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Topic Architecture

Cooper Hewitt National Design Award winners embrace the creative spirit

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by Deane

Winners of the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards discuss the impact of design. L-R: Susan Chin, Mary Ping, Susan Szenasy, and Caroline Baumann.

Members of the design community welcomed three of the winners of the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards to the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, for a panel discussion on the importance and impact of design.

The awards program, now in its 18th year, honored 11 winners, including panelists Susan S. Szenasy, editor-in-chief of Metropolis Magazine, who won the Director’s Award; Mary Ping, founder of New York-based label Slow and Steady Wins the Race, for fashion design; and the Design Trust for Public Space, for corporate and institutional achievement, represented by executive director Susan Chin, FAIA.

The National Design Awards underscore the significance of design in an era where arts funding is increasingly at risk. According to Smithsonian Secretary David Skorton, the awards program is “a chance for solutions or optimism at a time when optimism toward seemingly intractable problems seems elusive.”

Elaborating upon that sentiment, Szenasy spoke of design and architecture as acts of hope: “Whatever you put out there is about future use of something,” she said. “The creative spirit in human beings is the most important spirit alive.”

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

Better Design Makes Healthier Hospitals

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by Deane

From broad strokes ideas, such as starting with a set of guiding principles that ensure clients’ needs are met. to specific solutions, like indirect lighting in patient settings and healing gardens for patients, staff, and visitors, architects work toward hospitals that are healthier, by design.

Medical practice has come a long way since the days of applying more leeches as a cure-all; modern advances in hospital design anticipate and accommodate changes in technology and practice while bolstering the case for healthier patients through better spaces. Architects can shape facilities around broad strategies such as patient-first thinking and evidence-based design. But they can also incorporate more finely grained details, down to optimal placement of equipment and lighting fixture arrangement as well as staff and visitor amenities that, in concert, produce healthcare facilities that help people heal faster–and with fewer leeches.

Better spaces, healthier people

A 2004 report examining more than 600 studies on the impact of hospital design on clinical outcomes found evidence that design plays a significant role: “Improved physical settings can be an important tool in making hospitals safer, more healing, and better places to work.” Yet figuring out where to begin design decisions in an ever-changing realm of technological innovations can be daunting.

It can help to have early conversations with your architect about your needs, whether the scope is a renovation of an aging hospital facility or a new structure designed to house doctors practicing the most current medicine with state-of-the-art devices. Every hospital project has its own unique set of constraints, such as site and budget, and an architect shows the possibilities that will work in each specific situation.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture. 

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. 

The secret to creating a successful coworking space

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by Deane

WeWork’s Wonderbread Factory location in Washington, D.C.

As the name implies, WeWork’s Wonder Bread Factory office in Washington, DC, is a former industrial bread production facility, now baking ideas from dozens of local companies that make these offices their home. On the other side of an open area, a small conference hall is filled with a dozen or so people attending a courier training session for Caviar, an application-based meal delivery service. In the communal kitchen, a beer delivery man connects the tap line to a keg and explains how to keep it from going flat while a bespectacled gentleman prepares his lunch on the counter. Garage doors on the southern side of the room open—when the weather allows it—to a sunny patio with an assortment of seating for lounging, dining, or meeting al fresco.

Coworking spaces such as these have been springing up all over the country. In cities where office space rental is prohibitively expensive, coworking affords the opportunity to conduct business within professional environments without taking on the high cost of overhead. Think of it almost like getting a group of friends together to rent a house: With pooled resources and some shared amenities, each person can perhaps pay less for rent while enjoying more overall space as well as a healthy sense of community. And through architect-led redesigns and renovations, that sense of an office as a community can be enhanced even further.

These shared spaces often come with flair specific to each locale; in DC, a graffito by District native Kelly Towles overlooks the third-floor common area, and the caffeine supply comes directly from local roaster La Colombe. A local firm, Georgetown-based R2L:Architects, added three levels to the existing structure, and rehabilitated the existing historic façades. Within the WeWork offices, glass walls and doors enclose variously sized private offices arranged on long corridors, allowing natural light to fill each space.

Read the full story at Topic Architecture.