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 Never mind the blobs. Sharples Holden Pasquarelli says architecture's digital revolution is about creating a fluent practice, not fluid forms. May 2001
But these are mere fragments of information, bits and pieces of a larger, more significant story. What they add up to is the notion that SHoP represents an entirely new kind of firm, one riding the crest of architecture's digital wave. Like a growing number of their young peers, the architects of SHoP are using technology not simply to further some ideological agenda or push formal boundaries, but rather to create a practice that's lean, fiexible, pragmatic, and committed to built work. The growing prominence of such firms has a prophetic air: a couple of decades from now, when all the best-known baby boomers have shuffied off to the cultural periphery, the architecture world may well be left with a whole lot of firms that look, sound, and talk like SHoP. Like a few other partnerships made up of architects in their thirties, SHoP has a breezy collective title. An acronym cobbled together from the partners' last names, it combines the S in William and Christopher Sharples, 37-year-old identical twins, and Coren Sharples, 35, who is William's wife; the H in Kimberly Holden, 34; and the P in Gregg Pasquarelli, 35, Holden's husband. The SHoP name is also meant to suggest that despite the firm's command of technology it wants to maintain an explicit connection to tactile reality. Indeed, there is a machine shop in its modest offices on 37th Street, in which SHoP manufactures its models. (Writers like to note that a thin layer of real, honest-to-goodness sawdust coats the fioor.) The firm's moniker also refiects its effort to offer a broad range of design services, from branding and marketing to real-estate development consultation. In other words, the name means shop as in "one-stop." No single part of this philosophy is unique--more than a few young firms make similar pitches. Ben van Berkel, the Dutch architect who runs UN Studio with his wife, Caroline Bos, told the New York Times recently that their firm is landing work because "we not only know how to deal with the materials, but we bring into consideration all the different levels of financing, engineering, marketing, styling." But van Berkel and Bos are in their forties, live in Holland (where the climate for adventurous urban work is more hospitable), and employ 50 people. To be in your mid-thirties and working on a half-dozen significant buildings--all in New York City--with five employees and no interns is to be ambitious in an altogether different way. SHoP has outsize aspirations and a kind of polished, media-friendly chutzpah to match. It aims to do no less than change the way important architecture is built in New York by combining--in a small-scale operation--the fiair of a high-design firm with the hard-nosed practicality of a developer. The next three to four years, as SHoP's first major buildings go from the drawing board into the ground, will prove a stern test for that approach. The partners' varied strengths have helped them map out this unfamiliar terrain. None of them majored in architecture at the undergraduate level, although Bill Sharples earned a degree in architectural engineering. Coren Sharples studied marketing, Chris Sharples focused on fine art and history, and Kim Holden majored in art history. Gregg Pasquarelli earned a finance degree at Villanova before a stint on Wall Street. After graduating from Columbia's master of architecture program--Chris Sharples in 1990, the others in 1994--the five went off to separate pursuits. Bill and Chris Sharples started a firm in New York along with Coren, who'd married Bill in 1996 and had interned in Rafael Viñoly's office. Holden and Pasquarelli (who married in 1997) worked for Greg Lynn FORM and remodeled kitchens and bathrooms on the side. After the Sharples trio landed a fairly substantial job in Greenport, on eastern Long Island, they decided to join up with Pasquarelli and Holden. It was a tentative arrangement, but quickly the discussions turned to something more permanent. "The five of us began having these conversations about what the hell this profession was," Pasquarelli recalls. "There were no models that interested us. We didn't want to be the daring avant-gardists, the corporate firm, the starving artists, the academics." The model they pursued instead was one that very consciously borrowed from outside the profession. With a mix-and-match philosophical openness typical of their generation, they made an effort to combine technological savvy and a critical, high-minded sensibility with a clear-eyed approach to business. Many of architecture's leading firms--especially those with at least one foot in academe--find talking about money and marketing uncomfortable, even gauche. Not so with SHoP: "I would say SHoP is more like McKinsey [& Company, the global consulting firm] than it is like Richard Meier or Gwathmey Siegel or Polshek or KPF or Hani Rashid," Pasquarelli says. It's a line he's used with the press before--and one that neatly sidesteps the fact that McKinsey has more than 7,000 employees worldwide to SHoP's staff of 10. Asked why older architects tend to cringe at a direct embrace of marketing and public relations, Holden responds with a question of her own. "What's to cringe at?" she asks. "There is no good reason that architects shouldn't be savvy and innovative about marketing themselves--and be very knowledgeable about business practices in general. Many architecture firms do a disservice to themselves and to the industry as a whole because the firm is not run, and therefore not treated, as a business enterprise first." For all SHoP's talk about resembling a miniaturized consulting firm, the real power of its methodology lies in how it uses the computer. These days everyone is talking about the fiuidity and smoothness of computer-aided design forms. But SHoP is trying, with the help of very impressive technology, to create a fiuent practice rather than fiuid buildings. The firm has figured out a way to use software to help it take as many variables into account as possible within a single computerized system. (Mostly this is done using three-dimensional animation software that was developed for the film and video game industries.) SHoP's architects make the case that this allows them to absorb new information instantaneously--everything from what kinds of materials a particular client can afford to the setbacks required by zoning regulations. "As information is gathered from the contractors, the clients, and our design idea, we can feed that into the model," Pasquarelli says. "Then the form moves and adapts, but the design keeps its integrity." He adds, "We really feel that our buildings improve as more restrictions are placed on them. We love it when people say, 'Wait, I forgot, we need this,' because we just go tweak the computer, and the whole building shifts. We say, 'Does it work for you now?' And usually, yeah, it does." This is a new vision of what technology can bring to architecture. Ironically enough--given SHoP's wunderkind status--it replaces the excitement about blobs that has infected slightly older architects with a kind of grown-up attitude about the potential of digital design. But SHoP's partners are also careful to stress how much of their design work goes on offscreen. They're noticeably more eager to show visiting reporters old-fashioned chipboard and Plexiglas models in the machine shop than to sit them down in front of a monitor. "The computer will not design for you," Pasquarelli says plainly. "You work it in the computer, pull it out, work it in model, work it in construction techniques, work it visually. And then it's back to the computer. For us, it's all about this cycle." Technology is probably the key factor allowing SHoP's small staff to juggle so many projects, which in turn has allowed it to reach an unusual level of visibility given the age of its partners. (Of course SHoP's gift for salesmanship--which is either finely honed or a little too smooth, depending on your point of view--has something to do with this as well.) The firm may be the first to have turned that rhetoric into a professional image--a brand, to use that overworked word--that can be marketed to potential clients. "If there is any theory coming out of our office it's this methodology of practice," Pasquarelli says. "The computer has been a tool that's helped us to develop a new model. It's not about the form." In fact, he says, "if in twenty years' time we've got twenty-five buildings built, I would feel like we were a success if no one could drive by any of them and say, 'That's a SHoP building.'" That pragmatism differentiates SHoP from other computer-savvy architects. Greg Lynn, for example, suggests that he is sometimes at the mercy of software design tools--and he appears to enjoy the sensation. "If it comes down to it," Lynn told Lingua Franca, "I would have to give the software 51 percent of the credit for the design of my buildings." Lynn also aims to push formal experimentation as far as it will go on the computer, even if that means pursuing designs that are currently unrealizable. SHoP's approach is very different. "It is important to view technology as a tool, and not as a concept that we are in service to," Coren Sharples says. "Embracing technology is one way of maintaining a positive outlook toward the possibilities of design and construction, to say what can be done rather than what can't be or isn't done." The message is clear: technology's potential is something understood innately by all of SHoP's partners, rather than learned or fiaunted or affixed to an existing theory of practice. As Bruce Ferguson, dean of Columbia's School of the Arts, puts it, "They use the computer in way that is productive rather than technophilic." That's why the Dunescape project--despite its modest size--was such an important one for the firm. It had a formal novelty but also seemed approachable. (It was blobby, in other words, but it was real.) "We'd watch people come in with this hipster attitude," Pasquarelli recalls. "Then they'd look, and you could see the smile spread across their face." In the New Yorker, Paul Goldberger called Dunescape "one of the few instances of computer-enhanced design in which the result is warmer, livelier, and more exciting than the renderings that preceded it." Joseph Giovannini, writing in Red Herring, noted, "Dunescape's comfortable sunbathers were probably unaware that they were sitting on architecture's cutting edge." For Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, what's striking about SHoP is the speed with which the firm has translated academic ideas into practice. "A lot of times there's a breach between practice and theory that is difficult to overcome," he says. "Theoretical notions stay in the academy too long and get hyperdeveloped to the point where they grow past any possibility for practical application." There is a continuing danger of this happening with digital architecture. But Riley notes that although the SHoP architects "know how to use digital technologies very intelligently, they also know when to move beyond them and seek alternative means." Riley thinks of SHoP--along with architects such as Preston Scott Cohen and UN Studio--as an early example of what he calls a "second-generation" digital firm. At the beginning of the digital revolution in architecture, he says, "There was a kind of euphoria about the possibilities of technology. But this second generation realizes that it's not going to be a total revolution--that some intermediary steps are going to be necessary." SHoP was one of 19 candidates for the Columbia job, which is a tricky one in a number of ways. It will more than double the size of an existing 100,000-square-foot building called Prentis Hall, turning it into a new hub for Columbia's School of the Arts; it will have to be technologically complex to serve the needs of new-media and film students; and it represents a significantly higher profile for the university on 125th Street, where town-gown relations have not always been the smoothest. SHoP survived as the list of firms was trimmed to five, and then made it to the finals with Weiss/Manfredi. "We finally chose SHoP," Ferguson says, "because it seemed they were really thinking the way we were: that the program would cause the building to emerge, rather than this Modernist approach of imposing a particular design solution. And SHoP convinced us through their previous work that they could consider fiscal and aesthetic issues at the same time, without any loss of creativity. Among the firms we looked at, they were absolutely unique in that way." If SHoP's design philosophy is devoid of what might be called political passion in the ideological sense, it is highly political in the way it embraces the messy demands of process. This can perhaps best be seen in the firm's plans for a condominium tower near the Brooklyn waterfront, next to the Manhattan Bridge. The building will include 4 fioors of retail and commercial space, with 20 residential fioors above. (The developer is Cara Development, with Jeffrey M. Brown Associates.) The design is still in the approval process, but as SHoP envisions it, the building will combine contextual response and adventurous form: it will be made of dark red brick, with a vaguely Moderne look on the lower fioors, to satisfy the requests of the neighbors; and its two towers, connected by a series of passageways sheathed in glass, will bend and twist--like a pair of heliotropic plants--to take best advantage of light and views. To judge from the early renderings, the building may turn out to be a good symbol of the firm itself: not just pliant but somehow practical and cutting-edge at the same time. The Columbia job is close to their hearts for obvious reasons--and dealing with a large institutional client represents a big step up--but something about the Brooklyn project seems particularly compelling for the SHoP architects. First of all there is the site in what is simultaneously the most awkward and most promising of urban locations--hemmed in by the bridge, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and a subway line but offering the potential for sweeping views and high visibility. For SHoP there is something genuinely appealing about trying to negotiate the challenges of both the site and the infamous labyrinths of the New York City planning process while still producing a cost-effective and eye-catching building. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the design will escape that process with its charisma intact. But you won't find any wavering on that score inside SHoP's offices, where an indestructible optimism seems always to reign; indeed the partners argue that the Brooklyn project offers a perfect test of their fiexible digital system and its claims to spin restrictions into the gold of successful architecture. Just ask Gregg Pasquarelli. "When that tower goes up and people realize that this kind of building got built in New York, that's going to piss a lot of them off." he says. "It's going to prove to an entire generation of developers and architects that they're wrong, that they've lied to the public. These guys have sold the people of New York the worst crap for forty years. They've said that you can't do meaningful architecture here at this scale: it's too expensive, there's no room, New York isn't like that, you can't make money doing it." He stops to take a breath, beaming with anticipated pride. "At 38 years old, which is how old I'll be when it's done, I'm going to call all of their bluffs." |
