‘Building Stories’ Opens at the National Building Museum

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by Deane

The National Building Museum is near (as in, just four Metro stops away) and dear (we’ve hosted birthday parties here and attended countless events, both with and without kids), and I’m always delighted to attend their exhibition openings; I’ve had the good fortune to cover several of these for Architectural Record, and this one, Building Stories, is a lovely survey of the crossover between architecture and publication—two topics also near and dear.

An excerpt from Architectural Record:

Storytelling is an art form that requires continuous refinement, occasional improvisation, and meticulous editing until a final draft emerges, but the finished form tends to elide the process that led to it. At the National Building Museum (NBM)’s new exhibition, Building Stories, which is set to anchor the NBM’s ground floor for the next decade, the often-messy creation process is revealed and celebrated through proud display of maquettes, drafts, and sketches that become memorable stories. Ostensibly an exhibition of children’s books about architecture, Building Stories aims to be for “anyone who is naturally curious and who loves a good story—whether it’s told in words, pictures, or both,” as curator Leonard Marcus puts it.

Entering through a series of cross-laminated timber arches, visitors immediately encounter stories in the form of an eight-channel audio installation of voices reading aloud excerpts from books within the exhibition. This immersion within the realm of storytelling continues spatially through four galleries, each with its own narrative theme, all related to design overtly or otherwise. The first gallery starts with metaphorical building blocks in the form of a wall of alphabet books from around the world, just inside the CLT portal; literal building blocks, including examples of Froebel and unit blocks, also line display cases within the gallery alongside rough models by Tatiana Bilbao, Jennifer Bonner, and Frank Gehry, among others.  

Read the full article at Architectural Record, or keep scrolling here for additional images from the preview.

Portals between galleries within the exhibition play with sense of scale.
Model by Frank Gehry within Building Stories
House of Cards, by the Ray and Charles Eames; Best Sandwiches models by Jennifer Bonner
Hello Lighthouse book dummy by Sophia Blackall at the Building Stories exhibition
Bespoke bookshelves by exhibition designers Traci Sym and Daniel Meyers of Portland, Oregon–based studio + & > (Plus and Greater Than)
Sketches of the Pantheon for Rome Antics, by David Macauley

That’s all, folks! You’ve got roughly ten years to go see it for yourselves.

Charlottesville’s Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE) in Architectural Record

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by Deane

It is always a thrill to do a site visit to a see a new project, and this one was a delightful opportunity to revisit Charlottesville, a place to which I should go more often. Here’s the new Center of Developing Entrepreneurs—which integrates a stepped building into a challenging, sloping site—which appeared in Architectural Record‘s May issue.

An excerpt from Architectural Record:

Charlottesville’s Center of Developing Entrepreneurs (CODE) is a beguiling chameleon, created to foster the growth of new local businesses while also engaging its community. Designed by the local firm WOLF ACKERMAN and the New Orleans–based EskewDumezRipple (EDR), which has a second office in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., the project was conceived by CSH Development to encourage nearby University of Virginia graduates to remain in the city. The goal: to transform it into a business hub that could compete with the likes of Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas. “The whole idea of the building was, utilizing the concept of a coworking space as an entry point for young people,” says EDR principal José Alvarez. This vision—to attract and nurture talent within a building—he says, inspired a form that steps from level to level to symbolize how one can move up and “grow” a business.

Built on an incline, the structure changes scale at every elevation: On Main Street, the city’s historic pedestrian mall, it is a three-story building, in keeping with the small shops lining this promenade. On Water Street, at its southern edge, the building rises nine stories from the ground to its apex. And, from the top of Vinegar Hill, looking back toward the mall, it takes on another perspective with a four-story band of brick rainscreen, with staggered windows above a ground-level plinth, which grows from single- to double-height as the building moves downhill across an 18-foot change in elevation. It also masks the point where the building steps up, adding another three levels clad in clay-colored metal above the four-story brick band on its Water Street frontage.

Read the full story at Architectural Record: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/16223-eskewdumezripple-and-wolf-ackermans-center-of-developing-entrepreneurs-steps-up-to-history

Beyer Blinder Belle Completes Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C.

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by Deane
Entrance to the Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C. Photo: Deane Madsen

Last week, I attended the opening of the Rubell Museum in Washington, D.C., and had the good fortune to cover the opening for Architectural Record. It’s an exciting project, one that revitalizes a historic 1906 school building within the District’s Urban Renewal zone of the 1960s. The art collection is astounding, and the architecture makes great use of the existing spaces; it almost feels like being in an art classroom getting tutored by some of the biggest names in contemporary art, and the private ownership of the museum means that shows can be riskier, content edgier, and installations bolder than what the neighboring institutions along the Mall can pull off.

Beyer Blinder Belle also designed Gallery 64, the 12-story residential building (at right) adjacent to the Rubell Museum (at left). Photo: Deane Madsen

An excerpt from the piece:

On October 29, the Rubell Museum opened its doors to the public in the southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. It is part of a development more than a decade in the making of an underutilized parcel formerly occupied by the Randall School and rehabilitated by Beyer Blinder Belle (BBB). Situated on the side of the freeway cutting through southwest DC away from the progression of Smithsonian museums that line the National Mall, the Rubell Museum offers a sizable influx of contemporary art that expands the city’s cultural center. The other part of the site’s development is Gallery 64, a 12-story apartment building immediately north of the museum that was designed concurrently by BBB. Museum founders Mera and Don Rubell, along with their son, Jason, had previously opened a Miami museum designed by Selldorf Architects in 2019; the DC location marks the second outpost for an art-collecting family whose collection has grown to nearly 7,500 objects. 

Visitors to the Rubell Museum first encounter it as a row of brick school buildings—the 1906 Cardozo Elementary School and the 1927 additions that would transform it into the Randall Junior High School—along I Street SW, with a glass-and-steel entry pavilion facing an open courtyard between the museum and the neighboring Randall Recreation Center and Pool to the east. The taller apartment building, Gallery 64, serves as a backdrop (and highway noise buffer) for the Rubell Museum, with townhouse-style apartments at ground level surrounding an interior courtyard within the 492-unit mid-rise tower’s U-shaped plan; this courtyard bounces daylight into the museum’s north-facing gallery windows and reserves breathing room for the shorter building in perpetuity. 

Read the full article at Architectural Record: https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15934-beyer-blinder-belle-completes-rubell-museum-in-washington-dc

Two Quiet Residential Projects Speak Volumes

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by Deane

ArchitectureDC Magazine devoted its Spring 2019 issue to residential architecture, and I was delighted to cover two small projects: The Not-So-Bungalow, by Wakako Tokunaga Architecture, and an Artist’s Retreat, by Teass\Warren Architects with landscape architect Moody Graham.

Wakako Tokunaga’s project reconfigures a Takoma Park bungalow into a more livable arrangement with a modern addition. Will Teass and Charles Warren worked with Moody Graham to convert an existing garage into an art gallery Excerpts from each article are below.

Not-So-Bungalow

A Modest House Breaks Out of its Shell
by Deane Madsen, Assoc. AIA

For Wakako Tokunaga, AIA, LEED AP, an architect who trained with Japanese alternative-materials guru Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA, and Washington’s own residential powerhouse, Suzane Reatig, FAIA, the renovation of a Takoma Park bungalow was a welcome opportunity to merge distinct architectural eras, and to fuse her Japanese and American influences. From the street, the house still appears to be a typical 1920s structure. Inside, old gives way to new, culminating in a decidedly contemporary addition that transforms the house, in Tokunaga’s mind, into a “not-so-bungalow.”

Tokunaga, who runs Wakako Tokunaga Architecture out of her home office, met her clients at their children’s pre-school. They had bought the house based on the charm of its nearly century-old base building, but quickly found that an earlier addition constructed by the previous owner was both too cramped and too dark for their needs. And one of the main assets of the property, a shaded rear yard downhill of the street level, was blocked from view by the addition’s walls.

Read the full Not-So-Bungalow story at ArchitectureDC.

Artist’s (Re)Treat

Humble Outbuilding Becomes the Gem of the Lot
by Deane Madsen, Assoc. AIA

At the very edge of the District, where a spur of the Pinehurst Trail meets one of the city’s original boundary stones, the regular grid of the L’Enfant Plan crashes against the border, resulting in an awkward, non-rectilinear lot. The main house upon that Barnaby Woods lot is aligned with the east-west orientation of the facing street, while the long edge of the property line runs northwest to southeast. The resulting residual space, which also slopes downward in that direction, provides an opportunity for landscape and architecture to work in tandem to transform the backyard into a garden sanctuary, anchored by a new artist’s retreat.

The clients, who were looking to make the property as cohesive as possible while balancing built elements of a neo-colonial house with a modern addition and a forgettable garage outbuilding, first turned to landscape architects Moody Graham to unify the multi-level backyard connecting them. “We looked at [the yard] and immediately said that there’s an opportunity to simplify this, to tie in a lawn space with this garage, which we saw potential for as more of a destination,” recalled Ryan Moody, ASLA. “We proposed some initial concepts to them, and they got excited about the idea. It was obviously a little bit broader of a project than they originally anticipated, but they saw value in redoing the small structure they had and making it visually more interesting.”

That’s when they and the clients engaged Teass\Warren Architects with the goal of transforming the little-used garage into a studio that would also become the garden’s focal point when seen from the glassy, modern addition. Through conversations with the clients and the landscape team, Teass\Warren began to explore the notion of a sanctuary space that could play host equally to a painter and a yogi, which formed the basis for the artist’s retreat.

Read the full Artist’s Retreat story at ArchitectureDC.

Hip Hop Architecture Camp Lands in DC

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by Deane

For Architectural Digest, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a day of the Hip Hop Architecture Camp’s visit to Washington, DC. This edition of the camp brought 10 middle school students to AIA|DC’s District Architecture Center, where, with guidance from the camp’s founder, Michael Ford, they explored architectural concepts through physical and digital modeling. The students also developed verses reflecting their experiences in the built environment, with a rap battle yielding four finalists who then recorded a DC-specific track. An excerpt of that article is below.

Michael Ford speaks to his Hip Hop Architecture Camp participants

How Hip-Hop Can Help Solve Design’s Diversity Problem

The Hip Hop Architecture Camp is introducing underrepresented kids to the design profession, one lyric at a time.

by Deane Madsen

On a mild afternoon in Washington, D.C., a makeshift stage has formed in the entryway of the District Architecture Center. Middle-schooler Iyana Benjamin adjusts the arms of her gold-rimmed, circular glasses from beneath a gray beanie and smiles as she looks up from her notebook and out to a few rows of folding chairs, accommodating nine other kids and a few adults. A beat emanating from a nearby laptop breaks the silence, and Benjamin begins to rap. She raps in a matter-of-fact yet firm tone on topics that are well beyond her years, from the swift gentrification of her neighborhood to the overshadowed African American architects who first built it.

I grew up in a place being gentrified / Raised in Chocolate City, rehabilitized / Hanging out in the streets of Eastland Gardens / Where houses were built by Lewis K and Clyde Martin

—Iyana Benjamin

Benjamin, along with the other middle school students, are part of a weeklong workshop called the Hip Hop Architecture Camp. The program, founded and administered by architectural designer Michael Ford, brings awareness of the built environment to kids who may never have considered their place of upbringing as being a formative part of it. That’s something Ford hopes to change.

For students at the camp, the workshops are opportunities to not just explore a potential career avenue but develop a whole new way of thinking about their cities. Over the course of a week, students watch a lot of hip-hop music videos, but they also reinterpret their lyrics as miniature buildings and explore design at multiple scales. With the aid of volunteers, they then write their own songs (the lyrics of which are featured throughout this piece), jotting down bars in notebooks with a goal of recording them later.

“The benefit of doing this, for architects and urban planners, is being able to communicate with other artists about their skills and bring them into architecture,” Ford says. “As architects, we’ve always been influenced by culture. The Hip Hop Architecture Camp creates some very interesting, cross-disciplinary conversations that I have not had in architecture school.”

Read the full article at Architectural Digest.

Listen to the DC track, “Find A Way,” via the Hip Hop Architecture Camp.

Iyana Benjamin records her verse in a Fort Washington, Md., studio
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