church—now one of only seven such preserved medieval churches in Norway—and an adjacent 18th-century parsonage, the new building’s linear volume is boldly set within an excavated cleft of the site’s dominant granite ridge; its curving, winglike roof form projects out from the ridge to overlook the fjord waters beyond.

Contemporary Norway is a nation still acutely conscious of its natural beauty, and of the relationships between the natural environment and its cultural identity. The strong topography of the near and distant landscape, the presence of the historic church, as well as the animating character of the museum program, posed challenging, intriguing questions of siting, construction, and representation.

An exceptional poet and considered Norway’s greatest writer of his time, Dass has also become the subject of folklore, remembered now as a person who outwitted the devil. “Certainly the history and character of Petter Dass led the initial discussions of how to approach the project,” says Snøhetta partner Craig Dykers, AIA. “The choice of connecting the building to the sea through the nearby ridge was in part a means of releasing the site to the unrestrained character of the waters beyond. The integration of the building with the land allows the site of the past—the historic church—to merge with the undefined nature of the future as found in the sea.” Snøhetta reveals the spiritual and religious aspect of this Christian priest in the building’s geometry. The vertical spire of the medieval church, in combination with the horizontal axiality of the museum, implies a cruciform geometry when perceived together.

The crux of that cross-shaped geometry is in fact the forecourt of the new, 14,500-square-foot building, so that museum visitors are immediately confronted with the complementary forms upon arrival. Yet the boldness of the design’s singular siting gesture unbalances the relationship; the contained volume is set between an artificial cleft created by 230-foot-long, wire-cut rock walls 50 feet apart (the excavation technique is a common one in Norwegian construction, owing to the rugged character of the country’s terrain). The building itself is 37 feet wide within the clearance, providing for 6 ½-foot-wide passages on either side—a walkway through the ridge, and a stairway to its summit, where a monument to Petter Dass is erected.

The granite walls frame the glass-enclosed ground floor, which is level with that of the medieval church. There is no disputing the hovering, dynamic quality of the museum’s curving form; its zinc-sheathed, steel-framed upper level cantilevers out 23 feet at front and back, arching upward to a height of 32 feet above grade, in resonance with the curvature of ridge terrain, but clearly rising above it.

Inside, the museum program is transparently organized and presented in both plan and section. A simple three-tier staircase indicates circulation and services organized against the southern wall, leaving the bulk of the rectangular volume for public spaces. A reception and gift-shop area just past the entry doors leads to a glass-enclosed, red-seated auditorium, and through to the café (and outdoor terrace beyond). A polished-and-coated concrete floor throughout further reinforces spatial continuity. The permanent exhibitions of Petter Dass’s life, writing, and times, also designed by Snøhetta, occupy the entirety of the oak-floored second level, with a partial third level of glazed office and library spaces stacked above, just under the curvature of the roof. The massing of the program toward the center of the plan balances the cantilever at both ends of the building. Detailing throughout is spare and minimal, although much attention has been paid to the necessities of exterior wall construction, owing to the harshness of the northern climate.

Snøhetta’s designs always possess a strong formal, even gestural quality, at any scale—as seen in Oslo, at the new National Opera House [record, August 2008, page 84]—and here in Alstahaug. Yet, each of the firm’s designs contains a hidden, “telltale” moment of experience. The positioning of the museum volume in the cleft granite ridge has produced two compressed passages of movement, between the museum’s reflective outer walls and the grained, mossed granite surfaces. These are visceral places, highly tactile, and compelling in their focus through to the shoreline or churchyard and spire, or ascending to the ridgeline and its views over the fjord. On repeated visits over time, Dykers has experienced further subtleties in relation to larger environmental effects: “The building has taken on many more nuances with respect to its reaction to climate. I have been surprised at how differently the building feels when it is wet, covered with snow, or set under direct sunlight. While we imagined some of this, the intensity of these changes was unexpected.” In Petter Dass’s words, a “rare and splendid abundance” indeed.

Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre

By David Dillon

With its rippling aluminum facade and crisp cubic form, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre is an edgy presence in Dallas’s refined brick-and-stone Arts District. Corners peel back to expose massive X braces; floors cantilever at gravity-defying angles. Instead of flowing out like a traditional theater, with the stage in the center and support spaces to the sides, the Wyly pushes up, nine stories, with the lobby in the basement, the stage on the street, and rehearsal studio, costume shop, offices, and classrooms snapped together above like a transformer. The “vertical city” meets the Texas prairie.

A centerpiece of the $354 million AT&T Performing Arts Center, the Wyly is a surprisingly small building, barely 90,000 square feet. Across the street stand I.M. Pei’s swirling Meyerson Symphony Center and Foster + Partners’ Winspear Opera House, with its thrusting sunscreen and blood-red performance drum. Knowing that their building would be upstaged by its more flamboyant neighbors, Joshua Prince-Ramus and Rem Koolhaas opted to play to the office towers behind instead of the low-slung cultural buildings in front.

“Verticality helped us acquire an identity,” says Koolhaas. “The building belongs both to the cultural complex and to the rest of the city.”

The Wyly’s tubular aluminum skin, reminiscent of a pleated theater curtain, transforms it into a Minimalist sculpture on a low, grassy pedestal. But the rain-screen skin is only one part of the story. The architects set out to reinvent the contemporary theater by designing a performance machine. Equipped with an elaborate system of winches, pulleys, lifts, tracks, and catwalks, the structure can be reconfigured from a proscenium stage to thrust or flat floor in a matter of hours instead of days, dramatically reducing labor costs. While this is common in sports arenas and convention centers, the technology has never been used quite this way. Balconies fly up into the ceiling at the touch of a button; aisles can be rearranged between acts; the audience may sit on the floor at the beginning of a performance and on stage at the end.

“Going up allowed us to free the ground plane so that control of how the play is seen or changed passes to the director instead of the building,” explains Prince-Ramus.

Early reports have been enthusiastic. “Everything you’ve heard about the flexibility of the space is true,” wrote Dallas Morning News theater critic Lawson Taitte. “The machinery has worked beautifully.”

“It is exactly what we were hoping for,” adds Wyly artistic director Kevin Moriarty, “which is not to say that it will appeal to everyone or that it will work for any play. It was certainly not conceived as a home for 19th-century-style productions.”

The only complaints so far have been butt-bruising seats, poor sight lines in parts of the balcony, and, more frequently, the building’s perverse Chutes and Ladders entrance. Instead of entering directly from the street, patrons must walk down a sloping concrete ramp to the lobby, then back up a narrow interior staircase to their seats. This sequence stemmed from the architects’ desire for a totally flexible performance space, which meant that the lobby had to go below. (An early scheme showed the glass walls wrapping the stage folded up like garage doors, allowing patrons to spill out onto the plaza at intermission.) “Their thinking was that five minutes of inconvenience in the lobby was worth two hours of excitement onstage,” says Kevin Moriarty.

Yet the ramp is steep, hard, and unwelcoming, and with cars entering and exiting, dangerous as well. It also makes a large curb cut on Flora Street, the district’s main drag, while eclipsing views of the Winspear and the Meyerson on the other side.

Once inside, however, patrons find a sophisticated high-tech space. No sofas, velvet drapes, and warm, soothing colors here—only mute concrete floors and walls; sleek, stainless-steel-paneled overhangs; and bare fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceiling like light sabers. This is tough, “take that’’ interior architecture, occasionally crude in its execution yet carried through with the consistency of a serious aesthetic rather than a glib decorator flourish.

And in spite of its aloof, self-absorbed attitude, the Wyly still manages to engage the city at several levels. When a performance ends and the curtains part, audiences get a framed view of the passing parade on Ross Avenue, a major gateway to the Arts District. Likewise, the black-box theater on the sixth floor offers a synoptic glimpse of the rest of the district, with the Winspear bracketed by the Meyerson and Allied Works’ new Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts [record, January 2010, page 100]—classical music, opera, and theater doing a line dance. And from the balcony of the 9th-floor rehearsal hall, trimmed out in green artifical-grass carpet and fiberglass trellises, visitors have a panoramic view of downtown Dallas, with the historic Guadalupe Cathedral in the foreground and the skeletons of spec office buildings off in the distance. Past, present, and future, art and commerce are compressed into a single image.

With only two productions so far, one the opening gala, it is too early to say how the Wyly will ultimately perform. Kevin Moriarty predicts it will take five years to know what it can and cannot do. “We’re going to assault the building relentlessly to discover its limits,” he says.

It is clearly a director’s theater, a laboratory for the new and surprising, and it will certainly redefine what a night at the theater means for Dallas audiences. Like much of both architects’ work, it is provocative rather than pretty, a gutsy roll of the dice. In a 21st-century arts district, that’s a good role to play.

41 Cooper Square

A raw and charismatic vertical campus connects students to each other and their urban environment.

By Joann Gonchar, AIA

The New, $111.6 million academic building at New York City’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is the type of extroverted structure one would expect from architect Thom Mayne, FAIA, of the Santa Monica—based firm Morphosis. It has a sharp and folded perforated-stainless-steel shell with an aggressive gash in its main facade. Performance is part of the rationale behind the dynamic sheath, which cloaks a poured-in-place concrete building with a standard window-wall system, helping mitigate heat gain in summer and retain heat in winter. The outer skin is one of several tightly coordinated sustainable features that are likely to earn the project, designed with local associate architect Gruzen Samton, a Platinum certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system.

The screen, which Morphosis has deployed in other projects, including the Caltrans Disrict 7 Headquarters, in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Federal Building, serves not only as an energy-conserving element. It also helps integrate the building, known as 41 Cooper Square, into its urban surroundings, says Mayne, who argues that it is “highly contextual.” The skin crimps and curves, he points out, to respond to the frenetic energy of its East Village environment. And from below the bottom hem of this outer coat, V-shaped, poured-in-place concrete columns emerge to bring the building to the ground. The sculptural and slightly rough supports surrounding the otherwise mostly transparent first level are made of structural rather than architectural concrete, contributing to the exterior’s raw charisma. The building exudes “a kind of toughness that is New York,” he says.

This sensibility, explains Mayne, is also in sync with the mission of the egalitarian, but highly selective, tuition-free college, which offers degrees in architecture, engineering, and art. The 150-year-old school was founded by inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper, who had less than a year of formal education. 41 Cooper Square “is embedded in the values of the institution,” says the architect.

The nine-story, 175,000-square-foot building was constructed primarily to house the engineering school but also includes some facilities for art and architecture students. It is considerably larger than the two-story, early-20th-century academic building previously on the site. However, the new volume is roughly equivalent to the college’s most identifiable structure — the 1859 Italianate brownstone Foundation Building, which sits kitty-corner to the new building across leafy Cooper Square. But Morphosis can’t claim much of the credit for the dialogue that this similarity in scale creates. 41 Cooper Square’s dimensions — 100 feet wide by 180 feet long by 135 feet tall, with setbacks on the north and east — were determined well before the firm was selected in September 2003. The size was set as part of a city-approved rights swap that permits the school to develop the site of the engineering department’s former home a few blocks to the north as a commercial property.

The development plan created an additional source of revenue for Cooper Union and simultaneously allowed replacement of aging academic facilities. In addition, construction of the new building provided an opportunity to promote interaction among the school’s various academic disciplines. “We hoped to encourage students to come together in a natural way,” says George Campbell, Jr., Cooper Union president.

Morphosis responded to the desire to foster interaction by creating a vertical campus around a series of social spaces. The primary one is an amorphously shaped atrium that extends from the ground floor to a skylight on the roof. It is carved out from the center of otherwise surprisingly regular and rectilinear floor plans with offices and study lounges lined up along the building’s western edge, and instructional spaces, including engineering labs, art studios, and classrooms, along the eastern edge.

Where the floors are open to the atrium void, a curving lattice defines the space’s limits. The geometric but fluid web of glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum over an armature of steel pipe protrudes into the entry lobby, enticing students to walk up a 20-foot-wide grand stair that connects the first four floors. On the upper floors, the atrium narrows around a segmented and spiraling stair with faceted, resin-clad balustrades illuminated from within.

The atrium has clearly become a lively social hub. Early in September, shortly after the building’s official opening, and just a few days into the academic year, students could be seen chatting, studying, and eating lunch on the grand stair’s landings. Others were observing the activity from upper-level balconies, or “sky bridges,” which afford views across and into the atrium and sight lines out to the city beyond.

Part of the atrium’s appeal is its spatial complexity: It is made of overlapping surfaces and geometries that shift with every change in vantage point. But, although it is visually stimulating, the complexity doesn’t always have a corresponding functional advantage. One instance where it becomes a liability is in the vertical circulation.

Like several other Morphosis projects, the Cooper Union building has skip-stop, or express, elevators intended to encourage occupants to walk and to provide additional opportunities for interaction. These aims are valid. However, the system at Cooper Union seems too idiosyncratic. For example, anyone who wants to travel between levels 6 and 7 on foot, and by way of the atrium, would be unable to do so since the spiral stair has no run connecting these floors. Instead, occupants must choose between the egress stairs or the service elevator.

But quirky circulation aside, 41 Cooper Square seems to hit all the right notes. It contains the vibrant spaces for informal interaction and provides the state-of-the-art educational facilities that Cooper Union required. Mayne fulfilled these client mandates without ignoring the building’s civic presence, creating a gutsy, and appropriately energetic, addition to Lower Manhattan’s urban fabric.

Rolex Learning Center

SANAA’s much-anticipated Rolex Learning Center calls into question long-standing views about architecture.

By Josephine Minutillo

What makes a great building? The ancients seemed to think it had something to do with proportion and symmetry. That belief pretty much persisted through to the last century, when some of the most memorable buildings were the ones that broke completely with those Classical tenets.

Fast forward to a new decade of a new century, and the completion of SANAA’s otherworldly Rolex Learning Center. These days, any number of things can make a building great. Some point to the use of groundbreaking technologies and materials to create jaw-dropping forms. Others will argue for a building’s green attributes. And if you agree with a certain oft-quoted Modern master, it’s all in the details.

Back to Rolex. On the heels of the Pritzker Prize, awarded to SANAA partners Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa last month, it seems almost blasphemous to imply that the enigmatic firm’s latest building is anything but great. And much of what has already been written about the low, undulating structure heralds it as a masterpiece—despite some very obvious flaws. Is it structurally and spatially innovative? Most definitely. Is it sustainably built? Arguably. Is it impeccably finished? Not by a long shot.

Envisioned as a hub for the prestigious École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s (EPFL) small campus of mostly nondescript buildings in Lausanne, Switzerland, the new Learning Center houses a library, student work spaces, offices, a restaurant, and a café spread out over 215,000 square feet on one open, rolling level. A basement level contains parking and additional stacks.

It’s hard to resist likening the structure to a thick-cut slice of Swiss cheese, its rectangular form punctuated by a dozen or so variously-sized holes, or patios, as the architects call them. The patios bring daylight to all areas of the building, and the larger ones serve as entrances where their sloping forms touch the ground. To access them, visitors walk past the impenetrable glass facades and slip beneath one of the building’s peaks. It’s an unorthodox, but strangely evocative procession that also exposes the glossy underside of the rippled floor slab’s concrete.

The concrete—in some areas almost 3 feet thick—was poured over a precise formwork of sloping geometries created from 1,400 individual molds. The complex curvatures are supported by 11 highly reinforced arches, with spans as great as 280 feet. Prestressing in the slab over the basement provides added support, though the curving form around the largest patio in the building’s southeast corner required a structural wall and column.

A steel-and-wood roof billows in response to the concrete waves for a consistent 11-foot ceiling height (except in the taller multipurpose hall). Between floor and ceiling—the former blanketed by a mousy gray carpet, the latter a stark white sound-absorbing surface—is a remarkable space that’s a hybrid of built and natural environment that takes its cues from the nearby Alps, visible from inside. The building, a flowing landscape, is unencumbered by walls, allowing views across its interior and through the patios; overhead is a continuous plane.

Herein lies the building’s greatest strength. The experience of meandering through the space is magical, and one that challenges traditional notions of movement through man-made constructions as strictly vertical or horizontal. But this singular experience is also the source, somewhat counterintuitively, of the building’s main drawbacks. The single-story, sloping structure is not the exemplar of accessible design one might expect it to be. To use hiking terms—which the promenade through this building brings to mind—some of the hills might be classified as moderate to expert. So while it may be free of doors and walls, the building is chock full of ramps and elevators, both inclined and vertical.

The lack of partitions gives way to alternate methods of separating functions, some better than others (the cage surrounding the bookshop comes to mind as a less than desirable alternative). Tables in both the library and restaurant are raised on terraces and encircled by the same bulky railings that line the ramps. Circular “cubicles” enclose offices, creating awkward residual spaces between closely positioned cubicles, and between the covered tops of the cubicles and the ceiling. The sloping terrain itself is supposed to act as a divider, but since this is not abundantly clear, some areas are roped off. One large area behind the auditorium is just too steep to serve any purpose at all. Apparently, the efficient floor plan is so last century.

A series of student work spaces, referred to as “bubbles,” use glass to create privacy. Unfortunately, it’s not the precisely curved glass of SANAA’s Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio [record, January 2007, page 78] or the swirling acrylic of its Derek Lam Shop in New York City [record, September 2009, page 78]. Cost constraints dictated that the bubbles be fitted with less expensive, less transparent, straight panels—a surprise, given the list of donors who funded the $100 million project, led by the Learning Center’s illustrious namesake.

Cost-cutting measures are evident throughout the building, most noticeably in all the off-the-shelf components that draw attention in a structure that is anything but. Skylights, for instance, were necessary to keep the building naturally ventilated and help it achieve Switzerland’s strict Minergie label for energy efficiency—despite all the concrete. Yet the standard bubble type used here, glaringly visible from the ground, flagrantly disrupts the flowing overhead plane both inside and out.

Most visitors to the building, including a very curious public, are able to look past these flaws. Students from the EPFL and a nearby university have completely embraced it, consistently filling the libraries and work spaces and creating ad hoc study areas by variously arranging the beanbaglike chairs that dot the floor.

The Learning Center is obviously an inspiring place for its users, but that in itself cannot make the building great, and it is far from SANAA’s best. The firm’s ambitious design was scaled back almost from the start, leaving the architects to make one concession after another. Which leaves us with the perennial question: Is building a worthwhile pursuit when it may be impossible to reconcile the purity of a concept with the realities of construction and limitations of budget? As long as we want to have great buildings in the future, the answer to that is yes.

Nezu Museum

Updating Tradition: For a previously overlooked museum, Kengo Kuma creates a new home that connects to its garden setting and the big city beyond.

By Naomi R. Pollock, AIA

With a new name, a new logo, and a new building, the Nezu Museum has transformed itself from a staid cultural institution into Tokyo’s latest “it” destination. Despite a world-class collection of Asian antiquities and a central location in the city’s fashionable Omotesando district, the old museum (the Nezu Institute of Fine Arts) and its traditional garden kept a fairly low profile. But thanks to the new building and landscape design by Kengo Kuma, the Nezu is impossible to miss. Topped with a dramatic tile roof, Kuma’s building stands apart from its commercial surroundings. Yet it greets pedestrians warmly with a live bamboo wall symbolizing the elegant blend of architecture and nature inside.

“One unique aspect of Japanese culture is the deep connection between buildings and gardens,” says Kuma. “I want to go back to that tradition.” This approach marked a departure from the Nezu’s previous home. Adjacent yet closed off from its carefully tended grounds, the privately owned museum encompassed a concrete exhibition hall plus four plaster-covered storehouses. The original concrete building opened in 1955 (with additions in 1964 and 1990), but the storage structures and garden date to the era before World War II when the Nezu family estate occupied the property. When roof leaks and poor climate control threatened the priceless artworks in the storehouses, the museum decided to replace them with a new exhibition structure and convert the old museum into offices and a state-of–the-art archive for the 7,000-piece collection.

Removing the storehouses enabled Kuma to reposition the museum’s entrance more prominently—to the end of Omotesando’s famous, boutique-lined street (instead of a sequestered approach from Kotto Dori). A 148-foot-long walkway leads to the building’s main door, in the process taking visitors away from the buzz of the city. Inside, an intimate reception area adjoins an expansive sculpture hall overlooking the 161,459-square-foot garden. From the hall, visitors can either go outside or enter the six galleries: three on the ground floor and three (plus a lounge) on the second floor—all accessed by a glass- and-steel stair in the middle of the room. While a café occupies its own Kuma-designed garden pavilion, a shop sits near the museum entrance.

A second stair descends below grade to a 70-seat lecture room, and a hidden corridor behind the galleries connects to the old wing.

Though the new Nezu has more gallery space, its administrators’ primary goal was to improve the quality of the exhibition area—in terms of both conservation and display. Because of their fragility, most of the artifacts make only brief appearances in the galleries, each one designated for a different medium, such as decorative arts, tea ceremony objects, or calligraphy. Sequestered behind solid, steel-reinforced-concrete walls, the galleries are lined with built-in storage and cloth-padded cases where humidity and lighting conditions can be closely monitored. While the rooms are intentionally spare and subdued, the cases are equipped with LED and halogen fixtures that spotlight individual treasures without exposing them to harmful heat.

Because earthquakes are a major concern in Japan, stone figures in the sculpture hall stand on pedestals concealing metal springs that absorb seismic tremors. Though the objects are not light sensitive, Kuma carefully coordinated daylight and electrical fixtures to best present the pieces against the backdrop of the newly configured garden. Fanning out from the building, the garden presents a spacious, tree-ringed lawn cut by a path leading to the café. From here, walkways connect to the existing grounds laid out by the Nezu family’s master gardener. Uniting inside and out, a glass wall fronts the sculpture hall. While glass fins securing the wall minimize view-blocking window sashes, oblong, solid-steel columns measuring 4-by-12 inches seem to effortlessly support ceiling beams that enable the room’s 49-foot clear span. Soaring to 49 feet at its apex, the angled ceiling echoes the building’s pitched roof.

The museum’s most distinctive feature—its roof—is a direct quotation from Japanese history but rendered more abstractly, befitting a contemporary museum in an urban setting. While its traditional image ties the museum’s contents and container together, the pitched form, says Kuma, distinguishes the Nezu from the unpopular, boxlike public buildings around the country that do not blend with the Japanese environment. “A pitched roof harmonizes the ground and architecture,” he explains. Charcoal-colored ceramic tiles clad the entire roof surface, and their uniform texture accentuates the angled planes. Instead of ending with the typical, decorative flourish at the ridge or gutter, the matte surfaces terminate in tapered, sharp-edged eaves made of 0.13-inch-thick sheets of industrial grade steel—the same material covering the museum’s exterior walls.

Supported by 9-foot-long, cantilevered beams, the eaves shield the front walkway but submerge it in semidarkness. “People usually expect lighter spaces in public buildings,” comments Kuma. “But this darkness is necessary to separate [the museum] from Omotesando.” Black sandstone pavers compound this shadowy effect, while bamboo walls mitigate it. (Two rows of live bamboo plants buffer the building from the street, and split stalks adorn the facade, forging connections with both the garden and the interior.)

Inside the museum, Kuma used many of the same materials, including sandstone flooring and, especially, bamboo. Complementing the delicate tea utensils on display, exquisitely detailed bamboo panels cover walls and ceilings. In addition, the architect crafted versatile, L-shaped benches from both bamboo and wood salvaged from the old museum’s storehouses.

Today, those benches are one of the few reminders of the collection’s original home— a tranquil place where railway magnate Nezu Kaichiro I, the museum’s founder, first assembled and began sharing his treasures with the public. Drawing a wide audience that spans all ages and nationalities, the Nezu Museum now connects to its founder’s dream of honoring Japan’s artworks and brings the institution into the 21st century. Kuma’s design serves as a physical and metaphorical hinge linking old and new, inside and out, high-tech and traditional. And it does so in such a graceful way that it seems almost inevitable.

Herzog & de Meuron strips down in Miami Beach with a revealing new parking garage.

By Beth Broome

In the Pantheon of Building Types, the parking garage lurks somewhere in the vicinity of prisons and toll plazas. So a project in Miami’s South Beach consisting of a drive-through bank and office building renovation with a new parking garage as its crown jewel hardly seems a likely commission for Pritzker Prize–winning architects to take on. But when developer Robert Wennett approached Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron with this three-part program for 1111 Lincoln Road, the architects (who are also designing the new Miami Art Museum) saw possibility in addressing the urbanistic significance of the site, the climate, and the mix of uses. Plus, with an individual client—who collects art—they identified a ripe opportunity for experimentation and another chance to flip a stereotype on its head.

Over the years, Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road has undergone many transitions. Once considered the Fifth Avenue of the South, it suffered a decline in the 1950s, was rehabilitated as a promenade by Morris Lapidus, weathered more adversity through the 1980s, and reemerged in the 1990s with midmarket retail and street cafés. In 2005, when Wennett purchased the 1960s SunTrust Bank building and the adjacent parking lot at the entrance to the promenade facing the Regal Cinema, he hoped to revive the strip—a vehicular block abutting a bleak stretch of Alton Road—to its former glory and make it worthy of its position as the gateway to the city.

Approaching this “package deal” project as one of urban redevelopment, the team worked with the city and landscape architect Raymond Jungles to extend Lincoln Road by pedestrianizing the block. Because a new home was required for SunTrust before work on 1111 Lincoln Road could begin, Herzog & de Meuron designed a boxy, white two-story drive-through bank building on Alton Road with four apartments above. They then renovated the original building, removing the first two floors and replacing them with storefronts, with upper-level offices for creative businesses. Finally, the team added the 300-space car park, technically considered an extension of the SunTrust building. In step with other visionary architects who had tackled garages before, like Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis I. Kahn, and Paul Rudolph, the team had higher aspirations for the building type.

A robust house of cards, 1111 Lincoln Road is a composition of cast-in-place concrete slabs that function as floor plates, columns, and ramps winding through the compressions and expansions in heights of the six parking levels, which range from 8 to 34 feet. The building is anchored by ground-floor retail and topped by a restaurant and Wennett’s penthouse (both still under construction). A canopy above the retail spaces continues across the existing building to the new one, marrying the two structures that are otherwise linked only by bridges at each level. To carry life up off the street, the team wedged a boutique between the garage’s decks. And the soaring seventh-floor parking level does double-duty as an event space, hosting fashion shows, parties, and concerts.

Fancy footwork around constraints had impressive results. Zoning allowed a building height of 75 feet and the floor area ratio (FAR) provision enabled a program area of about one floor of enclosed space and six floors of parking (because parking does not count toward FAR, adding this amenity enabled the team to greatly expand the mass). The team argued that the height restriction would result in a building lacking adequate presence for its prominent location, and in relation to the 142-foot-high SunTrust building. Their proposal called for 50 additional vertical feet, while maintaining the FAR. By stretching the height of three of the parking floors, the team was able to increase the building’s visual impact (helping to attract high-end retailers, such as Taschen and Inkanta, geared toward “curating” rather just peddling merchandise), activate the car park by facilitating flexible use, and optimize the penthouse’s siting.

While the building may appear whimsical, its sculptural expression is the product of structural logic, say the architects. Their decision to vary the parking slabs both horizontally and vertically resulted in triangulated columns that lean out to buttress the cantilevers and split to accommodate ramps and long spans. In a nod to the building type’s humble pedigree, the team used class B concrete, so pockmarks and imperfections abound. But in the interest of differentiating the garage from its brethren, they employed an open stair and indirect lighting. And to keep lines clean, they used frameless elevators, limited exposed piping and lighting, and embedded the sprinkler system, lending the space the restrained ruggedness of a well-groomed five o’clock shadow.

While in some ways otherworldly, the building is very much of Miami. Inspired by Lapidus’s Tropical Modern canopies, fountains, and pavilions on the promenade below, the architects also nod to the local vernacular with the use of concrete and overhangs. Dispensing with exterior walls eliminates the need for air-conditioning and limits electrical lighting requirements. It also lends the building a gravity-defying flamboyance and affords expansive views and an awe-inspiring feeling of connection to the city and the elements.

The team has made a contribution to Miami Beach by providing a valuable amenity and creating a landmark and a vibrant public space that transcends shopping. In doing so, they have also pulled off quite the coup by transporting an apartment above the fray on a fantastic pedestal. But most of all, they are helping break the mold for the lowly parking garage, lifting it up out of its gloomy limbo into the light and air.

Centre Pompidou-Metz/Shigeru Ban

Under the Big Top: With a swoopy roof supported by a novel timber structure, the world-famous Centre Pompidou’s home for its first satellite challenges convention. Will it succeed?

By Rowan Moore

Shigeru Ban is an appealing architect. His emergency shelters of cardboard and paper, devised in response to disasters such as the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, present him as someone turning his skills to public benefit rather than personal gratification. He also designed a series of houses in which walls disappear or take the form of giant curtains. His choice of renewable materials gives him a warm, ecological glow. He seems to stand for the adaptive and responsive, with work that provides an antidote to the grandiose and the formal.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris has an astounding collection of Modern art and a history of imaginative exhibitions, installations, events, and structures. Its 1977 building, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, is a landmark of 20th-century architecture.

Ban and the museum have come together to create an $62 million outpost of the Pompidou in Metz, in eastern France. In theory, it could have been a wonderfully productive union. In practice, it is conspicuously, tragically less than the sum of its parts.

The main mission of Pompidou-Metz is to display works from the parent institution, in an admirable attempt to share its collection more widely. The obvious precedent is the expanding franchise of New York City’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, most famously with Frank Gehry’s building in Bilbao, Spain. As in Bilbao,

the aim is to raise the profile of a neglected city. Metz, whose contested ownership with Germany contributed to two world wars, now has a forgotten air, despite its fine stone streets and medieval cathedral. The new, 122,000-square-foot building is on the periphery, on the site of a former freight-railway depot, near the remnants of a Roman amphitheater, and separated by train tracks from the rest of the city. Close by is the town’s passenger-rail station, to which the TGV travels the 200 or so miles from Paris in a brisk hour and 23 minutes.

Tokyo-based Ban, together with French architect Jean de Gastines and Londoner Philip Gumuchdjian, won the design competition for the Pompidou-Metz in 2003. Gumuchdjian’s close involvement with the project subsequently ended, with Ban and de Gastines taking it to completion. Their concept was for an enveloping, undulating roof, compared by Ban to a bamboo hat, supported by a lattice of laminated and curved timber members. The seemingly woven structure, with spans of up to 170 feet, changes into funnel-like elements where the roof meets the ground.

The whole is covered in an 80,000-square-foot membrane of translucent fiberglass and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). The idea is that “the roof is on top of the landscape,” says Ban. “We wanted the landscape to flow into the museum,” he explains.

Beneath the roof is a loose assemblage of volumes. At ground level is the Grande Nef. Although intended primarily for large-scale work, the 60-foot-tall space has been divided into 17 relatively conventional rooms for the duration of the opening exhibition. Above is a stack of three galleries in shoe-box-shaped reinforced-concrete tubes, oriented to frame views of the surroundings through glazed ends. The tubes pivot around a steel elevator tower that pierces the roof and transforms into a 250-foot-high spire. Other volumes sheltered under the tentlike covering contain an auditorium, a restaurant, a café, a studio, and offices.

Rising the height of the interior is a big atrium, called the Forum, providing an open-ended area for events. It is semi-external, with transparent walls of polycarbonate and retractable glass doors that allow the space to open almost completely to a landscaped plaza.

As a concept, the project is convincing and seductive: a big, beautiful roof with free-form volumes underneath. It also reprises, in a very different location, the original Pompidou’s goal of urban revitalization. Yet the simplicity and lightness of the idea get lost in execution. You can’t really read the stack of tubes on the inside, which instead feels inchoate. Internal circulation is disjointed. The roof, conflated with the cuboid volumes beneath, becomes ponderous.

In addition, materials and systems—wood, plastic, metal, glass, competing grids and modules—collide in ways that seem underconsidered. De Gastines once worked for Gehry, but these are not the joyous collisions you find in Gehry’s work. If you ascend the tower, you find yourself on a balcony looking down on the atrium, which is potentially the culmination of the internal sequence. But the view is of mechanical equipment and the dust-gathering tops of the tubes enclosing galleries below.

The gallery interiors feel careless. In the inaugural exhibition, A-list works by Picasso, Brancusi, Miró, Duchamp, Dalí, Pollock, et al were washed with a dirty light, a drab metallic grid overhead. The spaces don’t show the attention that architects such as Piano or David Chipperfield would bring to materials, proportion, or detail. The idea was more for a studied casualness, but it doesn’t come off.

The theme of the building is the play of the monumental and the spontaneous, the permanent and the transient. However, instead of dancing together, these qualities entangle and trip. If it’s a tent, it’s a lugubrious one; if it’s a museum, it’s a shoddy one. The best things about the project are the works on display and the fact that they have come to Metz. There are some satisfying spatial moments, including the panoramic views from the galleries and the translucent roof lit up at night. Also successful was the studio that Ban created to deliver the project, a lightweight tube slung high up on the Piano and Rogers building in Paris. This temporary office perfectly responds to the original Pompidou’s spirit of appropriation and change. Disappointingly, this spirit seems to have been lost on the train ride east.

Tall Buildings Push Limits by Stepping Up, Not Back

By Josephine Minutillo

Since the dawn of the skyscraper, architects have been preoccupied with going higher. In the mid-to-late 19th century, advances in steel construction and elevator technology allowed buildings to soar into the air—usually going straight up, or sometimes tapering back a bit at the top. While some recently completed and still-under-construction buildings are currently vying for the title of “World’s Tallest,” these days—with less emphasis on achieving great heights—architects are exploring new directions.

One such architect, not surprisingly, is Rem Koolhaas. His Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has designed a striking—some might say audacious—residential tower for Manhattan’s Flatiron district. When completed (current plans have the project moving forward), it will be OMA’s first building in New York City, the setting for Koolhaas’s 1978 classic book, Delirious New York. In it, Koolhaas celebrates the early-20th-century drawings of Hugh Ferriss, which illustrate the possibilities for skyscrapers following the landmark 1916 Zoning Law that created New York’s pervasive setback buildings.

Koolhaas’s building at 23 East 22nd Street also refers to Ferriss’s work, though in an unexpected way. “This is a typical New York building, but turned on its head,” says Jason Long, the project architect based in OMA’s New York office. Growing out of a narrow lot, the building rises straight up for several stories, then swells at its midsection, tapering back again at the top. “The shape of the building derived from two acts of kindness,” Long explains. The stepped condition of the cantilevering midsection allows sunlight to continue to reach the roof garden of the neighboring building. By tapering at the top, the building does not impede downtown views from inside One Madison Park, a much taller tower by the same developer, Slazer Enterprises, currently under construction on 23rd Street. (The two buildings will share an entrance lobby and amenities.)

The 355-foot-tall OMA building would tower over its neighbors on 22nd Street, a mostly residential block lined with a mix of 10- to 12-story structures and smaller town houses in the shadow of the Flatiron Building. The original motivation for the growth spurt in the OMA building’s midsection was to provide a good mix of apartment units—a total of 18 luxury units, including several duplexes and terraces—with varying floor plans and ceiling heights. OMA’s initial design included a much more dramatic cantilever. Working from the earliest stages of design development with structural engineers at WSP Cantor Seinuk, however, OMA modified that element so that the cantilever became more gradual. The first cantilever, on the seventh floor, where the building sets back slightly, is the greatest, at 10 feet 5 inches, with successive ones above it stepping out at every other floor for a total overhang of 30 feet 8 inches above the adjacent five-story town house to the east. (The developer purchased air rights from a number of nearby properties.)

Spanning 10 floors of the 24-story building, the cantilever resembles an inverted staircase. At such a scale, the daring design is impressive, but the concept is an ancient one. In a corbel, which predates vaults, a block or brick is partially embedded in a wall, with one end projecting out from the face. The weight of added masonry above stabilizes the cantilever and keeps the block from falling out of the wall. The same theory holds true for this building, though steel plates are added at each of the cantilevered floors to counter overturning due to lateral, or wind, forces. In the absence of such forces, the building would be completely stable without additional support because of plans to use post-tensioning cables to anchor it into the bedrock.

The primary structure of the building, however, is not steel but concrete. The facades are composed of 12-inch-thick, high-strength structural concrete and act as sheer walls (thinning out to 10 inches above the 21st floor). The structural strategy can alternately be described as a tube with punched-out window openings or a series of stacked Vierendeel trusses that form a tube. “The structure fits nicely with the architecture,” explains Silvian Marcus, C.E.O. of WSP Cantor Seinuk. “Because the floor area is so small, putting the structure in the perimeter keeps the interiors free of columns. It also suits the architects’ desire for varied fenestration.”

In fact, the vertical window openings, which mimic those of nearby buildings, play a significant structural role. The size of the openings correlates to moments of stress. In areas under greatest stress, the window spacing is modified to provide increased structural area and rigidity, supporting the building like a structural corset. In the tower’s midsection, where the forces generated by the cantilevers are greatest, openings are smallest. There, ceiling heights are also at their lowest at 11 feet. Where forces are minimal, as at the top of the building, ceiling heights increase to 15 feet, and openings get bigger, creating loftlike interiors. All of the forces from the upper part of the building travel down the east and west side walls to the building’s base, where a 46-foot-tall, column-free screening room for the Creative Artists Agency is located. The box-in-box construction at the base acoustically isolates the screening room from the apartments. Adds Long, “In some ways, the base is more complicated structurally than the cantilever above.”

A similarly stepped building is planned—and was recently approved for construction by the local municipality—for Rødovre, a suburb of Copenhagen. Facing fewer site restrictions in terms of lot size and adjacent buildings than OMA’s tower, Sky Village—as the mixed-use building is being called—steps out in more than one direction. Designed by Rotterdam-based MVRDV and its Danish codesigners, ADEPT, the 380-foot-tall “stacked neighborhood” features a combination of apartments, offices, retail, and parking.

The basic design starts with a square grid of 36 units, or pixels, each two stories tall and measuring 251⁄2 feet wide by 251⁄2 feet long, a dimension arrived at for its flexibility for use as a suitable parking grid, housing unit, and office type. The four central pixels make up the core. Surrounding pixels are removed and stacked on top of each other in various configurations, though no single floor comprises all 36 pixels. The building gets “fattest” about a third of the way up, where floors contain up to 26 pixels. “We’re very fond of Legos and use them in the office for conceptual designs,” says Anders Peter Galsgaard, one of the Copenhagen-based engineers. “We try to build the same way.”

Galsgaard also likens the structure to a Christmas tree, with a very stiff base, in this case consisting of two levels of underground parking, and a main trunk, the cast-in-place concrete core made up of elevators, stairs, and shafts. The pixels, which have a column at each of the corners and diagonal bracing on two sides, will hang from the core from steel trusses rather than cantilever in the traditional sense. According to Galsgaard, “Hanging the pixels this way creates a lot of compression in the core, so even under very high wind loads there is very little tension, which allows us to use steel more efficiently.”

The shape of the 380-foot-tall volume—described by the engineers as “not exactly optimal in terms of aerodynamics, but not bad either”—was derived from a variety of considerations. Wind forces in Denmark are mainly from the west, and are also much stronger than those from the east. By hanging more units facing west, they are essentially leaning into the wind, thus optimizing the structural design.

While the designers took into account the impact of wind loads, programmatic considerations heavily influenced the final form. By varying the infill, a mix of offices and apartments are created. Stacking more units toward the north, a taller building emerges with sunnier, south-facing terraces and views to Copenhagen. The designers wanted to minimize the impact of shadows on the surrounding low-rise houses without blocking views on the street level. By pulling away most of the pixels on the ground floor, an open outdoor plaza is created, with some space kept for lobbies and shops. Using identical pixel-unit sizes for cutouts in the ground, the plaza achieves the same qualities and character as the rest of the tower, as if the tower were emerging from the ground.

For another New York building, now under construction and moving forward, Los Angeles–based Neil M. Denari Architects used a different approach. Rather than stepping up, the reverse-tapering form of HL23—a 14-story residential building on New York City’s West Side—gradually slopes out. “We didn’t want a Cartesian stepping like a wedding cake,” says Denari, whose design was inspired instead by a prism.

Denari, like OMA, was faced with a narrow Manhattan lot, which was further constrained by the presence of the High Line—a 22-block-long former railway that rises almost 20 feet above grade—immediately adjacent to it. But unlike OMA’s tower a few blocks east, which is completely (and surprisingly) as-of-right, Denari’s building— his first ground-up design—required a number of waivers. “There were a lot of restrictions for this site, but the developer was not interested in conforming to the building code,” Denari admits. “He really wanted to push boundaries.” Fortunately for both the architect and the developer, the city was behind the project, particularly because of its relation to the High Line, which is currently being transformed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Field Operations from its disused state into a nearly 7-acre, elevated urban park.

Denari’s project also takes a much different structural approach than 23 East 22nd Street. “Because the building is wider at the top than at the bottom, there is a natural instability,” explains Stephen DeSimone, president of DeSimone Consulting Engineers, who is working with Denari. “By using steel—which is a much lighter building material—you automatically reduce the effect of the building wanting to topple over.” So, unlike 23 East 22nd Street, which can be described as a brute-force solution with its thick concrete walls, HL23 is made up of slender structural members, including canted steel columns (at a maximum 24-degree angle and located mostly along the long, steel-clad eastern facade) and diagonal bracing (composed of 8-inch pipes and forming a tripartite composition on the glazed north and south elevations).

The building reaches overall stability only upon completion of construction. Throughout the construction process, guy-wires provide supplemental bracing. They will stay in place until the concrete slabs are poured. Because of the small building footprint, concrete is not used in the elevator core. Instead, a steel plate acts as a sheer wall to take horizontal and twisting loads—the first time such an assembly has been used in a residential building in New York City, according to the engineers.

The structure is also integral to the envelope, and was designed at the same time, with facade consultant Front, to avoid any “reverse engineering,” as Denari puts it. The sloping east facade, which cantilevers a total of 14 feet 6 inches over the High Line (it is set back 8 feet from the High Line platform at the second floor), features custom-designed stainless-steel panels with small window openings. The north and south facades feature extra-large glass panels measuring up to 111⁄2 feet tall.

As construction progresses, an independent contractor lasers the structure to produce surveys on an ongoing basis. “This building is closer to a Swiss watch than most buildings,” says Denari. “Ambitions are higher and tolerances are smaller. None of the steel can be even slightly out of place.”

Though the forms of each of these buildings are new, the technology that makes them possible is not. And while they seem to push the limits of structural engineering, they have only just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible for 21st-century buildings.