We know, both intuitively and practically, that socially interactive spaces, furnished with warm materials and rich textures, are beneficial and useful to the people who occupy them. But how do you convince the data-driven person who pays the bills? Buildings cost money. Owners want their dollars to go far. That’s reasonable. It’s because of this that architects are asked to prove that their designs marry performance and efficiency with inspiration and user comfort.
Our practice is focused on designing amenity-rich architecture, from spaces where interaction can take place in laboratories to art rooms and family lounges in hospitals. Atriums are utilized in all kinds of building typologies to bring daylight deep into a floor plate, create a natural gathering spot for users, and aid in wayfinding. Our recently completed U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Center South Building 1202 in Seattle, illustrates this approach. The building uses an oxbow-shaped atrium to connect conference rooms, amenities, and offices. Here the atrium is particularly successful because it utilizes biophilic strategies that connect employees to living systems through the use of daylight, views, fresh air, vegetation, and natural finishes. All of these strategies, together, enhance the user experience. But such amenities add to the building’s square footage and often the construction cost – thereby reducing the efficiency of the cost per square foot. Measuring their appeal to the users’ humanity can be proven by the employees’ enhanced performance and satisfaction. Still, making the case for this can be challenging from a purely quantitative standpoint.
We were recently challenged to design a new office building for a technology firm that wanted to measure the efficiencies and performance of the new project. I was part of the team asked that our decision-making process be based on empirical data rather than qualitative emotion. The company had a strong desire to have a healthy, inspiring workplace for its employees, but required all qualitative design decisions to be based on evidence. They weren’t going to be sold on pretty renderings alone.
This is the first in a series of posts that chronicles our evolving design process at Hickok Cole Architects in Georgetown, Washington, DC as we took on the challenge of proposing a vision for the Office Building of the Future. Like all stories, our narrative will be full of plots and twists, success and conflict, all of which culminated in a novel design vision. Our posts will focus on: concept process, design features, and impact.
In today’s fast paced world of “just in time design,” the three-headed dragon of short deadlines, demanding clients, and tight budgets has a way of trampling innovation. As I look back at the YouTube video of our design proposal, I still wonder what compelled a midsize firm of 80 people, struggling to recover from the recession, to dedicate a considerable investment in time, energy, and resources to develop such a comprehensive vision of the future.
The short answer: “to scratch an itch.” We know that the most complex ideas often result from the simplest conversations. In our case, they were the result of dozens of informal discussions on emerging trends and patterns in the marketplace. Some of our ideas were technical and focused on new envelope systems, anticipated code changes, or advancements in sustainable technologies. Others had sociologic undertones that focused on human interaction, demographic shifts, and changing attitudes about the office environment. They remained fragmentary until the beginning of the year, when a national ideas competition for a vision of the Office Building of the Future was announced by NAIOP, a real estate association.
The experience of a built environment is, of course, different in each culture and in each of us. Yet we all share an evolutionary past – an experience that step-by-step created patterns of instincts, innate capabilities, and primal human values – a core of a humannature – that kept winning in a competition to survive. And we are all clearly enough alike to create cohesive societies, global ideologies, and designs – like those of classical Greece and Rome, the Taj Mahal or English landscapes – that have commanded respect and inspired imitation across continents, through revolutions and over millennia.
Taj Mahal — Mughal art at its peak in northern India, sketch by Albrecht Pichler
An evolutionary perspective
The scientists who study human evolution have assembled widely accepted evidence that today’s human genetic makeup has been formed through adaptations to natural and social environments that developed originally in central Africa. Our ancestors’ minds and bodies evolved primarily in subtropical woodlands and savannahs, where cohesive family and kinship groups survived – as prey and predators – in shifting mixes of competition and cooperation, often in conditions of scarcity, exploiting sources of food and water, selecting and building secure, cost-effective habitats – or exploring and migrating to more promising land out in an uncontested territory. And in those environments they selected mates and raised generations of offspring, one after another becoming better adapted to interact productively and reproductively.
The specific qualities, the mind-body structures that survived through the millennia of individual encounters with victory and defeat, exploring and learning with fear or pleasure, became the physiological-psychological foundations of a “human nature” – the sapiens in homo sapiens.
They add up to complex interwoven systems that activated pleasure circuits in the brain and “rewards” in body chemistry when our ancestors made decisions – and were in places – that enhanced their “fitness” to survive – to win, advance and prosper. Civilization and affluence naturally enlarged the meaning of “survive”, but the structures created by natural selection still drive everything we design and build today. In the words of biologist E.O. Wilson, “We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.”
Wilson Hospice House, designed by Perkins + Will, won the 2011 Caritas Project’s Generative Space Award. It is definitely a space that works. The recognition the hospice has received is appropriate because its design has a special psychological effect on the people who spend time there. We need to see more examples of healthcare spaces that work. And so I call your attention to the June 15 deadline for submissions for the 2012 Generative Space Award.
Generative space, as the website explains, satisfies the following criteria: “It improves the health and well-being of all. It improves the performance and effectiveness of the provider organization. It produces systemic and sustainable improvements over time. Improvements are measurable and demonstrate documented evidence substantiating these improvements. It fosters a breadth of improvements ranging from the unique experience of individuals to the establishment of communities that foster health, vitality, and well being.”
Jennifer Tipton’s lighting design for “Spectral Scriabin” at the Lincoln Center in November 2011. Photo: Ruby Washington/The New York Times
If you talk to lighting designers about new technology—as we did recently—it’s hard not to conclude that the incandescent bulb is headed for almost certain extinction. The reasons seem obvious: LEDs are a lot more energy efficient and much (much) longer lasting. What’s not to like? Well, for now, price. But once economics of scale are achieved and the cost of LEDs come down, then it’s simply a matter of time before the incandescent—at one time, a radical breakthrough in its own right—shuffles off into obsolescence. And that has Jennifer Tipton, the legendary theatrical lighting designer, worried:
“My biggest concern is that the incandescent lamp will completely disappear, and with it the spectrum that it brings,” she told our Barbara Eldredge recently. “This means that all of the color that has been devised over my lifetime will no longer be the color that my eye recognizes. LEDs are great—they add to the toolbox. But if you look at the spectrum of an LED and the spectrum of an incandescent, they’re just fundamentally different. LEDs don’t produce that warm candlelight glow of the incandescent bulb at a low reading. Unfortunately, this has happened throughout the history of lighting. Each new lamp has been colder than the one before it. Lighting today is very, very cold, tilting almost to the inhuman. So I guess I’m old fashioned, like the people who complained about missing the glow of gaslights when electricity came in. But I do feel very strongly that the toolbox should be complete, and that you shouldn’t entirely give up one thing just to have another.”
Lighting for the Yale Repertory Theater’s recently-produced ‘Autumn Sonata’, designed by Jennifer Tipton. Photo: T. Charles Erickson/Yale Repertory Theatre
Related: In Leading Luminaries, we spoke to seven of our top lighting designers about new tools, new technologies, new challenges, and the way forward.
Jennifer Tipton is an award-winning lighting designer, internationally renowned for redefining the relationship between lighting and performance. She has collaborated for five decades with a veritable who’s who of the stage, with such companies as the New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, Twyla Tharp Dance, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and venues such as the Metropolitan Opera. Tipton has won two Tony awards, two Drama desk awards, and was awarded The Dorothy and Lilian Gish Prize. Since 1991, she has served as an adjunct professor of lighting design at the Yale University School of Drama. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008.
Why the funny title? Well, I went to a conference a few weeks ago in Burlington, Vermont and came away wondering if the Passiv Haus movement is really accessible to the mainstream. The phrase is a play on words from the presentation, “From Bauhaus to Passivhaus”, given by Ken Levenson during the Better Building by Design Conference, hosted by Efficiency Vermont.
A handful of presentations showcased Passivhaus projects and their innovative design process, as well as other super-low energy, net-zero projects. They brought together a variety of professionals and their case studies, working on opposite ends of the spectrum— houses for the wealthy ‘spare no expense group’ and those working with Habitat for Humanity, ‘let’s figure out how to do this for everyone group’. Somewhere in the middle we will meet. Read more…
A rendering of the East River waterfront esplanade, by SHoP Architects.
New York City’s architecture community braved the snow recently to hear Greg Pasquerelli of SHoP Architecture explain how he and his partners are moving beyond identified styles and developing a performance-based architecture practice. Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, William Sharples, Kimberley Holden and Gregg Pasquerelli started the firm in 1996, after graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Starting with a staff of ten, SHoP now employs 70, each person chosen for his or her special and diverse skill sets. This allows the team to tackle new ideas and test them in innovative ways.
Pasquerelli’s lecture, entitled “Out of Practice,” alluded to this desire to escape the traditional ways of architects and celebrate their field as the great generalist profession that it can be. He excited the full house at Cooper Union’s Great Hall by showing beautiful renderings of projects like the East River Park, eagerly awaited New Yorkers—construction is to be completed in August. But more importantly, he discussed their new business ventures, named SHoP Construction, SHoP Envelope, and HeliOptix, which are integrated into their practice in order to facilitate growth and innovation. Read more…
Political Hardball: Part 2 Updated
Remembering Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bijou
It’s Show and Tell Time for Building Product Manufacturers
Q&A: Kevin Shanley
Political Hardball: Part 2
SOM and CASE Invent a New Interface
A New Humanism: Part 18
The Green Team Part 13: Game, Sett, Match
On the Road with the Rudy Bruner Award: The Steel Yard - Providence, RI
Designing from Nature
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