Sidwell Friends School, a K-12 Quaker school in Washington, D.C., transformed a 1950s gymnasium into a contemplative space for worship, with additional facilities for art and music instruction. The gymnasium had been used as a makeshift worship space for more than a decade; its location on campus was ideal, its acoustics and architecture were not.
Studio Twenty Seven Architecture, along with joint venture partner Leo A. Daly, is developing a design for the District-owned “La Casa” supportive housing project. The project is an important milestone for the District in its efforts to redefine the concept of housing for the homeless community. Rather than function as a shelter, the “La Casa” project will provide permanent, supportive housing for forty men. Each living unit is designed as a single-person efficiency that will provide stability and predictability for the tenants as they immerse themselves in day to day living.
The site is located in the up and coming Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. In this residential neighborhood of two- and three-story row houses, the challenge was to design a new duplex residence that would respect and complement the historic context as well as provide uplifting spaces for the inhabitants.
Front at night (Images Courtesy Robert Lautman & Suzane Reatig)
The tight site, located across from the Mt. Vernon Square metro, originally housed six apartments for the elderly. The not-for-profit client wanted to replace the dilapidated building with a new three-story apartment building with an elevator. Before construction began, the owner found suitable replacement housing for the elderly tenants, and decided to offer the units to all. The change in program was an opportunity for the addition of mezzanines to the upper three units.
The house is both a dwelling and an exhibition informing the public about issues of alternative energy and sustainability. It has been exhibited in Washington D.C., Times Square, Madrid, Spain, Millennium Park, and at the Farnsworth House in Plano Ill.
STEVEN HOLL, FAIA, AWARDED THE 2012 AIA GOLD MEDAL BY THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS
Profession’s highest honor goes to architect known for humanist approach to formal experimentation
Washington, D.C., December 9, 2011 – The Board of Directors of The American Institute of Architects (AIA) voted today to award the 2012 AIA Gold Medal to Steven Holl, FAIA. The AIA Gold Medal, voted on annually, is considered to be the profession’s highest honor that an individual can receive. The Gold Medal honors an individual whose significant body of work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. Holl will be honored at the 2012 AIA National Convention in Washington, D.C.
Holl and his firm, Steven Holl Architects have completed projects that tackle the urban-scale planning and development conundrums that define success in the built environment throughout the world. He’s able to work with diverse clients to get his projects executed, all while being a tenured professor at Columbia University. His explorations have served as an inspiration to his colleagues.
Higgins Hall
Holl completed two projects located in China in 2009 that are emblematic of his approach to architecture and his innovative method of design inquiry. His Linked Hybrid, in Beijing, is a series of circularly arranged towers, filled with 700 apartments and enough ancillary programming (hotels, schools, restaurants, park spaces) to form its own micro-urban community. The towers are linked by a system of 20th floor skywalks that trace a ring of public programs. In contrast to the mega-block street walls typically erected by Chinese developers, the Hybrid invites the city in with green space, public programs, and playfully varied porous massing.
The Vanke Center in Shenzhen is quite literally a horizontal skyscraper: a long rectilinear mass tipped on its side with arms and branches reaching out from its main stem. Holl’s building hovers above garden and park spaces on eight legs, creating a shaded micro-climate and quality public outdoor space that’s sorely lacking in developing-world cities. Making the building co-exist with the green space below necessitated that this developing nation take a fundamental symbol of its burgeoning prosperity–a new shimmering high rise tower–and tip it on its side. Such depth of inquiry and lack of presupposition in Holl’s work makes this kind of audacious gambit almost common in his buildings.
Knut Hamsun Center
In addition to China, Holl’s work can be seen across the United States and Europe. Examples of his work include:
The Nelson Atkins Museum Bloch Building in Kansas City, Mo., a subterranean art museum expansion that pierces the ground plane with five translucent boxes that materialize light like blocks of ice.
MIT’s Simmons Hall in Cambridge, Mass., a dormitory that Holl used to develop his ideas about urban porosity, later seen in his Chinese projects. Based around the conceptual motif of a sponge, the building features irregular volumetric gaps and transparencies, as well as vertical, funnel-shaped incisions that act as light and air chimneys.
The Knut Hamsun Center in Norway, a historical museum honoring the Norwegian writer that takes cues from Hamsun’s work to create a wooded vernacular-referenced façade pierced by walkways and glass observation decks, literary symbols of hidden impulses.
NYU’s Department of Philosophy in New York City, which redesigns the interior of a historic masonry building and inserts an open six-story light shaft, taking formal and conceptual guidance from the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Pratt Institute’s Higgins Hall Insertion, an addition to Pratt’s architecture school, in New York City, that join two red brick buildings with a glowing bar-shaped volume of varying transparency and opacity.
Linked Hybrid
“What, in my view, especially commends him as a candidate for the Gold Medal,” wrote Harry Cobb, FAIA, of Pei Cobb Freed, in a recommendation letter, “is his brilliantly demonstrated capacity to join his refined design sensibility to a rigorously exploratory theoretical project.”
Holl is the 68th AIA Gold Medalist. He joins the ranks of such visionaries as Thomas Jefferson (1993), Frank Lloyd Wright (1949), Louis Sullivan (1944), LeCorbusier (1961), Louis Kahn (1971), I.M. Pei (1979), Santiago Calatrava (2005), Glenn Murcutt (2009, and Fumihiko Maki (2011)). In recognition of his legacy to architecture, his name will be chiseled into the granite Wall of Honor in the lobby of the AIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
NAMA
About The American Institute of Architects
For over 150 years, members of the American Institute of Architects have worked with each other and their communities to create more valuable, healthy, secure, and sustainable buildings and cityscapes. Members adhere to a code of ethics and professional conduct to ensure the highest standards in professional practice. Embracing their responsibility to serve society, AIA members engage civic and government leaders and the public in helping find needed solutions to pressing issues facing our communities, institutions, nation and world. Visit www.aia.org.
Krueck + Sexton’s architectural design vision for 1100 First Street re-defines the expectations of the speculative office building in Washington, D.C. Organized as two distinct 350,000 square foot blocks on a 1.7 acre site, the forms of this glass-clad building pair are subtly manipulated to emphasize verticality and activate a dynamic courtyard at the center of the complex. This space brings natural light deep into the site and identifies the building’s main entry.
View from First Street (Image Courtesy Prakash Patel)
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