Good food, better design: In Situ at SFMOMA

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by Deane

SFMOMA’s original Mario Botta building stands before the backdrop of its 2016 Snøhetta addition

SFMOMA’s 2016 renovation doubled its gallery spaces with a new addition by Snøhetta. As part of the overhaul, the museum retrofitted its original post-modern Mario Botta building in the process, including a street-level restaurant designed by Aidlin Darling Design. 

In Situ is Chef Corey Lee’s third restaurant in San Francisco; his first, Benu, boasts three Michelin stars. Perhaps the easiest way to describe the offerings of In Situ is as a curated dining experience. Just as the museum above it collects the best artwork it can acquire to display for its patrons, the restaurant and its chef have compiled a menu of signature creations from world renowned chefs— faithfully executed by Lee and his team—for diners to enjoy. In Situ marks continued collaboration with Aidlin Darling Design, who conceived this space and Lee’s second restaurant, Monsieur Benjamin; and a l m project, who developed brand identity and graphics for all three of Lee’s restaurants.

Within the dining area, a sculptural ceiling of parallel, variable-depth, suspended wooden slats provides spatial intimacy and acoustic dampening while concealing ventilation ductwork. Between these slats, pendant lights drop down to provide general illumination. Custom, hewn-wood communal tables feature smooth tops and rough-looking undersides that introduce an organic quality in opposition to the clean lines of leather, steel, and concrete elsewhere in the restaurant. On the street side, full-height glazing allows interaction between guests and passersby, extending the activity of the city into the dining room. One side’s wall is devoted to a mural by Spanish artist Rosana Castrillo Diaz that was commissioned for the space, and apertures in the wall opposite frame views of the museum atrium.

The careful curating of food, furniture, and artwork within the restaurant reflects the sensibility of the museum that houses it as well as the diversity of the city in which it resides. Varying degrees of polish and perfection in the customized furnishings create a backdrop that echoes the complexity of the cooking without overshadowing it. The architectural team has created a contemplative space for fine dining that lets patrons digest not only the palette-expanding creations on the plates before them but also the fine art on the walls around them. As your architect is likely to note, where you eat can be just as important as what you’re eating.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

Multipurpose spaces can strengthen seasonal businesses

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by Deane

Rock Chapel Marine solves the problem of what to do with a seasonal property in its off-season. At this road salt facility, winter is busiest, and stockpiles of salt are at their largest. But when icy conditions give way to warmer weather and the piles diminish, the Marine becomes an opportunity for community recreation, one which architects at Landing Studio have transformed from winter industry to waterfront amenity. With the firm’s imaginative recasting of the site, Rock Chapel Marine has become an example of how creative programming can bring year-round use to underutilized spaces.

The types of projects architects encounter have an extraordinary range. While they work on plenty of bread-and-butter office or residential buildings, they’re often asked to find solutions to uncommon—and highly interesting—problems, such as how to turn a still-operational road salt facility on a brownfield site into a community amenity. That was the challenge leveled at Boston-based Landing Studio, and one whose solution, Rock Chapel Marine, has garnered several awards for the firm, including a 2017 AIA Award for Regional and Urban Design.

Rock Chapel Marine, which is alternatively called “Publicly Organized Recreation Territory” (PORT), was once a 13-million-gallon oil tank farm alongside the waterways of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Prior to Landing Studio’s involvement, it had become a road salt terminal that would expand and contract based on seasonal demand. The terminal saw heavy wintertime use for the distribution of more than 100,000 tons of salt per year to aid in highway ice abatement, but it saw little activity during the warmer months. Now, it combines its function as the Eastern Salt Company’s storage facility with a more publicly enticing waterfront park, with the area of each relating to the current season: Winter equals more salt, less park; summer means less salt and more park.

Some of the structural shells of the old oil tanks remain, with new soil and plant cover added to begin the soil remediation process for a wildlife habitat upon a site that has seen half a century of heavy industrial usage. One of the larger tank shells has been converted into an outdoor amphitheater, and its frame supports lighting for the event space. Landing Studio repurposed an old tugboat as a lookout tower for the park, and illustrated salt piling strategies that would preserve neighborhood views to the waterfront; a new basketball court would be the last zone filled with salt if the spatial need arises. The architects also specified containment covers for the salt piles that lend a cleaner aesthetic to the industrial portion of Rock Chapel Marine while providing a backdrop for projected art installations and screenings.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

Transforming everyday structures into unique workspaces

On
by Deane

Waffle, by Eric Owen Moss Architects. © Deane Madsen

Atop the fourth level of an otherwise-ordinary parking structure in Culver City, California, lies an improbable squish of glass-and-steel boxes that form a roof-level office called Pterodactyl. Perched like a prehistoric winged predator on the edge of the garage, Pterodactyl—which received a 2016 AIA Award for Architecture—capitalizes on the parking deck’s over-structuring to add leasable volume in a decidedly non-standard configuration.

The setting for Pterodactyl is the Hayden Tract, a part of Culver City that was once a hotbed of manufacturing and light industrial facilities with spur tracks that allowed for easy distribution via the Pacific Electric Railway. These days, the Hayden Tract is a booming tech and media hub, with a creative workforce arriving on the recently completed Expo Line, which occupies right-of-ways from its predecessor, the Pacific Electric Railway. The parking structure Pterodactyl rests upon is a nod to Southern California’s car culture; built in 1998, the decks have an 800-vehicle capacity. The garage now acts as a podium for the offices above it, with its column grid also supporting a set of nine boxes that intersect and overlap to form a two-level office spilling over the garage roof to hang off its western façade.

Part of what has made Eric Owen Moss Architects (EOMA) so successful is his long-term client relationships with people like Laurie and Frederick Samitaur-Smith, whose patronage for three decades has transformed the Hayden Tract in Culver City into a creative wonderland that intersperses more than 30 full-scale architectural experimentswith repurposed warehouses. Pterodactyl completes a complex that includes other unconventional works by EOMA titled Stealth, Umbrella, Slash, and Backslash.

Moss has called his work in the Hayden Tract “an ongoing exploration,” and it’s that kind of study that has pushed both Moss’s practice and his pedagogy; Moss integrated material and technological pursuits into curricula during his tenure as director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. “[We’re] setting ourselves up with problems we have to solve,” Moss says. “And we’re making things where the pro forma is not yet available.”

 

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

Studio Gang Architects Assembles Hive at the National Building Museum

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by Deane

The National Building Museum’s summer installation, Hive, by Studio Gang Architects

Hive, the latest installment of Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum’s Summer Block Party installation series, opens Thursday. Designed by Studio Gang Architects—the Chicago and New York-based firm founded by Jeanne Gang—Hive breaks down the vast scale of the museum’s neoclassical Great Hall into three more intimate, oculus-topped chambers made of stacked silver-and-magenta wound paper tubes.

Gang and her team drew much of the inspiration for Hive out of ideas relating to the occasionally problematic acoustics of the Great Hall: “The thing that we noticed when we first came into the Great Hall back in 2004 [for Gang’s installation, Marble Curtain], was that it feels like you’re outside in the middle of a big field, an expansive space, because there’s nothing for the sound to reflect off of,” Gang said at a press preview Monday. “We wanted to create spaces…where the acoustic properties would be noticeably different. By utilizing this catenary shape, each chamber balances the structural forces and supports its own weight while attaining height that enables a unique acoustic signature. The whole structure acts like a clearing in a forest, rather than a field.”

Though still under construction during the press preview, Hive’s chambers will reach a final height of 56.5 feet when completed, which will make it the tallest structure ever built inside the museum. The paper tubes that comprise the structures range in height from five inches to 10 feet, with diameters of six inches to two feet, for an overall catalog of 2,551 paper tubes in nine different tube sizes.  The tubes, which are often used as formwork for cylindrical concrete columns, are oriented vertically, and notched to form interlocking rings that taper before culminating in circular openings, framing views up to the museum’s ceiling.

Read the full story at Architectural Record. Scroll down for additional images.

The smallest of the three Hive chambers features a tubulum made of miscellaneous pipes as its centerpiece.

An oculus at the top of each chamber focuses views toward neoclassical features of the National Building Museum.

The National Building Museum’s summer installation, Hive, by Studio Gang Architects

The National Building Museum’s summer installation, Hive, by Studio Gang Architects

Infusing contemporary design thinking into historic libraries

On
by Deane

Rendering of the renovated Johnson Building (Courtesy Boston Public Library)

The Boston Public Library is the oldest urban library in the United States, and it features the work of three renowned architectural practices in its Central Library on Copley Square. The original Renaissance Revival building, designed by Charles McKim of the preeminent firm McKim, Mead & White, was completed in 1895. McKim intended the library as a “palace for the people” and included moments of delight and surprise, such as Guastavino tile vaulting and an inner courtyard wrapped on three sides by an arcade replicating that of the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome.

Three-quarters of a century later, in 1972, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, along with collaborators from Architects Design Group, celebrated the opening of an addition that matched the McKim building’s roofline and material—Milford granite—but swapped out palazzo architecture for Modernism, in which Johnson was fluent. The Johnson Building, as it is now known, comprises 170,000 square feet divided into 10 floors, four of which are suspended from 16-foot-deep trusses at the seventh level; three of its levels connect to the McKim Building. Less than a year after it opened, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable’s New York Times review of the Johnson Building was full of praise:

“It poses, and solves, a number of functional, structural, environmental and esthetic problems with mastery, and represents the kind of utility of program and solution that is what the best architecture has always been about.”

While both buildings have been granted landmark status, the latter had not seen any significant improvements since its opening. And in the intervening years, changes both in the surrounding neighborhood and in the way people use libraries rendered original design elements—such as vertical granite barriers at the sidewalk edge—obsolete. Local firm William Rawn Associates was tasked with updating the 1972 building with a $16 million, two-phase renovation that was finished last year and received a 2017 AIA/ALA Library Building Award. Those street-level barriers have been removed, and ground-floor mirrored glass has been replaced with clear glazing and new entrances that reinforce the library’s connection to the street life around it.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

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