The Real Thing

I’ve lost track of how many times over the years I’ve returned to a single line from Michael Ben­e­­dikt’s For an Architecture of Reality. It’s a short, profound book with manifesto airs, published in 1987, a time when—no irony intended—Post-Modern architecture already seemed quite old. Benedikt, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, was looking for substantial alternatives to the reductive or superficial schemes of practice then proliferating. He identified the architecture of games (citing Bernard Tschumi), dreams (Emilio Ambasz), illusions (the murals, much in vogue, of Richard Haas), and jokes (Arquitectonica). Also in his sights were the “architecture of reenactment,” the mainstream of historicist Po-Mo, and brilli­antly, of “preenactment,” buildings such as the Centre Pom­-­p­idou, forced avatars of a future not yet reached through the passage of time.

In contrast, waiting for us to come back to ground and take notice, was the neglected and undervalued real. Benedikt argued for architecture that would capture the spirit of our purest, unsentimental, extraverbal epiphanies, social and natural—moments, he wrote, that are “suffused with an unreasoned joy at the simple correspondence of appearance and reality,” moments when “the world becomes singularly meaningful, yet without being ‘symbolical.’” It was a call for buildings that appeal to and satisfy a primal uncon­scious rather than a tortuous analytical mind, buildings that are more Jung than Freud, though I don’t think he ever put it in these terms. Returning to a more formal theoretical tone (he does acknowledge in the book that tragically many people distance themselves from simply reveling in the world for fear of appearing “unworldly”), Benedikt re-ferred to his epiphanic moments as “the direct esthetic experience of the real.” Then the kicker, which has stuck with me for 20 years: “In our media-saturated times it falls to architecture to have the direct esthetic experience of the real at the center of its concerns.”

That our present times are so resoundingly more media-saturated than those that begot Benedikt’s motto makes it correspondingly more thrilling, and more of a welcome respite, when one encounters a building that not only takes the physical world as its subject, quietly delighting in it, but is also capable of inducing its own epiphanies. The David H. Koch Center, a new home for the sciences designed by Roger Duffy for Deerfield Acad­emy, a boarding school in Western Massachusetts, is one such building.

On a recent visit I parked myself on a long wooden bench and, after some nervous waiting, saw the light of the sun pass as a white ray through a precisely tuned oculus and strike the north wall of the high central atrium. It does this each day for about ten minutes on either side of local solar noon, tracing over the course of a year the form of an analemma, that stretched vertical figure eight most often seen drawn somewhere in the empty Pacific on good globes, winter solstice at the top, summer solstice at the bottom, the equinoxes at the pinched crossing. Designed with the astronomer Richard Walker, who did not live to see its realization, the daily light show is an appropriate device for a science center that looks to the physical, not the dazzle of technology, for its inspiration. Each day when, at its zenith, the sun’s light enters this snaking, amorphous building, otherwise only in dialogue with the ground, it’s pinned in place in the solar system. That was my third thought when I saw this successful example of rallying architectural devices to the cause of realizing natural effect. My second was, “It’s Benedikt!” That I had no first thought is a reminder of the nature of direct experience.

One usually associates that sort of thing—call it the rediscovery of wonder through architecture, if you must call it anything—with structures that are either purpose-built to awe (churches, airports) or follies of the type that can approach the sublime because, with plumbing, wires, and other distractions, they have also banished all sense of directed use. The Koch Center is a complex, program-rich building. The facility includes labs for biology, chemistry, geology, and physics; various classrooms and offices; places to eat and study; a large lecture hall; and even a planetarium, its projection technologies more advanced than those in most museums, provided by the largesse of a Deerfield alumnus from Indonesia. The site is slop­ing and difficult, on its high side addressing the formal quadrangle of neo- and neo-neo-Georgian buildings at the heart of the campus, its lower side facing sports fields and woods. The building that Duffy, a partner in the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), has designed mediates this context using the device of tall, nearly yard-thick curving brick walls that carry up through the three floors to frame the internal circulation and, as a series of shorter retaining walls, reach out into the land to form graded approaches and paths.

There is a metaphor at work here, the sort of thing that might act to erode a High Benediktian response to the building, but it is very softly applied. Part of the teaching mandate of the Koch Center is to evoke the peculiar geography of the Connecticut River Valley, an ancient rift left over from the breakup of Pangaea; the supercontinent almost split here rather than at what is now the Mid-Atlantic Ridge—and that abortive upheaval is recorded in the area’s mountain chains. Many geological epochs later, during the most recent ice age, the valley was home to Lake Hitchcock; and the meanders of the Deerfield River, adjacent to the campus, are a relic of that history. “The building may want to express metaphorically the drainage from Lake Hitchcock,” Duffy says in his quiet, thoughtful way during a tour of the site. “We talked about that a little bit. But really what we were doing was using the walls to channel space and movement.”

They do that well. There is hardly any signage in the Koch Center and none of the you-are-here way­finding one so often sees in buildings attempting to correct their anti-intuitive planning. Apart from room numbers, the only prominent sign is a plaque announcing the building’s LEED Gold rating. Instead, without being barked at, one is brought into the building free of the worry of disorientation, from the campus paths, through a glass curtain detailed as a tight diaphragm between the walls, into a large vestibule—the brick, identical inside and out, giving a sense of continuity—and from there to the convergence of halls at the central atrium.

Once inside, the deft management of artificial and natural light takes over as an organizing theme. With James Turrell, with whom he has worked on several other projects, Duffy conceived a singular program of art lighting that would also function as the sole ambient and emergency-lighting sources in the public corridors. On each side of the halls, where the concrete floors (stained a very Wrightian Cheyenne red) near the brick walls, there is a continuous glazed slot about 18 inches wide. These correspond to ribbons of skylight above, and even on the winter day I visited, sunlight managed to find its way down to all three floors of the building. At each level, the natural light is supplemented by a system of concealed cold-cathode lighting: three tubes—red, green, and blue—that can be programmed to produce any color. Because there is no need for additional emergency or other lighting—and because air vents and returns for the low-flow ventilation system are provided in the walls—the ceilings can be kept scrupulously bare, heightening the contrast with Turrell’s installation.

It’s an effect at once audacious, simple, and useful. The light channels continue outside the building along the radiating walls, the troughs glazed and covered by piled translucent quartz gravel. At night, the light, often an eerie aquamarine, serves to guide visitors; in most places, outside too, it provides enough foot-candles to obviate the need for secondary sources. Inside, during the day, the gradations of natural and artificial light serve to distinguish each floor, otherwise nearly identical in plan. Standing in the atrium, one can see the bright top floor, the blue glow nearly washed out by the sun; the middle floor, where the two sources achieve a sort of détente; and the lower level, where the dying sunlight gives way to the neon to create a distinctly submarine vibe.

If this were a building where one was set up to search for narrative meanings—indeed, if it were asking you to think analytically at all—you’d step back here and say, “Lake Hitchcock. What a lovely run-on metaphor.” But the strength of the building is that it elicits only haptic and subconscious responses, preparing the mind to appreciate things as they are. Nowhere is this more true than in the classrooms and labs. At each floor, even the half-buried lowest, light shelves crossing the tall windows reflect a mix of natural and artificial light off the white ceilings, again kept absolutely clear of disruptive apparatus. It’s rare now to find rooms like these, where no clutter of fixtures and fans menaces you from above, and the result is a preternatural calm that has to be conducive to focused learning. The widths of the labs and classrooms were determined in part by the distance that the bounced light would travel from the exterior walls, about 30 feet—and that distance became a critical module for dimensioning the plan. “I’m very proud of the lighting inside,” Duffy says. “There are no ‘normal’ conditions.”

That very lack of normality, in the eyes of the clients, was a hurdle for the project. The Koch Center is the first modern building on the campus—or rather the first modern building on the campus that did not attempt to hide its modernity behind ersatz versions of the hipped roofs, strict symmetry, and white sash windows of the original neo-Georgians. The only nod to that heritage in the end was to match the multihued brick of the older buildings, and to lay it in the same dot-dash-dot patterned Flemish bond. To get to that point, though, took some work. The school began considering the project in 1997 (it was completed last fall), and in the early years, SOM convened a series of interdisciplinary meetings with professors, administrators, and outside advisers in a shrewd and successful effort to nudge the academy toward experimentation and away from its architectural comfort zone. After Turrell was brought in, the group held a four-day workshop at Roden Crater, exploring the depths of the artist’s monumental land-art installation.

Duffy credits that trip in particular with opening the eyes of all involved to the opportunities at hand. One result was a consensus that the building itself should be a teaching tool. This has manifested itself in many ways, subtle and on the nose. Specimen rocks of interest collected from the region are scattered around the building and its environs. The green roof is both an energy-saving move and—as the ten species of sedums planted there battle each other for dominance over the years—an experiment in ecological diversity. Turrell’s contributions also include two glass-fiber-lit star maps—northern hemisphere on the atrium ceiling, southern on the floor—that record the state of the heavens at the moment of a rare convergence of the planets that will occur in April 2036.

The more subtle educational by-products of the Koch Center are related to what, for lack of a better term and taking cover again behind Benedikt, I’ll call its realness. With its calm, recessive ambience—its habit of getting out of the way and letting one think, that single spark-bright daily reminder of its place in a greater natural order—the building as a whole teaches a necessary lesson: that the experience of subintellectual epiphanies—“Aha!” “Eureka!”—and a pure love of the world are at the very core of scientific curiosity.