case history: the desert home

case history: the desert home

Our ideas about building in the desert come from three months spent crossing the Sahara Desert in 2006, and from 6 years now in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.  From the Sahara, we got a visceral sense of the difference between building with earth and building with concrete.  The bottom line was this: In the absence especially of large quantities of expensive insulation, earthen construction was almost always comfortable, and concrete construction rarely so.  In the Sonoran Desert, we've come to draw inspiration from the creatures that operate comfortably in the environment, and extract typologies from that examination.  The house discussed here draws from the Desert Tortoise, relying on a tough, insulating shell to shield the more vulnerable living space within.

...a face only his mother could love...

In this case, the shell is a reinforced thin-shell of concrete, covered by 14" of earth.  In this way we are able to benefit from the structural capacity of a modern material with the insulating value of earth.  Deep overhangs are calculated to admit sun during the winter, when the desert gets quite cold, and keep the sun out otherwise.  Liberal covered exterior space takes advantage of the opportunity to live outdoors for up to 6 months a year by providing shade.  Patios, driveways and the swimming pool extend out into the landscape, stabilizing the surrounding terrain.

The project is dug into a berm, taking advantage of underground temperatures that remain stable year-round between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  Underneath the shell, the building is open to the breeze with a lot of surface area and large operable glass panels.

The question, especially with buildings that aren't cubic, is always what kind of urbanism would emerge if this were taken as a prototype.  In other words, what does a building like this mean for neighborhoods, and for cities?  The failures of suburbia: impoverished social structures, bland culture, enslavement to the car and to commuting, outsourcing childcare, all the gifts of Henry Ford and Frank Lloyd Wright and Dwight Eisenhower, they demand a better answer.  Our inspiration still comes from Paolo Soleri and Arcosanti and a vision of tremendous density and spatial diversity juxtaposed with great stretches of unabused land in its natural or cultivated state.

learning environments: flow

the learning environment: flow

From a recent article in CNN Money, lauding a new book: The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, by journalist Steven Kotler, pointing out that peak mental states are triggered by a rich environment.  Our take-away: Peak educational performance will be triggered by rich, complex, novel educational spaces.  If we are going to take education seriously and make the most of what science has to tell us, then the 21st century school will not be business as usual, neutral lecture rooms.

"There are 15 flow triggers that are covered in The Rise of Superman. For example, you want a very specific challenge-to-skills ratio. The challenge needs to be 4% greater than the skills you bring to the table. We took that number and ran with it, and tried to test it in various scenarios, and we have found it's very effective.

A rich environment is another trigger. A rich environment is a fancy way of saying lots of novelty, lots of complexity, and lots of unpredictability. Google (GOOG) is great at this. They talk about 10x improvement and not 10% improvement. When you're asking for 10x improvement, you're throwing out all the existing assumptions, and you have to start radically new. You're massively increasing the amount of novelty, complexity, and unpredictability in your employees' work life."

From: The Science Behind Peak Human Performance, Anne VanderMey, CNN Money, March 17, 2014

approach: visceral and inspiring learning environments

approach: visceral and inspiring learning environments

The modern classroom...as neutral as ever, as drained of psychological content as ever, as boring as ever.  Notice the utter passivity of these potentially vibrant, active kids.  30 years after leaving public school, we remember the rooms far more viscerally than the people: arid, airless, draining.  It suggests at the very least that we pay attention to the environment as much as we pay attention to the lesson plan.

Two classrooms in Agadez Niger, 2006, one on each side of a teaching wall, in the shade of a small bosque.  No resources, no enclosure, no one sleeping, incredible engagement.  You can see the earthen bricks for a future building in the background.

School is too often boring.  Emotion is too often stifled or viewed as a problem, environments are desaturated to the point of complete neutrality, and too many buildings give the word "institutional" a bad reputation.

When we think of teaching as telling stories, and learning as experiencing the world through those stories, then we have to ask, how do we get students viscerally involved in stories?  Furthermore, how do we inspire students to create stories, to make their life an amazing story?  Is the hermetic vacuum of a classroom where stories are born?

Given our understanding of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1999), and given our perception that learning is transactional with the learning environment (Dent-Read and Zukow-Goldring, 1997, Wagman and Miller, 2003), we propose an approach to the design of educational environments that acknowledges their active, cognitive impact and power.

Here than are 14 environmental typologies we believe worth considering for the school environment as an alternative to the neutral classroom.  We'll explore each typology individually in future posts, but leave you with this image: of a school in which teacher's no longer own their classroom, but instead rotate their class among a wide array of individual learning experiences, a host of unique learning environments appealing to the many different intelligences of their many students.

Here are the 14 typologies:

1. The Bar-Restaurant

2. The Campfire

3. The Digital Environment

4. The Garden

5. The Interview Booth

6. The Kiosk

7. The Library Cafe

8. The Map Room

9. The Sandbox

10. The Speaker's Corner

11. The Tent

12. The TV Array

13. The War Room

14. The Workshop

Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, Basic Books, New York (1999)
Wagman and Miller, Nested Reciprocities: The Organism–Environment System in Perception–Action and Development,  (2003)
Dent-Read, C. and P. Zukow-Goldring, “Introduction: Ecological Realism, Dynamic Systems, and Epigenetic Systems Approaches to Development”, in C. Dent-Read and P. Zukow-Goldring (eds.), Evolving Explanations of Development: Ecological Approaches to Organism-Environment Systems, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, (1997)

approach: visceral and inspiring learning experiences

approach: visceral and inspiring learning experiences

As we spent more and more time analyzing school projects and working with educators, we recognized that the conversation was mired in what was rather than what could be.  Student population projections, state authorized reimbursable venues, and traditional teaching methodologies all froze the exploration before it could produce anything but what we've always built and always seen.

There is no doubt that the neutral 800 or 900sf classroom, the gym/cafeteria/auditorium/library array, the playground layout, the sports venues and the "office": administrative spaces, nurses space and storage, all have served us moderately well, some of it even remembered fondly by the alumni of the system.  We think, however, that the status quo is more of a budgeting and planning convenience than an inspiration to the parents, students and teachers.  In a world where creativity is recognized as a significant indicator of future success, and where a rich landscape of different learning modalities and intelligences are at work, the notion of a "neutral" classroom seems like a cop-out.

Herewith, our list of learning experiences we wish were commonplace, and better served by the educational venues we build:

1. The Race

We don't mean this literally: schools already build tracks.  We are talking about a situation where students or teams of students compete against each other in pursuit of a singular goal.  That experience: of going head to head, of focusing on a singular result,, of bringing all of your creativity to bear on being faster or better, that experience is indelible.

The race in Geography could be a virtual effort to travel from one place to another using existing timetables and other web-based resources, progress tracked on a world map.  That race requires a maproom, one of a catalog of alternative learning venues we'll cover in a future post. The race in Math could be an effort by teams to solve pressing real-world problems mathematically, and the venue may require a campfire or a purely digital environment.  The bottom line: racing should be a regular thing, and not just in gym or after school.  It can be a powerful learning experience.

2. The Safari

Safari's require leaving behind the habitat you know very well and feel completely comfortable in to enter into a rich, alien environment filled with interesting and even potentially dangerous objects or animals of study.  Safaris bring you in direct contact with the natural world.  Schools already offer "field trips", an excellent example of a Safari.  We prefer to think of Safari's however, as something that can occur regularly and frequently, without leaving the school grounds.  Our design for the Tucson Waldorf School, for example, included a distant classroom and extensive garden venues that afforded the opportunity for classes to move out of their classrooms, no busses or parental permission slips required.

3. The Meditation

The meditation demands silence and attention, two commodities in short supply in our students' hectic lives and therefore all the more valuable.  In a world where attention spans are demonstrably decreasing, the importance of exercising our ability to concentrate for extended periods seems obvious.  Schools should be demanding it of their students, and supporting them with the appropriate venues.

To students, perhaps most of them, meditation might be torture.  No electronic tethers, no friendly banter, only themselves and perhaps a koan, or perhaps an "altar" or focal point. 

4. The Duel

The duel has some qualities of the Race, the winning and losing for example, but it is much more personal, and highly visceral.  The duel could be a gymnasium filled with chess boards, or a series of one on one debates, or a contest in any field whatsoever.  A duel can be a singular event, or many duels in parallel.  The key to a duel is that the participants are on display: the duel is a very public event typically reserved for the middle of town.  Duels require spectators.

5. The Bullfight

The bullfight pits a student or team not against another student or team, but against an implacable inhuman force or problem.  The bull can be an obstacle course, a minefield, a computer game, a math problem, a difficult situation (accomplish the following 10 tasks in this room of non-English speakers), or any number of possible challenges.  Again, spectators create the experience, even when it is simply your classmates.  This kind of learning experience is, of course, not uncommon even in a neutral classroom environment.  We believe, however, that the venue makes the experience.  It was in thinking about bullfights that we began to imagine a campus of unique venues among which classes rotate.  

Today we are in the bullring: we will learn French in a manner commensurate with the room.

In this manner, teachers are motivated and empowered to teach to a multiplicity of intelligences, a lecture rarely welcome in a bullring that could instead invite a spectacle.

6. The Swim

The swim is complete immersion in an alien environment, forcing the student to figure out survival strategies without the usual support structures to enable disengagement. The swim is entering a room where no one speaks English.  The swim is being presented a board full of alien inscription, math for example, and being required to interpret or explain.  The swim is a garden in which students are told to find and identify and solve for pathogens.  The swim is a historical exercise in which students are required to immerse themselves in an alien culture in order to understand and explain a certain mindset in a visceral way, 1936 Germany for example, or 2014 Washington DC.  The swim invites a moment of sheer, visceral panic, in which the enormity of the distance to land is fully understood and acknowledged.  The power is in overcoming that moment to plot a survival strategy.

7. The Climb

The climb is a challenging path to a singular, well-understood and immensely rewarding goal.  It can be an individual or team effort.  The difference between a climb and a term paper is the acknowledged awesomeness of the ultimate achievement, the reward sufficient to motivate students to unparalleled effort.  Some examples of climbs include: pursuing scientific problems no one has solved ever...in the world, solving a cool engineering problem and seeing it implemented, building apps, pursuing a patent, implementing a new program in school, running for office...class treasurer even...building robots...

Climbs demand individual excellence, but it can also build teams.  Climbers are often roped together, and climbers often rely on guides and belayers.  Climbers help each other.  Climbing is an incredibly visceral experience, an unforgettable experience, and a powerful model for learning lessons students will never forget.

8. The Apprenticeship

For students to experience adults pursuing excellence: that's an unforgettable and eye-opening event.  We are not particularly concerned about the one-on-one relationship, though this is undeniably powerful. We are more interested in the visceral nature of the relationship, the experience of working with an adult, and the rich possibility of learning by doing.

9. Storytelling

Stories are essential to teaching and learning.  By providing narrative and context and engaging protagonists, stories escape the trap of rote learning.  Even memorization experts agree: the key to memorizing long lists lies in tying each element on the list to a cohesive narrative.  We might examine therefore how we can bolster the impact of stories by building contexts as powerful as a campfire on a beach.

We believe schools should be built to support and encourage these powerful learning experiences.  Neutral classrooms add little, and too often drain completely the emotion out of learning experiences.  We can do better.

case history: a new school campus

case history: a new school campus

This is the story of a beautiful Sonoran Desert site adjacent to a wash flowing down from the Finger Rocks north of Tucson, Arizona, donated to the Tucson Waldorf School.

The site floods, and large volumes of sand get deposited when it does, and the site is a protected landscape, a rural historic landscape certified by the Department of the Interior, meaning a huge swath of it facing the main road is highly scrutinized for adherence to an historic mythology.

This beautiful 10 acre site was donated to the Tucson Waldorf School, and on it they envisioned building a new campus.  We were fortunate to become the designers.

We assembled a team for an integrated project delivery, including mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, civil, landscape and construction management consultants, and explored the project with the client in extensive charettes involving the entire school community. Discussions focused on sustainability and anthroposophy, a philosophy articulated by Rudolph Steiner in the early 20th century upon which the Waldorf system is based.  Regarding architecture, the philosophy emphasizes dialectics or juxtaposing opposites and eschews right angles, but a detailed explanation is impossible here.

Early explorations of the site plan assumed entry to the site from the main road, placing parking and driveway in the protected landscape on the main road and pushing the school back away from the street noise.  An early metaphor about beehives and the anthroposophic injunction against right angles suggested a planning grid based on hexagons, which drove these early schemes.

Ultimately however, the addition to the program of a soccer field forced a complete rethinking of the site plan, the soccer field could only go into the protected streetfront area, and entry to the site was moved back to the side street:

The heart of this final conceptual site plan was the construction of four islands, one each for administration, early childhood, grades 1-8, and group functions (auditorium/gymnasium/support).  The islands would raise the buildings and play areas out of the floodplain, and would be connected with bridges to highlight their independence. Classrooms are pushed to the back, quieter part of the site, and the athletic and performance venue faces the main road.  We imagined school events this visible to the community driving by would be a tremendous calling card for the school.  The plan also articulated a three phase construction plan: Phase 1 in orange, Phase 2 in blue, and Phase 3 in pink.  With a site concept in place, we began schematic design of phase 1.

Our perception that in early childhood especially, children love to occupy corners suggested keeping the hexagonal rooms that were originally generic placeholders.  The hexagons were exceptional as rooms, and also wonderfully fluid in clusters, making this an important decision. They also avoided right angles, the anthroposophic concern nicely addressed.

 In the upper grades too, the hexagons allowed for straightforward orthogonal seating but offered apses for a teacher's desk and secondary activities.  Here we warped the hexagons in order to expand the teaching wall, and opened the rooms fully to the site behind the student seating to allow for connection without creating distraction.  Lockers and toilet facilities occupy the courtyard around which the Grades classrooms cluster.

The administration building proved quite straightforward, serving as an entry to the three other clusters and the site, maintaining a secure site entrance, and establishing a home base for the staff.

Three dimensionally, we experimented with a number of different building sections.  Our objectives were to provide a superior building envelope, maximize daylight, address anthroposophic concerns, and create a superior teaching environment.  Our experience in the Sahara Desert had proven the superiority of earth as a desert building medium, and rammed earth was our original intent.

Advice from the contractor regarding cost and constructibility led us to steel or wood frames with structural insulated panel (SIP) skins topped with stucco.  Extensive shading, sloped walls and columns to avoid right angles, and a subdued desert color palette were additional objectives.

Delivery of the schematic design package, consisting also of input from each consultant and a cost estimate from the contractor, was met with concern by the Grades teachers who were unconvinced by the hexagonal classrooms.  We produced an extensive comparison of different options, and decided ultimately as a group that the original design served them best.

At this point, key members of the Board of Directors left the project and the school, including most significantly, the head of the Board and key driver of the project.  The cost estimate came in very high, but there was no opportunity to explore construction options or scope changes that might bring the project in line. The new head of the Board had a very different vision for the school and another architect to carry it out.  A year later, the school built some modest classroom buildings that eliminated any possibility of our plan coming to fruition, and so we chalk this one up to experience and that realm of truly exceptional possibilities that will never be fulfilled.

case history: the branded environment

case history: the branded environment

We were approached by a Boston furniture dealer to help them think through the redesign of their showroom lobby, a mess of a space at the end of an anonymous corridor of a building filled with showrooms in a warehouse not far from downtown Boston.

Our proposal centered on the red circle that featured so prominently in their logo.  We thought, "what could we do to turn that red circle into something more compelling, something that could draw people to the showroom down that long corridor from the elevators?", and we decided to turn it into a big red ball that would just sit there in the showroom without explanation.  We wanted a more compelling red, a more three dimensional red, and so the artist on the team came up with tissue paper and elmers glue:

The layout proved pretty easy: remove everything cluttering up the space, and replace it with some lounge seating, a reception desk, and a way to show off the latest chair designs.  The design turned out like this:

It's true that we needed to blast light at that red wall to really make it come alive, and those lights didn't come cheap and so the final budget here wasn't zero.  For 6 years after the installation however, COP had an awesome entrance at the end of that long, public corridor, until the furniture company they represent required another rebranding.  When finally the red tissue paper and elmer's glue walls came down, we happily co-opted the material for our own logo, and we use it to this day.

Consult our portfolio for the final results of the Creative Office Pavilion showroom.

case history: the flexible, collaborative workplace

case history: the flexible, collaborative workplace

We were approached to design the new headquarters of Neustar Corporation, a spin-off from Lockheed Martin charged somehow with administering website domain names, a business that turns out to be very big business.  Like selling shovels to goldminers, we suspect this might be where the real money is.

We flew to Washington DC and were shown a dark cavern of space, a pancake wedged between neighboring buildings and filled with concrete columns every 20 feet in all directions.  We had been imagining empty loft space on the trip over, and felt like we'd accidentally stumbled into the parking garage instead.  The space was...challenging...

We asked Neustar if they could get out of the lease, but no dice.

Back at the studio some time later, committed to the project, and programming complete, but not yet struck by thunderbolts of inspiration, we simply started with test fits.  The existing floorplate was a sea of columns with an elevator core stuck in the middle:

We had the company broken down by department and personnel count, we understood the flat hierarchy, we had heard their commitment to collaboration and fluid teams, but we didn't yet understand possible layouts that worked with the unusual floor plate and limited access to daylight and views.  The test fit result was a horrifying rat's maze:

One of us remembered a night from his youth, north of Agadir, Morrocco, with an inky black sky above and dozens of bonfires lit along the beach, groups of people gathered around each, carousing and playing music, ...and we might have rolled our eyes at yet another story from 1979 except that it captured exactly the experience of being in that deep, dark space down in Washington, and it captured the possibility of some kind of beacons scattered around the floorplate that would serve perhaps as departmental hubs, cutting the darkness.

A new plan emerged, now with each department centered on a conference room, a glowing totem of a room, a room that started off as a bonfire but became more like a lit beacon or lighthouse, crossed with an idea about grafitti and Paris kiosks filled with announcements that led to us adding erasable whiteboard to the rooms both inside and out, a place where people could gather in ad hoc ways and doodle or brainstorm:

This new plan imagined workstations spreading throughout the floor organically, growing and shrinking like a bacteria or a virus throughout the rigid matrix of the floorplate.  It was a conception made possible by a new hexagonal workstation design developed by Herman Miller, that abandoned the orthogonal limitations of traditional furniture systems.  This new furniture system was radically light and open, dispensing with tired concerns about privacy or hierarchy and embracing teamwork and visual connection.  This felt like the way work should happen in order to fuel creativity.

We could imagine now, a floor filled with glowing totems:

With encouragement from the client, we developed the design further.  The conference rooms in particular required careful consideration, serving now as beacons, kiosks, meeting rooms, and presentation venues:

The resulting workspace proved radical: combining density with flexibility, juxtaposing the stationary with the fluid, encouraging collaboration with the whiteboard kiosks, identifying departments with the beacons and creating an unbridled atmosphere of creative freedom.  There was resistance certainly, fiercely, as no client like this is monolithic, but we had captured the imagination of the CEO with our vision of his company, and this is perhaps the only reason this project survived: just this one man and his sense of possibility.  We recall Buckminster Fuller, who famously dealt only with the very top of the organizations for whom he worked, anything else in his estimation a complete waste of time.  The problems we solve, the architecture we commit ourselves too: they aren't flashy or particularly fashionable usually,  We wring meaning from them however, and bestow nothing less than careful attention and yes, love, and this is how we feed our own hope that tomorrow is even more exceptional than today.  Hope, Love, Meaning.

See our portfolio for photographs of the final results.

case history: the tropical home

case history: the tropical home

A friend called from Hawai'i to ask if we knew any architects who could design a house for his new coffee plantation.  We suggested he hire us for the job, and flew out to take a look at his site.  It was early autumn in Boston, the heat and humidity gone, a trip to Hawai'i just the thing to prolong summer.

The flight to the Big Island of Hawai'i was long, first to Los Angeles and then over an ocean as rippled and green grey as slate.  The sun sank away, reading was futile, and the movie was boring: emerging finally from the plane felt like crawling out of an underground hole.  It was warm and dark and moist in Kona, and the lei offered in welcome smelled absolutely delicious.

The next morning, this more or less is what we saw of the site.  

The client insisted there was a fantastic view there, of miles of coastline and an ocean all the way to Japan.

Here's something that turned out to be the most important thing our client showed us: a closet that didn't get any fresh air:

Without excellent ventilation, the moisture here settles everywhere, and the black mold rapidly follows.  The lesson is simple: the free flow of air is absolutely imperative in this place.  It started us thinking about flow.

In Hawai'i, the ground, the air, the water...it all flows.  It's neither theoretical nor dull enough to ignore.  It is visceral, and commonplace and it makes the experience of being there more vibrant than elsewhere.  It is exactly what makes this place...this place: its genius loci.  We determined that this house, to be truly and fully of this place, it would be about flow.

In thinking about flow, we realized the flow of air and water and lava was really either mauka: up the hill, or makai: towards the ocean.  Obvious perhaps, but out of this thought came the image of an array of parallel walls perpendicular to the slope, a configuration least disruptive of the flow.  These parallel walls could hold up the roof and provide separation between spaces, but never create the moldy closet we saw when we first arrived in Kona.

There are lots of examples of parallel wall buildings, but the one that inspired us here is the Sonsbeek Pavilion designed in 1966 by the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck and rebuilt in 2006 (It was a temporary sculpture exhibit).

We love the way the parallel walls grapple with roundness, and the way views and spatial relationships are enriched with unexpected openings.

This image from the original structure beautifully highlights the contrast between the dark sculptures and the light walls, the heavy concrete block and the light roof structure, sun and shade.  In the same way straight slots of space become round apses, the play of opposites makes a rich architectural experience.  Here is the rebuilt structure:

We worked through the Fall and Winter on the house, The idea of parallel walls came early, but a convincing building eluded us.  Another client needed our help in New York City, and in some little cafe in the Village came the idea to break the Hawai'i house into 6 pieces: Master Bedroom, Office, Living Room, Kitchen/Dining Room, Guest Bedrooms and Garage,  Open Lanais could occupy the spaces between these elements under a great big green copper roof.

The Van Eyck building niggled at us, his way of mashing round and straight in particular suggesting to us that straight walls alone would lack even the slightest possibility of spatial tension.  A crude sketch of the Hawai'i plan, great big red magic marker ellipses highlighting what we started calling "hot spots", fireplace, kitchen, master bedroom, suggested some possibilities.  The ellipses ultimately erupted out of the roof, great big skylights implying space below without rippling the walls.

In early Spring we flew back to Hawai'i, a month lost to quibbles with the client about the kitchen/dining room.  It seemed the only way to bust through the impasse.  For a week we sketched options, the client reviewing them every evening, until finally a front kitchen with a huge surf board of an island and a back kitchen with dishwashing and storage solved the problem.  A huge snowstorm in Boston kept us in Hawai'i an extra day, and we could celebrate a problem solved.

We sent a model off to Hawai'i, a big chipboard affair.  The response was positive.  We changed our mind about the garage, begging to amputate it from the house and shove it into the slope behind the house.  We spent more time than we were paid for.  Our plan for Hula Dog Farm developed into this:

The pools of water flow through the house, clouds can drift through, and the lava rock and plants flow into the dwelling as well.  Views out into the landscape in all directions ties you directly, viscerally to the landscape.  A section through the building shows this as well:

We thought a lot about air flow and cooling, accounting for evaporation and the bernoulli principle and every other strategy we could think of that might keep air moving in the building:

...and when we were done, and the building we designed was built, and the owner called to say that clouds were drifting through his house, we could email him this picture torn out of a travel magazine on the plane flight home from our first site visit, before we really knew what we were going to do:

A few years later, after the house was "discovered", a photographer asked to document the house, and it came to anchor a book called "The Hawai'ian House Now".  It's available through Amazon.

There are parts of this story less triumphant: how the client lived in a shipping container for two years on the site to get this thing built, how it took him a year to find a contractor to build it for the money he could borrow, how we almost lost the skylights and the beautiful pool to the pressure to reduce cost, how the contractors that finally started despite skills and endurance failed to finish and lost their own houses to the bonding company, their bid price too low, how the soils on the site gave way in the rains one night.  These were all emergencies then but feel like footnotes now.

The original owner still lives there, and just this year we designed some support buildings to help him more effectively operate the coffee plantation.  See our portfolio for photographs of the house.