Val Notre-Dame Abbey

Monastic Revival: Pierre Thibault's pared-down architecture for a new abbey outside Montreal connects relocated monks with nature.

By Josephine Minutillo

The Christian monastery, among the most paradigmatic of building types, has for centuries retained the basic formula of a square plan around a cloistered garden. Nevertheless, since the Middle Ages, these complexes, including their church buildings, were often progressive examples of Western architecture. But long after religious communities ceased being the most influential patrons of the built environment, their leaders continued to support Modern architecture. And Modern architects have jumped at the chances, so few and far between, to interpret the building type in their own way. In the 1950s, both Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer designed monastic buildings: the former, the Dominican monastery of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Tourette near Lyon, France; the latter, the lesser-known Benedictine complex for Saint John’s Abbey and University in Minnesota (and later, its sister institution, Annunciation Priory in North Dakota). In each case, the community leaders were looking for a bold design.

The same was not true for the Cistercian monks of Notre-Dame-du-Lac Abbey in Oka, outside Montreal. Their existing building, a late-19th-century stone structure designed to house over 150 monks at its peak, had become far too big for the community’s diminished population, reduced to just under 30 monks at the start of this century.

In the intervening years, the surrounding area also changed — from a place of peace and solitude to a highly trafficked corridor, in conflict with the order’s call for its monasteries to be located in areas remote from human intercourse.

Recently, when a community of Czech Cistercians relocated from France back to their homeland, they chose John Pawson as their architect, finding his Minimalism compatible with their ascetic lifestyle and traditional architecture [Record, September 2007, page 132]. The French- Canadian Cistercians at Oka instead sought a greater connection to nature, and saw in Pierre Thibault an architect whose sensitivity to the landscape, best exemplified in his residential projects [Record, July 2007, page 184], perfectly suited their way of life.

The Quebec architect was selected to build the new complex, Val Notre-Dame Abbey, at Saint-Jean-de-Matha, 80 miles northeast of Oka, following a 2004 competition. Though the monks were open to forms that deviated from that well-known paradigm — several such buildings were constructed after the order’s constitution reforms of 1969 — Thibault’s winning submission for a low, sprawling structure hidden among the trees maintained the ideal plan, with the church on the north side and the cloister immediately south of it.

Much of Thibault’s design adheres to traditional layouts to accommodate the tight programmatic requirements. For instance, the guest wing is on axis with the refectory, so that the common kitchen between the two serves both the monks and their guests. (Despite the order’s desire for seclusion, hospitality is one of its missions, and the monks often host visitors on short retreats.) The simple, unadorned elevations of the church and outer cloister, originally designed with stone but executed in white concrete panels, also follow tradition.

Thibault’s pared-down Modernism and preference for natural materials and basic construction details retain a touch of the vernacular. From the outside, his buildings, including the monastery, appear like found objects in nature, an achievement in itself. But it is from the inside that his architecture comes alive. At the monastery, the space that does so more than any other — through light, sound, and a spectacular 30-foot-high window onto nature — is the church. It is here that the monks spend most of their day, beginning at 4 a.m., with the first of seven daily offices.

The order’s rules dictate that the church face east, as Christ is seen in the rising sun. Thibault’s decision to terminate the apse in an entirely glazed wall, while not heretical, is certainly unorthodox. Throughout the day, the view changes dramatically; over the course of a year, even more so.

During predawn services, the wall appears solid black. Daylight hours treat churchgoers to a view where the slender trunks of silver birch trees peek out from the warmer months’ dense foliage or winter’s bare, snow-covered branches. A stray deer or coyote, and once even a bear, has wandered past during services. Birds have been known to add their song to the monks’ chanting.

Since chanting plays such a large role in the offices, Thibault paid special attention to the space’s acoustics. The nave’s permeable walls feature rows of wild-cherry planks, each slightly more inclined as they get higher so that the sum of the various angles forms a vaulted shape from bottom to top.

Thibault’s office designed the stalls by the altar where the monks face each other during services, and the pews where up to 120 visitors can be seated. The two are deliberately separated to avoid interaction between the monks, who enter and exit the church via side aisles, and the lay community.

The new monastery is a third the size of the former building at Oka, yet its cloister is larger. The full-height, triple-glazed units of the inner cloister’s lower level offer constant views of the garden and of passing monks on opposite sides. In the dark of night, small recessed lights placed a foot above the floor along all four faces of the cloister appear like floating candles in the glass reflections, an especially poignant vision when the monks are in procession to the first office of the day.

Thibault retained the existing plantings within the garden, whose sunken appearance happened quite by accident. The site’s high water table was discovered only after construction documents were completed. To address this unforeseen setback, Thibault raised much of the building by several feet.

While it might come as a surprise to some, the building incorporates state-of-the-art, 21st-century technologies, including a sophisticated, computerized building management system that monitors, among other things, the 14 geothermal wells located below a nearby parking lot. But then again, monasteries were among the first buildings to harness electrical power at the turn of the last century.

It was the monks’ desire to make the building’s environmental footprint as light as possible, so that the monastery not only exists in nature but respects it. Locally sourced wood was used for most of the structure and cedar cladding. Roofs over the lower levels, including by the individual cell’s private terraces, were planted. A drainage system collects rainwater and recycles gray water.

The biggest design challenge, however, had nothing to do with formal or practical concerns. The life of a monk is a contemplative one, where spirituality takes precedence over everything else. By connecting the interiors to the outside and, more important, by capturing light — both natural and artificial — Thibault created spaces with floors and walls that feel immaterial, the antithesis of Le Corbusier’s and Breuer’s brute concrete. The monastery’s inhabitants treasure this quality most. In the words of one monk, “La lumière est l’espace. It is the same thing.”

Ewha Womans University Campus Center

Dominique Perrault blends built and natural environments in a new campus center for the growing student body of Seoul’s Ewha Womans University.

By Robert Ivy, FAIA

Blurring the line between construction and topography, French architect Dominique Perrault’s campus center for Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea’s trendy Sinchon district is seamlessly integrated into the sloping hillside it intersects. At the crux of the prestigious campus, this multitiered, multifunctional hive of activity anchors the site and creates a landscape of its own.

The unique site is particularly fitting for the school, which was founded by American Methodist missionary Mary F. Scranton in 1886 and named Ewha (pear blossom in Sino-Korean) by the emperor in 1887 for the abundance of delicate flora at its original location in the city’s central Chong-dong area. Beyond poetic metaphor, however, necessity was the mother of this striking structural invention.

Primarily, the existing gated campus of traditional Collegiate Gothic structures, designed in the 1930s by W.M. Vories, the eponymous, Japan-based architectural design firm of Kansas-born William Merrell Vories, was becoming increasingly inadequate. Ewha had risen in prominence and size to more than 20,000 students—reputedly the world’s largest private women’s university. Yet, while its international student body continued to grow, most domestic students were living at home, many with 2-hour commutes, and the campus lacked sufficient study space or places to gather for long days at school. For those who did remain on campus, weekends proved disconcertingly lonely and detached. Moreover, the addition of a notable building would communicate the university’s growing global connection.

Working with a task force, former university president Shin In-ryung established structural and logistical guidelines for the proposed facility. It would be embedded into the landscape, include bi-level parking and a commercial area on lower levels, and redefine access to the campus. It was also determined that the project would require a design by an established international architect. So in February 2004, invitations to compete for the project were sent to a select group of firms from which three finalists were chosen: Zaha Hadid, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), and Perrault.

Ultimately, the commission was awarded to Perrault for his scheme’s sensitivity to landscape. According to the architect, his brief was “to expand urban activities into the campus.” His solution was to rebuild the site’s original topography, a hill with a slope; introduce the new building into the “constructed” hillside; then cover the building with a park. The result is both heroic and naturalistic, depending on the viewer’s perspective.

Remarkably, little changed from Perrault’s original program. Crucial to his realization was the decision to bifurcate the concrete-framed structure, dividing it into seemingly cloned halves by an immense rift, or “valley”—a strong assertion of contemporary intervention into the landscape. Ramped from its intersection with the street, this passage, lined with granite pavers, descends into the sliced reconstructed hillside, allowing access to the buildings along its route. It then terminates at a grand stairway that not only climbs up into the campus at the opposite end but serves as an informal seating area or, as Perrault envisioned, an open-air amphitheater. Intended to be a link to the community and social space for students and visitors, this walkway maintains a controlled progression of height to width that points downward to the interior activities, and upward to the older buildings on the hills above.

Insulated glazed walls, supported by a polished, stainless-steel-clad aluminum framing system notable for its perpendicular vertical fins, provide light to the lowest interior levels and animate both indoor and oudoor spaces with human activity. Intermittent doorways, signified by bold graphic numerals, provide the simplest of alterations to the otherwise continuous curtain wall.

Surmounting the binary structure, a green roof partially conceals the large building footprints. At the outset, Perrault intended to plant trees in this overhead park, but the shallow depth of the soil would only permit grass and shrubs. Nonetheless, the constructed roofscape produces a natural effect with a stone path that meanders among plantings, artfully introduced mechanical elements (read chimneys), and stairs. It is difficult to understand if the park existed on the hillside, or if the hillside is entirely new. Indeed, the passageway can disappear from view, depending on where one stands on either side of the building, leaving only greenery merged with the campus landscape.

Perrault, a proponent of below-grade structures—with built projects like the French National Library in Paris and Velodrome and Olympic swimming pool in Berlin under his belt—feels there should be more research on the use of the earth, or landscape, as a viable building material like concrete or steel. “Usually nature is around the architecture,” he says, adding that he and fellow architects should be “thinking about another kind of relationship with nature and soil.”

Within this trompe l’oeil–like setting, one will find a battery of much-needed spaces—enough to constitute “a small city,” notes Yoonhie Lee, associate professor of the university’s department of architecture, and a member of the original competition committee instrumental in the center’s interior programming. No single programmatic element dominates, though the building tends to aggregate the noisier, more social activities on the lowest level, four levels beneath the roof. Like a commercial district, this level, B-4, contains a twinned-screen art cinema, coffee houses, a gymnasium, restaurant, theater, art exhibition space, commercial banks, and retail outlets.

The higher you ascend, the quieter it gets, because, explains Lee, while classes are held here, one of the center’s most important functions is to provide places for study. Formal, monitored librarylike spaces, with reserved carrels and desks, alternate with informal couches interspersed throughout, where students talk in small groups, review lessons, or simply socialize. A large, open staircase links upper and lower levels adjacent to the glazed curtain wall and seems to attract more student traffic on inclement days than the “valley” outside, which can seem daunting. While gravity-based drainage removes heavy monsoon rain, snowfall on the outer passage must be cleared by hand.

Of course, one benefit of building into a hillside is energy conservation. According to university sources, the thermal mass of the green roof and side walls sheltered by existing topography has resulted in a passive protection system that saves up to 25 percent of total energy costs as compared to conventional construction. Perrault also used a concrete core activation system, (aka in-floor HVAC made of piped heating and cooling under floor slabs) along with a “thermal labyrinth” system that optimizes air flow in the interstices between retaining walls and other structural elements to cool ambient air. And while the building’s interior could have been dark and dingy, Perrault and his collaborators inserted light wells down through to the lowest inhabited levels, a strategy augmented by the glazing.

In terms of budget, the simple system and material choices, such as exposed-concrete columns, helped to deliver the building on time and within the financial strictures of the university. Even fireproofing, often prohibitive in such large open spaces, doubled as decorative elements in the otherwise muted interiors.

Clearly, Ewha Womans University took a bold step specifying a scheme that goes not up, but down. No less dramatic or memorable than the towers dotting the Asian landscape, the campus center makes a strong statement of the institution’s commitment to the future, to its heritage, to its place in the environment, and to its students.

California Academy of Sciences

By Clifford A. Pearson

Renzo Piano calls his new building for the California Academy of Sciences a “soft machine.” “It sounds better in Italian, because machine brings to mind the process of making and Leonardo in his workshop,” he explains, pronouncing the Italian word macchina. The architect and his team at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) conceived of the 410,000-square-foot project as a manifestation of the academy’s mission to study, store, and exhibit the wonders of natural science. “It’s a machine for preserving nature,” says Piano. Great idea. But this is a big machine, at a key location in Golden Gate Park, and it needs to engage a lot of different people: the 10-year-old kid looking for the live penguins, the 40-year-old ichthyologist working there, and the romantic couple sitting on a bench in the adjacent plaza, called the Music Concourse.

Part museum and part research-and-storage institute, the academy occupies the site of its predecessor—an 11-building complex erected piecemeal from 1916 to 1976 and damaged beyond repair by the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. It faces Herzog & de Meuron’s de Young Museum [record, November 2005, page 104] across the Music Concourse, creating a dialogue between equally famous foreign architects working on public buildings of equal scale. While Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron wrapped their museum in an array of copper panels (dimpled, bubbled, and flat), and Piano surrounded his with extremely clear, low-iron glass, both projects attach themselves to the park—the de Young with fingers of landscaped space entwined with gallery wings, and the academy with enormous, floor-to-ceiling views outside. The firms’ very different approaches to similar sets of issues makes this pairing one of the most fascinating in the country—on par with Kahn and Ando in Fort Worth. When asked about the academy’s relationship with the de Young, Piano says he didn’t think about it much. “This is what you get when you are yourself and they are themselves.”

Piano’s initial sketch for the academy shows a long, undulating roof in section: Where large programmatic elements sit, it rises up to accommodate them, and where less is needed, it dips down. “So it becomes organic,” states the architect. “At first, I wanted to do the roof as a wood structure, to build it like the keel of a boat,” he explains. In the end, though, it was made of steel, in part to limit the number of trees cut down. From the start of the project, Piano collaborated with Chong Partners (now Stantec), even bringing designers from the San Francisco firm to work in his Genoa office for certain periods.

Piano saw the roof as a metaphor for the entire project. “I saw it as topography,” he adds. “The idea was to cut a piece of the park, push it up 35 feet—to the height of the old buildings—and then put whatever was needed underneath.” From the beginning, he envisioned a green roof that would be an extension of the park and serve as a thermal buffer for the spaces below. “Twenty-first-century architecture must be about sustainability,” he asserts. “This isn’t a moralistic stance; it’s simply what architecture must be.”

For an institution devoted to the natural sciences, such an attitude was particularly important. The building, which received a LEED Platinum rating after it opened at the end of September, employs an impressive range of green strategies, including recycling 90 percent of the demolition waste from the old buildings; using recycled material for all of its structural steel; incorporating insulation made from recycled blue jeans; employing heat-recovery systems to capture and use heat generated by HVAC equipment; using radiant heating in floors; ensuring that 90 percent of regularly occupied space has access to daylight; naturally ventilating almost the entire building (see sidebar, page66); and reducing the need for potable water by using low-flow plumbing fixtures and reclaimed water from the City of San Francisco.

The green roof, which bulges to form seven hills, plays a critical role in the building’s sustainable-design performance—reducing storm-water runoff by 98 percent, providing thermal insulation, and creating a 2.5-acre habitat for 1.7 million native-Californian plants and all kinds of insects and birds. The undulating roof incorporates glass panels above part of a central piazza and small circular skylights set into the various “hills.” The skylights, which are controlled by an automated system, all open and close to naturally ventilate the spaces underneath. A solar canopy wrapping around the perimeter of the building contains more than 55,000 photovoltaic cells that can generate 213,000 kilowatt hours each year (at least 5 percent of the academy’s energy needs). According to Arup, which provided sustainability-consulting services, as well as structural and mechanical engineering, the building will consume 30 to 35 percent less energy than required by California’s already strict building code.

Varied Responses to Vague Theme at the Venice Biennale

By Diana Lind

12th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2010
Curated by Kazuyo Sejima | Through November 21, 2010

The international architecture exhibition produced every two years in Venice is a sprawling, humid, one-stop shopping experience. When done right, it’s also exhilarating. Though the strategy of showcasing architecture’s freshest ideas through national pavilions and exhibition galleries has had its drawbacks in the Architecture Biennale’s 30-year history, high-quality submissions help make this year’s show feel curated. The recurring threads of sustainability, adaptive reuse, and traditional building methods — while planning for an uncertain future — give the show an underlying coherence.

This year’s director, Kazuyo Sejima of the Japanese firm SANAA, chose a remarkably enigmatic theme for the Biennale — People Meet in Architecture — which may alienate the audience and architects, but by virtue of its vagueness makes almost every project feel tangentially related to it. Is Sejima celebrating the way architecture provides the place for human exchange, or is she urging architects to refocus their energies on people, rather than architecture’s competing priorities of economic development, environmental sustainability, and technological innovation?

This year’s pavilions and exhibitions address these questions with varying directness. Most of the exhibitions in the voluminous, brick-walled rooms of the Arsenale take a loose interpretation. Olafur Eliasson’s Your Split Second House, a pitch-black room with pulsing stroboscopic lights that illuminate wildly lashing water hoses making violent noise, seems to have no agenda other than to intrigue and delight visitors. Nearby, the German climate-engineering practice Transsolar offers Cloudscapes, where condensed air forms clouds one can walk into by ascending curving ramps.

Other responses to Sejima’s mandate encourage visitors to rethink their experience of architecture and how they see themselves within it. One playful look into this topic can be found in the Romanian Pavilion. With a population density in urban Bucharest of one person per 1,000 square feet, the Romanian team, led by Tudor Vlasceanu, created an all-white rectangle, positioned on a bias within the gallery, which represents the dimensions of this space. Small circles in the sides of the construction give visitors a view inside the box, while a door allows one visitor at a time to experience the interior. Bluntly demonstrated is the voyeuristic nature of architecture and the way in which buildings without people feel meaningless. When no one stands inside the ark, the space looks like a sterile void; with a person within it, the space is suddenly like a highbrow peep show, dramatized by the simple, brightly lit, white aesthetic.

It seemed that Sejima’s firm, SANAA, hoped to elicit similar reflection on how buildings are enlivened by people and vice versa with the 13-minute film, If Buildings Could Talk…. But whereas the Romanian Pavilion achieves this goal with its understatement, the 3D treatment by celebrated director Wim Wenders feels a little overwrought, its interpretation of Sejima’s theme a little too explicit. The film’s voice-over explains how SANAA’S Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the people within it are nourished by each other’s presence, while accompanying footage shows close-ups of people breathing deeply, eyes closed. Buildings should be left to do the talking.

The display at the Kingdom of Bahrain’s debut pavilion, which won the Golden Lion Award, is far more effective at capturing the interchange between people and architecture. Reclaim examines the consequences of rapid urban development on a tiny country that has long lived off fishing and pearling in the sea. Installed in the space are three small wood shacks that once served as fishermen’s shelters. Flat screens within the shacks show footage of fishermen lamenting their loss of connection not only to the sea but to these structures.

Numerous pavilions reassure visitors that architecture is still the best tool for ensuring a more sustainable future, primarily through better, denser urban communities. The U.S. Pavilion, Workshopping, takes a modest look at architecture’s problem-solving capacity. Practices such as Archeworks, which exhibits a mobile agricultural project, and cityLAB, which cleverly shows how to make Los Angeles denser by adding small houses to backyards, points out that entrepreneurialism and experimentation is critical to the sustainability not only of our cities but of the architecture profession. Michael Shapiro, director of the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, an organizer of the U.S. Pavilion (with 306090, Inc.), chose to also bring in a display of John Portman & Associates’ 40-year-long development of the Peachtree Center in Atlanta. But despite their individual merits, the seven exhibits within the pavilion do not feel conceptually linked.

Vacant NL, the Dutch Pavilion, curated by Rietveld Landscape, includes a picturesque urban blue-foam model balanced on wires strung from the pavilion’s mezzanine level. The exhibition highlights the problem of vacant public buildings in the Netherlands, noting that the Dutch Pavilion is used only three months a year. With regard to the intentions, Ole Bouman, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which organized the show, writes, “A good building makes something happen beyond the building itself.” That goes for the Biennales. This Biennale will undoubtedly extend its influence beyond the exhibition itself with the humble reminder that architecture is only as relevant or meaningful as the people and their activities within it.

Richmond Olympic Oval by Fast + EPP, Richmond, British Columbia, Canada

By Rob Gregory

The world’s longest glulam wood/steel arches at Richmond’s Olympic skating venue

Chris Rudge, CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee, did not pull any punches when comparing this building with other, more celebrated Olympic landmarks. On architect Cannon Design’s website, he declared: ‘Every visit to the Richmond Olympic Oval is awe-inspiring,’ adding that, while much has been said about the visual impact of Beijing’s National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) and Aquatics Centre (the Water Cube) and their ‘stunning’ exteriors, interiors ‘were rather pedestrian’. By contrast, ‘the interior of the Oval is majestic’.

Creating a column-free space in which Olympic speed skaters chased record times, the structure itself became this site’s first record holder, with the world’s longest composite glulam wood/steel arches achieving a 95m span. However, what caught the attention of Trevor Boddy in his article for the AR (March 2010) was not the impressive statistics or opinions of the host city’s politicians. Rather, it was the innovative use of small-section timber, salvaged from threatened British Columbia pine. With many wood producers forced to harvest timber early due to the impact of hungry pine beetles, this impressive 2.5ha roof (built for £475 per m2) found an inventive use for the unusually large stockpiles of the humble two-by-four stud.

The primary structure comprises 15 arches at 14.2m centres formed by two slabs of 175 x 1,700mm glue-laminated Douglas fir wood connected at the bottom with a 10mm thick stiffened steel blade. Between these are the ingenious pre-tensioned ‘wood wave’ panels that tie the arches together and give the interior its distinctive serrated character.

While other infill options were considered, a US $1.5 million (£980,000) research contribution from the state government and forest industry enabled Vancouver-based engineers Fast + Epp, working with sister company StructureCraft, to offer, as managing director Paul Fast explains, ‘a unique made-in-BC solution that would also meet the wood/pine-beetle use design criteria’. Typically produced in 3.6 x 13m triple V units, held in bow-shaped form by three Dywidag tension rods, the roof’s prefabrication also included installation of acoustic and fire insulation and sprinkler branches.

In 2009, Fast + Epp won an Institution of Structural Engineers Award for its innovative ideas in the Oval, beating Arup’s design for the Bird’s Nest. Boddy says: ‘If the heavy steel members and faux-sculptural mesh of the Arup/Herzog & de Meuron design represents the architecture and economies of the decade past, the elegant green efficiency of Fast + Epp surely represent a bold direction for this new decade. [Olympic medal designer Omer] Arbel’s magnificent gold medals should go to engineers for leading the way for shunted-aside architects in North America’s greenest city.’