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OCTOBER 2023
DEPARTMENTS
20 EDITOR’S LETTER
23 NEWSMAKER: Enrique Sobejano
By David Cohn
27 NEWSMAKER: Cynthia Weese
By Josephine Minutillo
33 FORUM: Sans Spectacle By Isabel Strauss
37 PRODUCTS: Glass & Glazing By Sheila Kim
38 PRODUCTS: Textiles & Wallcoverings
43 BOOK REVIEW: The Way We Build:
Restoring Dignity to Construction
Work, by Mark Erlich
Reviewed by Pansy Schulman
44 BOOK EXCERPT: The Japanese House
Since 1945, by Naomi Pollock, FAIA
51 LANDSCAPE: The Leaf, Winnipeg,
Manitoba KPMB ARCHITECTS
By Pansy Schulman
55 GUESS THE ARCHITECT
57 BUILDING TECHNOLOGY: Höweler +
Yoon’s Trio of Residential Buildings in
Boston By Eric Höweler, FAIA
64 IN FOCUS: Baddour Center, Senatobia,
Mississippi DUVALL DECKER
By Matt Hickman
PROJECTS
70 Perelman Performing Arts Center,
New York REX By Izzy Kornblatt
78 East Flatbush Library, Brooklyn,
New York LEVENBETTS
By Josephine Minutillo
RESIDENTIAL
87 Beyond-the-Family House,
Madrid IGNACIO G. GALÁN AND
OF ARCHITECTS By Leopoldo Villardi
90 Geode ADU, Burlingame,
California IWAMOTOSCOTT
ARCHITECTURE By Clare Jacobson
92 Blind Dormer House, Toronto
ANYA MORYOUSSEF ARCHITECT
By Alex Bozikovic
94 Werfstraat, Brussels
BOVENBOUW ARCHITECTUUR
By Tim Abrahams
96 Stick House, Brick Garden,
Brooklyn, New York
ABRUZZO BODZIAK ARCHITECTS
By Joann Gonchar, FAIA
BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,057
MULTIFAMILY HOUSING
103 Borrassà, Barcelona PERIS+TORAL
ARQUITECTES By Leopoldo Villardi
110 ParkLife, Melbourne AUSTIN
MAYNARD ARCHITECTS By Dillon Webster
116 Keybridge, London ALLIES AND
MORRISON By Chris Foges
122 Vale Pereiro, Lisbon NOMOS
ARCHITECTS By Izzy Kornblatt
128 Timber Tower, Paris MOREAU
KUSUNOKI By Andrew Ayers
135 CONTINUING EDUCATION:
Office Conversions
CAN ADAPTING EMPTY COMMERCIAL
TOWERS REVIVE BUSINESS DISTRICTS AND
ALLAY THE HOUSING SHORTAGE?
By James S. Russell, FAIA Emeritus
160 Dates & Events
164 SNAPSHOT: Flor Lofts, Los Angeles
KONING EIZENBERG By Sarah Amelar
COVER: BORRASSÀ, BARCELONA. BY PERIS+TORAL
ARQUITECTES. PHOTO © JOSÉ HEVIA.
THIS PAGE: BEYOND-THE-FAMILY HOUSE, MADRID. BY IGNACIO G.
GALÁN AND OF ARCHITECTS. PHOTO © IMAGEN SUBLIMINAL.
Expanded coverage at architecturalrecord.com.
11
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Photo courtesy of © Mark Herboth; CRL

p144 p154

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14 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
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16 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
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 From the EDITOR

Close to Home
WHEN MY PARENTS bought our family home in New York
decades ago, it cost about twice my father’s then yearly salary. That
house is now worth about 40 times what they paid for it, and is not
something I could afford to buy today, despite my advanced education
and command of the English language (something my parents lacked
at the time).
My little personal story, anecdotal as it may be, goes a long way in
explaining the ongoing, persistent, and utterly frustrating problem of
affordable housing—not for the chronically homeless or the astonish-
ing influx of migrants coming to the country, which are separate crises,
but for average Americans. In 2022, the national median household
income was around $75,000. By the formula I cited above, a house for

PHOTOGRAPHY: © JILLIAN NELSON

say, a family of five (as mine was) should cost twice the homeowner’s
salary, or $150,000. But the average price of a house in the U.S. is well
over $400,000. Even taking into account the fact that most households
today, unlike those in my parents’ day, are dual-income, the cost of
housing is eating up more and more of our paychecks.
Of course, annual salaries and house prices vary dramatically across
the country. But when you consider that only about 12 percent of
individuals earn as much as $75,000, the disconnect becomes even
more staggering. And what about renting as opposed to homeowner-
ship? Without any further confusing math, let me just quote perennial New York political candidate
Jimmy McMillan—“The rent is too damn high!”
This issue of record presents architectural efforts that offer either affordable residential design or
opportunities for densification. We examine a dignified social housing project in Barcelona, featured
on the cover, and a mass-timber apartment tower in Paris, both of them located on their respective
cities’ peripheries. In the center of Lisbon, a small office building is converted to residences. In
Melbourne, a sunny yellow structure anchors Australia’s first operationally carbon-neutral residential
precinct. And in London, a city long averse to residential high-rises, a new development mixes build-
ings of different scales, including the very tall.
To supplement this month’s multifamily building-type study, we include a residential section that
features single-family houses in urban areas across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. They showcase
examples of multigenerational living, aging in place, accessory dwelling units, and generous outdoor
space. The continuing-education article tackles the issues architects confront when adapting sky-
scrapers, originally designed as offices, into residences in cities including New York, Detroit,
Chicago, and Philadelphia. And in Boston, an architect explains the different approaches taken in
three separate projects that bring density and transit-oriented development to difficult sites in that
New England city.
Returning to New York, the city I’ve called home for nearly my entire life, the little brick row-
house on a Brooklyn block where I grew up was not affordable housing, as we use that term now. It
was just a house that was affordable. Our best architectural efforts won’t change the fact that those
kinds of houses, like the ones featured in our residential section, are out of reach for most families
(and single people) today. But employing more of the design strategies demonstrated in this issue
could help more people find more appropriate housing in the places they want to live.

Josephine Minutillo, Editor in Chief

20 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
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 Record NEWSMAKER

Enrique Sobejano Discusses His Firm’s Winning Proposal

for the Dallas Museum of Art Revamp
Many were surprised when the Dallas Museum
of Art announced in August that a Spanish
couple, Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano,
had won the competition to enlarge Edward
Larrabee Barnes’s 1984 building. Though this
will be their first American work, the architects,
both 67, are well-known in Europe for their
competition-winning cultural facilities, all
involving historic sites and buildings. Their last
big competition win was for the City of Theater
in Paris, now awaiting financing, which will
bring three major state theater companies together
in the former workshops of the Paris Opera.
The couple, who established the eponymous
Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos in 1984, first won
international recognition for their museum beside
the archeological site of Madinat al Zahra, a
10th-century Islamic city-palace near Córdoba,
Spain. Winner of the 2010 Aga Khan Award,
that project adapted the palace’s geometric patterns
of spaces and patios to work in a sleek, modern
design. Other notable works include the San
Telmo Museum in San Sebastián, Spain (2011), firm is based on interventions in existing ing. Some left it unrecognizable. In fact,
the Center for Contemporary Creation, also in buildings. For us, Edward Larrabee Barnes’s when we saw the other proposals, we thought,
Córdoba (2013), and the Moritzburg Museum in original museum was the key factor in our “Well, ours is so different that it must not be
Halle, Germany (2008). Nieto and Sobejano proposal. It’s very large and opaque—over what they’re looking for.”
teach and maintain offices in Madrid and Berlin. 420,000 square feet—and organized in a
Sobejano spoke with record international series of near cubic volumes clad in limestone. But you certainly had to make important
correspondent David Cohn about the winning The clients want to improve its image, enlarge changes to the original building.
proposal for the Dallas Museum of Art and the it, and open it more to the public. But the base Of course. For example, the four main
similarly “respectful” approach the firm has taken of our project had to be Barnes. We analyzed galleries are staggered in height, with some
to expansion projects at European cultural insti- his design in geometric and constructive 5 feet of stairs between each one. It’s spatially
tutions. terms. Our proposal responds to the idea that attractive but today presents a problem of
it should be enlarged following this logic. accessibility. So we altered the floor height in
IMAGES: © NIETO SOBEJANO ARQUITECTOS (BOTTOM); ALVARO FELGUEROSO LOBO (TOP)

What do you think made your design stand
out from among the other five finalists?
The formation and development of our
I think David Chipperfield [in his pro-
posal] did something similar, but the other
firms greatly transformed the existing build-
two of the galleries, and instead of four halls,
there are two larger spaces.
At an intermediate level, a central axis
organizes the whole design, with new eleva-
tors, stairs, and escalators. As it is now, this
space is like a subway tunnel. We opened it to
natural light from above, which gives it
height, and to the north and south facades.
The education center is found there, and
temporary exhibitions, a shop, and café. This
changes everything—it becomes like a public
street that passes through the building.
The second important part of our proposal
are the two main facades. The original build-
ing only has one, to the south, with a sym-

Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano (above),

architects of the winning proposal for the
Dallas Museum of Art expansion, featuring a
volume above the existing building (left).

23
 Record NEWSMAKER
bolic vault opening to the axis of the Dallas
Arts District. But patterns of development
suggest that the opposite, northern facade
will also become important in the future.
Though the idea still needs to be developed,
we will transform these facades so that artists
can interact with them by presenting contem­
T3 Office Building
“Rainier” Blackened Steel
The Contemporary Art Center, or
C3A, in Córdoba, Spain (2013).
porary art directly to the city, as
we’ve done in our Córdoba Con­
temporary Art Center. We main­
tained Barnes’s stone massing but
opened the ground floor with
sections of glass to make it more
transparent and friendly.
How are you handling the addi-
tion to the building?
The addition comprises about
40,000 square feet. It will appear
as a volume floating over the roofs,
almost square in plan like Barnes’s
modules. The elevated volume—dedicated to
exhibitions—is without columns, making it an
enormously versatile space. It has a powerful
structure, with deep beams and large cantile­
vers supported by only four columns. The
translucent cladding can be illuminated at
night. Below this floating volume are a restau­
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Do you feel a particular sympathy between
Barnes’s work and your design aesthetic?
The relationship is more ambivalent. But,
on entering the competition and revisiting
his work, we began to understand its value.
In Germany, where the country’s postwar
architecture is now highly valued and pro­
tected, we are working on several projects
with similar issues. Our addition to the
Archeological Museum in Munich opens this
year. It’s a very forceful building of the 1970s
by a little­known architect, Helmut von
Werz. We won the competition with the
same approach: that the building should be
respected. In this case, our addition is under­
PHOTOGRAPHY: © ROLAND HALBE
ground. Currently, we are restoring the
Beethoven Concert Hall in Bonn, a 1950s
building designed by a disciple of Hans
Scharoun. The value of such works is some­
times architectural, sometimes historic. We
respect that and respond to this. And that’s
what we did here in Dallas. n
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 Record NEWSMAKER
Cynthia Weese Receives AIA Lifetime Achievement Award
AIA Chicago, the second-largest chapter of the
American Institute of Architects, has honored
Cynthia Weese, FAIA, principal of Weese
Langley Weese Architects, with the 2023 AIA
Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award. For
nearly 50 years, Weese has served the architec-
tural profession as a reformer working to ad-
vance women in the field; as a design innovator
in affordable housing, adaptive reuse, and
educational facilities; and as an academic vi-
sionary. She was a later addition to the original
all-male group known as the Chicago Seven,
who supplanted rigid Midcentury Modernism
through their design work and exhibitions. In
1974, Weese became a founding member of
Chicago Women in Architecture, the ground-
breaking forum advocating for women archi-
tects. Between 1993 and 2005, she served her
alma mater as dean of the School of Architecture
at Washington University in St. Louis, becom-
ing the first woman to be a dean of any college
there. She spoke with record editor in chief
Josephine Minutillo, who was a graduate
architecture student at the school during the
years that Weese served as its dean.
When I look back on my years at the archi-
tecture school at Washington University,
I don’t know if I was naive or extremely
enlightened, but neither I nor any of my
classmates thought, “Hey, there’s a woman
running this school!” What was it like for
you, being one of the first female deans of
an architecture school in the country?
I’m glad you didn’t think it was unusual. I
was, of course, honored to be dean, but it
wasn’t unusual for me. There were about five
or six women who were either deans or heads
of architecture schools in the early 1990s,
and, when I left, there were about the same
number. When I went to WashU as a stu-
dent, we started out with three women in a
class of 80. The second semester there were
two, and from then on it was just me. My
classmates were like brothers. We didn’t
compete on the basis of gender.
Later, in many cases, I was the only
woman in construction. I discovered there
PHOTOGRAPHY: © STEVEN E. GROSS
might be tension between me and a con-
tractor in charge who didn’t want to take
advice or anything resembling an order
from a woman. But the wonderful thing
about architecture is, you have to make or
renovate a building in a wonderful way, and
that takes precedence over everything. The
barriers break down.
People call you a trailblazer—do you feel
like one?
Not really. I was fortunate to have a slight-
ly different upbringing from most people my
age. Women were raised to be good home-
makers. But I decided when I was 14 that I
wanted to be an architect, and my parents
thought it was great. I remember a woman
backing me into a corner at a party and say-
ing, “Didn’t anybody ever tell you that wom-
en can’t be architects?” And I said, “No.”
It was a time when people would say you’re
taking a man’s place, but that did not happen
in St. Louis, except maybe with one or two
older professors who’d say I was just there to
get a husband, which really annoyed me. But,
actually, I did. I married Ben Weese, who
was teaching there.
So you and Ben Weese became one of the
earliest husband-and-wife architectural
teams.
At that time, when a husband and wife
practiced together, the wife was usually the
office manager and took care of things so the
“great man” could design. And I wasn’t going
to let that happen.
Since Ben had been a teacher of mine, I
did not join up with him for a while. I start-
ed practicing by myself as soon as I was
through school in the early 1960s. I had a
couple of clients, and I did a lot of renova-
tions of old townhouses in Chicago. It was a
time when people were just beginning to hire
architects, and they were moving into the
city and spending $30, $40, even $50,000 on
a house and then they had maybe $10,000 to
fix it up.
It was a mission. We didn’t call it gentrifi-
cation. We were like urban pioneers, since
people had been moving out of the city at
enormous rates back then.
Ben at the time was working with his
brother Harry Weese, who had a well-
known practice. What made you and Ben
start an office together?
I worked in the office of a landscape
architect, Joe Karr, for a couple of years, and
then I joined Harry’s office part-time and
did my own work on the side. During a
recession, when there was very little work in
Harry’s office, Ben fired me!
I was furious and I started working com-
pletely on my own, where I found out that it
was actually good. I learned that I could
make enough money to support the family if
necessary, if something happened. I had
enough going on.
I did see people like Frances Halsband
and Robert Kliment practicing together and
I thought, “Okay, I can do that.” But I felt it
was important for me to first establish my
identity as an architect apart from Ben.
Then, a few years later, Ben left Harry’s
office. I joke that I invited him to come and
join me in my practice.
We started our firm in 1977. The idea was
we would be small, and we would be at the
other end of the phone when clients called.
Ben had been president of Harry’s firm, and
it was big! They had three offices and a
hundred people in one and probably a couple
of hundred in the others. Ben had very little
time to do his own projects. When he left, he
went to a meeting with a client and said, “I
won’t be at any more meetings, I’m starting
my own architectural office,” and the fellow
said, “Are you an architect? I thought you
were a lawyer.”
The really important thing was that we
would do work for clients whose goals we
shared. And so academia was certainly that,
and low-income housing, and renovation.
Those were two principles that still, I think,
continue to guide the office.
27
 Record NEWSMAKER

How involved are you with the firm now?

Ben has not been there for a while, and I am less engaged than I have
been. I don’t participate in projects in the firm. I have done some work
on my own within the office’s umbrella, but I’m not a daily participant in
its affairs. I keep track, however.

Your son has been part of Weese Langley Weese since 1992. So it’s a real
family affair.
He’s carrying the banner now. When I came back to Chicago from

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY WEESE LANGLEY WEESE (LEFT AND OPPOSITE)

St. Louis in 2005, the idea was that Dan and I would work together and
look for jobs in academia. And we were successful. He does a lot of work
now at Northwestern, and we have had commissions from the University of
Chicago. So the firm has been focusing on colleges and universities.

You have a very famous last name among architects. Was that a help or a
hindrance in your career?
I had very little contact with Harry. We didn’t really engage much, aside
from family dinners and going to the symphony and whatnot. I think it was
good in that Ben provided advice and his presence as I went through the
first years of practice.

Ben received this same AIA Chicago award in 2011. Were you upset that
you didn’t get it at the same time?
No, not at all. There’s a generational difference in our age, since Ben is a
decade older. There always are tensions, but he got it when he was about my

28 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
 Chicago City Day School, 1990 (opposite).
Gallery House for an Artist, 2008 (right).

age now. I will say that, when he submitted

his AIA fellowship application in 1974, I read
it and was astounded at all that he had built at
that relatively young age—he was 45—and I
thought, “My, God, I’ll never build that
much.” Yet I probably did.

We have a joke around the magazine that

architects never retire. Do you see yourself
ever fully retiring?
Well, I think you’re always designing, no
matter what. A scientist, Herbert Simon, was
really interested in the idea of design, which he
defined as the act of making an existing situa-
tion into a preferred one. When I was dean,
people would say, “Don’t you miss design?”
and I said, “No, because I’m really designing a
school.” You’re designing a curriculum, a
faculty, et cetera. I did miss construction.
When we were building something, I would
walk around and smell the concrete and dry-
wall, and I would think, “Oh, yes.” n

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 FORUM

Sans Spectacle
In the wake of allegations against David Adjaye,
Isabel Strauss argues that the Studio Museum in
Harlem was never about the building.

THE STUDIO MUSEUM in Harlem has always been

mythical to me. Hailing from Chicago with only Ask
Jeeves, Microsoft Encarta, and a library card to transport
me to New York, I understood the museum to be at the
center of Harlem, Harlem to be at the center of the
Harlem Renaissance, and the Harlem Renaissance to be
central to Black art. By the time I began sixth grade,
Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter had landed in my
hands, and, while I couldn’t understand its contents, I did
understand that Hughes had lived in Harlem, and so had
Roy DeCarava, a figure I knew as the photographer from
The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book that opened my eyes to
the power of words and pictures together. Which is to say:
living in the “Second City,” I knew that New York was the
first; I knew from the books in our house that their au-
thors lived in Harlem; and I knew from its name that the
Studio Museum did too.
Famous for its Artist-in-Residence program, the Studio
Museum has furthered the artistic practices of Njideka
Akunyili Crosby, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall,
Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley. I only went into
the former museum building once, maybe twice, over a
decade ago. Entering the building in 2013, I remember
Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture Give Us a Poem under one of
architect J. Max Bond Jr.’s skylights. I remember a warm
glow and quiet buzz in the museum offices, and I remem-
ber walking away invigorated and determined to pursue a
career in the arts.
The Studio Museum opened in 1968 in a loft space just
north of Marcus Garvey Park, a Harlem landmark. In the
summer of 1982, it moved two blocks to the multistory
former New York Bank for Savings on West 125th Street,
the renovation of which was designed by Bond (1935-
2009)—a partner at Davis Brody Bond who also designed
such notable buildings as the Martin Luther King Jr.
Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and the
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. Years later, the mu-
seum excavated the vacant lot next door to construct a
narrow, subtle addition. Then, in 2018, the museum
closed its doors, interspersed programming throughout
Harlem, and prepared for full demolition and construction
of a new building by Adjaye Associates in partnership with
Cooper Robertson.
Current director Thelma Golden, in a 2019 conversa- logistically cumbersome (few tall walls, fewer rooms for The Studio
tion with art historian James Cuno, described Bond’s siloed shows), Bond’s interiors created space for a mu- Museum’s new
building, by
PHOTOGRAPHY: © YAXUAN LIU

work on the former building as a “prime example of
adaptive reuse, which was being done all over Harlem at
that moment, that is, buildings that [had once had]
another life that were now underused, or perhaps even
vacant, that were being reclaimed and creating, in the
reclamation, new institutions for the Harlem that was
becoming.” Though formally idiosyncratic and at times
seum that had purpose, and, because of this, the occa-
Adjaye Associates
sional “work-arounds” only gave the museum more pres- with Cooper
ence. Golden explained that, without a loading dock, Robertson, is
pieces larger than 8 feet had to be carried across 125th rising in Harlem.
Street: “Now, people in the neighborhood love that,
right? And I am glad that we provided those wonderful
interventions of art in real time on the street—but I am

33
 FORUM
The Studio
Museum’s
now-demolished
former building
was renovated by
J. Max Bond Jr. in
the early 1980s.
so thrilled that this new building has a loading dock that
a truck can back into.”
Talk of erecting a new building began in the late aughts
when it became clear that the 1980s HVAC systems had
had enough. Though I think of Bond’s building as a sa-
cred space, I do understand how exciting it would be, as
an artist, curator, conservator, or art handler, to finally
work in a building that could serve practical needs, that
has a loading dock as well as working mechanical systems.
It was time. And though it was difficult to let go of the
old space, the museum serves a changing dynamic with its
context. And while symbolic, Bond’s work was not de-
signed as pure symbol—it was conceived out of Harlem,
and set within a building that had already had another
life. The institution’s power is similarly defined, not by
the spatial choreography or solved corner problems of its
lobby, but, rather, by the space it creates for diasporic
artists and for the social and cultural networks that extend
far beyond the museum’s walls.
And, so, in the summer, when news broke that sexual
assault and harassment allegations were made against
David Adjaye by three employees, and the museum, as a
result, cut ties with the architect, this seemed to me just
as well. I did not feel the force that propels a museum to
waver—I only perceived a shift in the most recent mar-
keting strategy. Adjaye was never the power behind such
a far-reaching institution. Like the National Museum of
African American History and Culture, which was de-
34 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
The Studio Museum cannot be
defined by one person or one
building envelope. It is the child
of infinite networks of care.
signed by a team including Bond and Phil Freelon along
with Adjaye and SmithGroup, and which took sweeping
collective action over a century to get built, the Studio
Museum cannot be defined by one person or one building
envelope. It is, instead, the child of infinite networks of
care, and through directorship alone has undergone dif-
ferent and distinct eras. Which is all to say, the Studio
Museum in Harlem was never about the building.
Sans starchitect, I am excited to step into the new space.
Though it is not yet complete, its parti of varied, stacked
galleries, able to accommodate larger works and more
visitors than the old building, has already taken shape. A
generous glass-fronted space by the entry, described by the
museum as a “reverse stoop,” will become a kind of public
living room for the neighborhood. Seen as one strolls down
125th Street, the new building has a weighty presence but
does not tower over passersby.
I hope that the museum will, like the adaptively reused
building reconfigured under Bond, take this present reality,
what has been given to it, to redefine, reclaim, and recon-
textualize this new phase of the museum’s history, and use
the new building to acknowledge and unpack this present
moment with an intimate community that holds global
recognition. Put more succinctly, let’s not play ourselves.
Let Harlem residents and museum artists, curators, and
educators, talk about what has happened, what it means to
part ways with a “starchitect”-led firm this late in the
construction phase, together. Let this conversation begin
PHOTOGRAPHY: © AMERICASROOF, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
within the museum, with Harlem residents. And let us all
celebrate what it took to create this space, to create both
refuge and platform for diasporic artists. Let us not be
distracted by spectacle, for, in the words of scholar
Christina Sharpe, “Spectacle is not repair.” ■
Isabel Strauss received a Master of Architecture at Harvard.
She is working on a book about piecemeal reparations and
contracts in the curatorial department at the National Museum
of African American History and Culture.
Send pitches and submissions for future editions of Forum to
ARForum@bnpmedia.com.
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BOOKS
The Way We Build: Restoring Dignity to
Construction Work, by Mark Erlich. University of
Illinois Press, 144 pages, $23.
REVIEWED BY PANSY SCHULMAN
IN OCTOBER 2019, the Hard Rock Hotel
in New Orleans, still under construction,
partially collapsed, killing three workers and
injuring 12 more. The ruin sat untouched as
local politicians hammered out the details of
its demolition, and it took 10 months to
recover the remains of two of
the deceased, both undocu-
mented immigrants, from the
rubble. Prior to the collapse,
multiple crew members had
raised alarms about shoddy
design and engineering, with
one recording a video noting
the lack of support beams
below a freshly poured con-
crete floor.
Construction has always
been a dangerous job, account-
ing for 21 percent of worker
deaths nationwide, but the
fatality rate has been rising
steadily since 2011. In his new book, The Way
We Build, Mark Erlich points to the New
Orleans incident not as a one-off tragedy, but
rather as an inevitable outcome of the sys-
temic weakening of building-trades unions
over the past 50 years, which has led to unsafe
sites, poor working conditions, and low wag-
es, and has encouraged an illegal labor market
ripe for abuse. In this slim but information-
packed volume, Erlich sketches out the rise
and fall of union power in the construction
industry over the course of the 20th century
and makes the case for policy and union
reform both to address current working con-
ditions and restore the profession as a pathway
to the middle class.
Erlich, who is currently the Wertheim
Fellow at the Center for Labor and a Just
Economy at Harvard Law School, brings
decades of experience in the building trades to
his argument: he began his career as a carpen-
ter and, since 1988, has served in various
administrative positions in union governance,
including executive secretary-treasurer of the
New England Regional Council of Carpenters
from 2005 to 2017.
Throughout the first six decades of the
20th century, the political and economic
power of trade unions grew by leaps and
bounds, with average construction wages
rising steadily. By 1947, union density in
construction reached 87.1 percent (compared
with today’s 23.5 percent). Wages climbed
even higher in the 1960s, spurred by the post-
war building boom and labor shortages due to
Vietnam War conscription. A 1968 article in
Fortune described the building-trades unions
as “the most powerful oligopoly in the
American economy,” constituting a full-
fledged crisis for owners and developers, who
were weary of conceding power.
Erlich marks 1969 as a turning point, when
a group of executives formed the Business
Roundtable, which mounted
“an anti-union political agenda
which proved to be surgical
and effective.” Throughout the
next two decades, the group
managed to undermine union
power and density by lobbying
Congress to strike down fed-
Shayle™ Wall Panels
eral wage laws and reform tax
codes in favor of business
owners. The most impactful,
Erlich argues, was the passing
of Section 530 in the Revenue
Act of 1978, which protected
employers who “misclassified”
workers as independent con-
tractors (typically to avoid paying benefits and
insurance) from penalties. Misclassification
has garnered renewed attention with the rise
of today’s gig economy, but Erlich contends
that the practice was first abused in construc-
tion work and links its normalization to the
many troubles that define the current state of
the industry.
After devoting much of the book to defin-
ing the scope of the problem—outlining the
Kahn™ Wall Panels
relevant history and legal battles, and docu-
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menting anecdotes from a diverse array of
construction workers—Erlich uses the final
three chapters to chart a path forward. Part of
the solution lies in increased regulation, he
says, pointing to successes in recent years of
some federal and state initiatives to curb pay-
roll fraud and illegal labor brokering, but he
returns to the power of labor organizing as a
crucial reform tool. Remaining realistic about
the limitations and exclusionary practices that
tinged the old days of union dominance,
Erlich insists on a new, more inclusive model
of organizing that also bolsters the profession
as a means toward financial stability for wom-
en and people of color.
With housing shortages and the climate
crisis necessitating rapid adaptation of the built
environment, the building industry writ large
would do well to listen to the demands of
construction workers—and support attempts
to ensure their safety, dignity, and livelihood. n
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 BOOKS

The Japanese House Since 1945, by Naomi Corbusier in Paris, and with his own staff and
Pollock. Foreword by Tadao Ando. Thames & Junzo Yoshimura, who students, including
Hudson, 400 pages, $85. followed his employers, Fumihiko Maki and
Antonin and Noémi Kisho Kurokawa. Later,
In her 10th book, record contributing editor Raymond, to the United the airiness of Toyo Ito’s
Naomi Pollock, FAIA, showcases 98 houses built States. Upon returning steel-frame structures was
in Japan since 1945. In addition to acquainting to Tokyo, these designers rendered with an even
readers with these era-defining dwellings, she shared their freshly lighter touch by his for-
draws on her 30-year residence there to explore the acquired knowledge in mer employee Kazuyo
social, technological, geographic, and historical both the studio and the Sejima, and lighter still
factors behind them. Following is an excerpt from university seminar room. by her disciple, Junya
the author’s introduction. Unsurprisingly, these Ishigami.
new ideas surfaced in the The ease with which
“FOR JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE, design of their own new architectural ideas
the history of its modernization has also been houses, but also in the took hold in Japan was
a history of westernization,” explains architect work of their architec- partly due to the unprec-
Fumihiko Maki. Prior to the war, Western tural progeny. The pass- edented design freedom
design ideas were already circulating in Japan. ing of thoughts and theories from mentor to that resulted from widespread devastation.
Famously, Bruno Taut and Charlotte Perriand mentee is an ongoing process natural to the Streets and property lines may have survived
imported emerging European concepts in the profession, with each generation adding modi- the conflagration, but the land itself was
1930s and 1940s respectively. The exchange of fications of its own. Le Corbusier’s embrace of often left devoid of buildings, especially in
ideas was also generated by Japanese architects concrete appears in the work of Maekawa, major cities. As Japan began rebuilding in the
going abroad, for instance Kunio Maekawa who passed this know-how on to his students, early 1950s, efficiency was the aim of many
and Junzo Sakakura, who both worked for Le such as Kenzo Tange, who then shared ideas architects’ residential work. At that time

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44 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
 money was tight, construction materials
scarce, and building size restricted for recipi-
ents of government loans. “There was very
little opportunity for architects to do elaborate
designing,” notes critic Noboru Kawazoe. But
Japan has proven again and again that size
limits can be catalysts for invention. Some
architects, like Kiyoshi Ikebe, were inspired
by the concept of the “minimum house” dis-
cussed at the 1929 Congrès Internationaux
d’Architecture Moderne in Frankfurt. And,
as the economy steadily improved, larger plots
became affordable, manufactured materials,
like concrete and steel, enabled new forms,
and design possibilities expanded rapidly.
Architects were keen to test out new concepts,
PHOTOGRAPHY: © MITSUO MATSUOKA
and houses were the perfect medium for
experimentation, be it for their own use or
that of a willing client. Thanks to the coun-
try’s astonishing economic recovery, by the
1960s, houses were no longer just shelter.
Many of those designed by architects had
become highly personalized statements—a
trend that continues to proliferate today.
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While building codes still regulate matters
of health and safety, aesthetic preferences are
unrestricted. Where visual appearance is
concerned, in Japan anything goes. Aside from
select historic districts, unified street walls,
continuous cornice lines, and style consistency
are all conspicuously absent. Even the address
system—houses are numbered in the order that
they are built—negates adjacency relationships.
Along the same lines, contemporary party
walls are very rare, as they enable the quick
spread of fire, a problem that plagued wooden
houses of the past. These conditions have
resulted in object-like detached homes that
have little relationship to each other, let alone
their surroundings. Making a bolder gesture
still, some even front the street with window-
less facades. A means of shielding the home
from unpredictable urban development nearby,
this strategy took off in the 1970s. More re-
cently, some architects have begun to inten-
tionally interact with the surroundings. Instead
of shutting out the city, the sights, sounds, and
scenery outside become part of daily life inside.
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45
 BOOKS

The advent of computer-aided design

(CAD) in the 1990s pushed the individual-
ization of houses significantly further. “For
those . . . who spent a lot of time playing
computer games as children and already had
access to CAD in the beginning of their
architectural studies, the computer is more
than an aid for drawing: it serves to perfect
their technique, it is even a source of ideas,”
observes critic Shozo Baba. Suddenly, organic
shapes and complicated curves, which in the
past took days to construct by hand, could be
created with a series of mouse clicks. This
technical freedom also eased the difficulty of
designing for the small, awkward, or down-
right strange sites being created just as the
economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, and bars. Each one is documented with a text that

PHOTOGRAPHY: © TOSHIYUKI YANO

property became affordable again. Keen to incorporates interviews with the architects or

(RIGHT); OSAMU MURAI (LEFT)

Sky House, in Tokyo (above), was designed by
Kiyonori Kikutake in 1958. Suppose Design
Office’s House in Ono, completed in 2004,
overlooks train tracks (right).
cram as much house as possible onto these
odd plots, many architects collaborated with
engineers, whose structural prowess made it
possible to build livable homes on even the
most challenged sites.
Exemplifying their respective time periods,
the featured houses pushed limits and raised
their staff, with their family members or cli-
ents, or with architectural critics—people with
firsthand knowledge and memories of the
work—alongside a selection of photos and
drawings. Together, words and pictures cap-
ture the spirit of the architecture and help
bring these homes to life. n

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 LANDSCAPE
KPMB DESIGNS A TRANSCLUCENT MONUMENT TO HORTICULTURE IN WINNIPEG, CANADA’S COLDEST CITY. BY PANSY SCHULMAN

IT’S HUMID ENOUGH for the air to

cling to your skin. There’s a quiet roar com-
ing from a nearby 60-foot-high waterfall,
which gently mists a cluster of surreally large
ferns. Tucked among the profuse greenery is
a banana tree bursting with unripened fruit, a
cacao plant, and jewel-toned flowers that
stretch upwards towards the sun. You’re
standing not in some far-flung jungle but in
the heart of Winnipeg, the coldest major city
in Canada, inside the tropical biome of The
Leaf, a new horticultural center designed by
Toronto-based KPMB Architects in associa-
tion with Architecture49.
Completed last fall, The Leaf replaced a
century-old conservatory in the city’s 400-
acre Assiniboine Park, which also hosts a zoo
and an outdoor theater. The 21,000-square-
foot Hartley and Heather Richardson Trop-
ical Biome is just one of the building’s attrac-
tions: an adjacent Mediterranean biome
showcases plant life from drier climates; a
ground-floor restaurant serves cuisine made
with ingredients sourced from the park’s
gardens; and an attached event venue accom-
modates celebrations and conferences.
“I wanted to create an experience that
allows you to transcend current conditions
and enter a different world,” says KPMB
partner Mitchell Hall. His approach to The
Leaf was informed by parallel work on several
health-care projects that incorporated the
therapeutic value of biophilic design. “All
architects want to believe their work makes a
difference,” he says, “but studies have found
real healing properties from proximity to
plant life, and The Leaf offered the best
opportunity to take advantage of that.”
Though low to the ground—its highest
point is 100 feet tall—The Leaf ’s distinct
translucent roof, which dramatically spirals
upward, renders the building impossible to
miss on Winnipeg’s flat prairie landscape,
even from miles away. It was made from
ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a
plastic that allows significantly more light
and heat penetration than traditional glass
and avoids the need for extensive structural
support. “The idea of creating a transcenden-
tal environment required that its container be
as unencumbered and comprehensible as
possible,” Hall says. “We needed a design
PHOTOGRAPHY: © EMA PETER

that maximized the amount of sun that

comes in but had a minimal impact on your
experience, so that you can actually feel as if
you’re in another world. That’s where ETFE
came along.” The material was also preferable
for the extreme climate fluctuations of the
city, where temperatures can soar upward of

51
 LANDSCAPE

Surrounded by
30 acres of public
gardens (above), The
Leaf’s tropical and
Mediterranean
biomes are
accessible via a
soaring atrium (right
and opposite). 80 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and stay well
below 0 degrees in winter.
Research for the roof took Hall as far as
Kazakhstan, home to the Foster + Partners–
designed Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center,
which has one of the largest ETFE roofs in the
world. The team toured the tent-shaped project
with the roof ’s manufacturer and “basically went to
school,” Hall said.
The intricate cable-net structure supporting the
roof is strung from The Leaf ’s central spire, which
is located within the tropical biome and contains
much of the roof ’s mechanical system. Metal tubes
at the top of the spine pump air between the three
ETFE layers, preventing condensation and aiding
in the precise temperature control needed to ac-
commodate the building’s varied flora. To avoid
unnecessary clutter on the roof ’s 70,000-square-
foot surface, the lighting is also mounted there,
and operates via projection onto reflectors embed-
ded at various connection points between the

52
ETFE “pockets.” An elevator within the spire takes visitors up to the
canopy walkway, which leads directly into a butterfly room on the 1 TROPICAL BIOME 5 KITCHEN
third level. The waterfall, designed by Canadian artist and landscape 2 MEDITERRANEAN 6 GREENHOUSE
designer Dan Euser, cascades past the walkway from above and falls BIOME 7 HORTICULTURE
into a koi pond below, offering a mist-framed aerial view of the lush 3 LOBBY
LOBBY OPERATIONS
tropical landscape within. 4 RESTAURANT
Owned and operated by the Assiniboine Park Conservancy, The
Leaf is a paid attraction, but, outside, 30 acres of public gardens de-
signed by local firm HTFC Planning and Design stretch out on the
5 6
surrounding grounds. The outdoor space is divided into six uniquely
themed areas, among them a kitchen garden—which grows a variety of
fruits, vegetables, herbs, and other edible plants, and hosts an outdoor 3
oven for cooking demonstrations—and a performance garden, with a 7

stage and amphitheater-style seating. The Indigenous Peoples Garden, 2

a tranquil gathering place where visitors can wander pond-side in tall
grasses, was designed in collaboration with local Indigenous artists,
designers, and community leaders.
Hall’s biggest hope for the project is its educational potential. “There’s
a huge amount of knowledge associated with the connection between
climate, people, and plants,” he says. “How important and delicate that
0 50 FT.
relationship is needs to be better understood and protected.” n GROUND-LEVEL PLAN
15 M.

53
 Light-
Catching
Mosaic

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As the multi-faceted Precision Series metal tiles catch the sunlight,
the three colors used are transformed into many shades, adding richness
to the palette of grays – Musket Gray, Slate Gray and Granite. Stone White
7.2 panels create a contrasting feature wall for the interior courtyard.

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 Guess the Architect Contest
ENTER NOW! A monthly contest from the editors of RecoRd asks you to guess
the architect for a work of historical importance.

THIS HOUSING COMPLEX, LOCATED IN A WATERFRONT EAST ASIAN CITY, REFLECTS ITS
ARCHITECT’S LONG-STANDING INTEREST IN DENSITY AND URBAN FORM. THE PROJECT
ENCOMPASSES TWO BLOCKS OF TIGHTLY PACKED THREE-STORY TOWNHOUSES, EACH
OF WHICH INCORPORATES A COURTYARD THAT BRINGS NATURAL LIGHT INSIDE THE
PHOTOGRAPHY: © NILS PETTER DALE (BOTTOM); HIROYUKI KAWANO (TOP)

RESIDENCES AND PROVIDES PRIVATE OUTDOOR SPACE. ON THE UPPER FLOOR OF

EACH IS A LIVING ROOM TOPPED WITH A SLOPED ROOF AND CLERESTORY WINDOWS;
TOGETHER, THE WINDOWS FORM LARGE BANDS OF GLAZING THAT GIVE THE COMPLEX
A DISTINCT URBAN IDENTITY.

The Gyldenhal House was designed by Sverre Fehn. Occupying an entire city
block in central Oslo, the complex houses the headquarters of Norway’s largest
publishing house and incorporates the preserved facades of several demolished
buildings. Fehn died at 84 in 2009, two years after the project was completed.

By entering, you have a chance to win a $500 Visa gift card. See the complete rules
and entry form online at architecturalrecord.com/guessthearchitect.

55
 Building TECHNOLOGY
Höweler + Yoon Completes a Trio
of Residential Buildings in Boston
Firm principal Eric Höweler, FAIA, writes
about the various approaches to design and con-
struction taken on a series of apartment towers
aimed at increasing housing density in the city.
HOUSING IN BOSTON remains a
wicked problem. Lack of supply and insa-
tiable demand have made Boston one of the
least affordable major cities in the U.S.
Creating new high-density housing, in urban
neighborhoods served by transit, has been the
focus of the last three mayoral administra-
tions. Affordability is the main topic of con-
versation at most community meetings and is
the centerpiece of current mayor Michelle
Wu’s agenda. All residential projects with
more than 10 units are currently required to
provide a minimum of 13 percent affordable
PHOTOGRAPHY: © ALEX FRADKIN
units. Creating more new housing also cre-
ates more affordable units.
The critical factors that drive, and some-
times restrict, the creation of housing in Bos-
ton are viable sites, the entitlements process,
parking requirements, and constructability.
Because Boston has been continuously remade
The terra-cotta facade of Zero Athens is
articulated as a series of corner units on a
wedge-shaped site (left).
passed over for development due to its irregu-
lar, pie-shaped footprint. Incorporating off-
street parking on the small parcel proved inef-
ficient, so the design team proposed a car-
share solution with only two parking spaces.
This operational answer to the parking prob-
lem unlocked the ability to erect a six-story
building with 55 units of housing.
Zero Athens (the building’s address on
Athens Street) is a compact building that
occupies most of its wedge-shaped plot, but the
stepping of the north facade allows it to be
articulated as a series of corner units, giving
the building massing a distinct granularity that
acknowledges that “part-to-whole” nature of
housing. The exterior integrates itself into a
historic neighborhood through a facade of
large terra-cotta shingles that references the
earth tones of the brick buildings in Southie
while introducing a new tectonic language.
Zero Athens is built with 5+1 construction,
consisting of one floor of fire-rated steel and
concrete at the base with five floors of stick-
built framing above. This cost-effective type
1 ALUMINUM PICTURE
FRAME ASSEMBLY
2 ALUMINUM CASEMENT
WINDOW
1 3 WOOD WINDOW SILL
over centuries, most of the sites that are easy to 3
3
4 HORIZONTAL ALUMINUM
2
develop have already been built up. There is no TRACK
“as of right” development in Boston, so approv- 5 TERRA-COTTA TILE
10 11
als and entitlements are negotiated through a 4
5 10 11
process that includes input from community
groups, city agencies, design-review commis- 6
sions, and abutters (owners of adjoining prop- 7
erties). To build new housing, thus, requires
thinking creatively about sites previously
deemed “undevelopable.”
The three projects presented here are 8
recently completed or nearing completion.
Located in three different neighborhoods,
they represent unique approaches in the
entitlements process and illustrate innovations 9
2 6 ALUMINUM MEMBRANE AND
in housing typology and construction.
WEATHER BARRIER
7 EXPANDABLE INSULATION
Less Parking, More Housing
8 WOOD BLOCKING
Zero Athens
South Boston (“Southie”) has been dramati- 9 COLORED ALUMINUM
FLASHING
cally transformed by development along the
Red Line subway transit corridor (“the T”). 10 GYPCRETE SANDWICH
PANEL
Located only a block from the Broadway
subway station, the parcel at the corner of 11 TYPICAL STRUCTURAL
ZERO ATHENS
FACADE DETAIL FRAMING
Athens and West Second Street had been
57
 Building TECHNOLOGY

allows for the greatest density under the Inter­

national Building Code. In urban settings, this
maximum allowable becomes the minimum
viable, making this the default construction type
for most urban housing and highlighting the
challenges of mid­rise housing, where construc­
tion costs and return on investment drive the
building massing. For Zero Athens, the ability
to work with the city to reduce parking require­
ments, coupled with the efficiency of the mass­
ing and a contextual material palette, enabled
the transformation of a residual site into a key
part of an emerging neighborhood.

No Back
212 Stuart
Located between Bay Village and Back Bay,
the parcel for 212 Stuart Street was assembled
from two smaller parcels to total 7,000 square
feet, but, still, its small footprint made it
nearly impossible to develop efficiently with
off­street parking. The development team, led
by Transom Real Estate, negotiated to lease 50
spaces from the adjacent hotel garage, illus­

The multistory concave fluted piers of the

facade of 212 Stuart (left) were hoisted in place
by crane (above).

ZERO ATHENS 212 STUART 50 PROSPECT

58 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
PHOTOGRAPHY: © CHUCK CHOI (OPPOSITE, LEFT AND THIS PAGE, TOP); KYLE RICHARD, COURTESY SASAKI (OPPOSITE, RIGHT);

At 212 Stuart, townhouse entrances, complete

with stoops and flower boxes, face the low-rise
neighbors (above). The precast piers were
shipped on flatbed trucks (right).

trating how a creative approach to the entitle-

ments process transformed an empty lot into a
20-story housing project.
The 200-foot-tall residential tower ex-
ceeded the allowable zoning height, yet the
increased density was supported by city agen-
cies to add more housing in downtown Bos-
ton. The multi-year approvals-and-entitle-
ments process highlights the difficulty of
adding density in the historic city center.
Height, parking, shadows, wind effects, and
contextual fit were the consistent issues raised of its immediate neighbors. The concrete located. In response to this comment, the
during the community-engagement process. piers are 20 to 30 feet long, to maximize a project was redesigned to feature townhouse
The building massing and facade articula- module size that is within the limits of what duplexes facing the low-rise neighborhood to
tion negotiate the difference between the is transportable on flatbed trucks and the the south, with the retail and residential
high-rise scale on Stuart Street and the low- carrying capacity of a construction crane. lobby facing north onto Stuart Street. The
HOWELER + YOON (BOTTOM)

rise context of Bay Village with a facade
design of a coursed block, stacked in multi-
story packages. The facade consists of precast
concave fluted piers that stagger across each
face, creating different rhythms in horizontal
courses, and references the finer-scale details
The key typological innovation is a re-
sponse to the community-engagement pro-
cess. Neighbors residing across the street in a
two-story townhouse expressed a concern
about facing the “back” of the building,
where the mechanical rooms were initially
“no back” approach provides townhouse
entrances complete, with stoops and flower
boxes, facing the existing townhouses. The
new building negotiates specific urban condi-
tions to complete the street and contribute to
the neighborhood.

59
 Building TECHNOLOGY
50 Prospect aims to
create density around a
new transportation hub.
Right Place for Height
50 Prospect
Prompted by a new subway-line extension on
the Green Line (GLX) that ties the primarily
residential neighborhood of Union Square to
the center of Boston, 50 Prospect Street is the
first phase of a planned 2.3 million-square-
foot Transit Oriented Development. The
project aims to create density around the new
transportation hub, to energize the neighbor-
hood, improve walkability, and increase the
amount of urban housing.
The project combines two known building
types, the point tower and the mid-rise bar
building, which wraps around and over the
concrete parking deck. The high-rise portion
of the project is a square-footprint tower with
60 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
14 units wrapped around a compact core.
The massing of a point tower is less efficient
than the typical high-rise bar building, but its
small floor plate minimizes the building
profile on the skyline and limits the shadows
cast on its neighbors. The cost of the elevators,
pressurized stairs, and fire-rated construction,
is offset by efficiencies achieved by building to
a certain height—in this case, 25 stories.
The cladding for the tower is made up of
precast panels (known as “donuts”). The
facade panels were designed with a vertical
texture of alternating bands of color—reds and
oranges, creams and grays—derived from the
palette of existing buildings in the Union
Square neighborhood. The economies of scale
of the precast panel facade and a girder slab
structure allowed the project to be built
quickly and cost-effectively, producing 460
units of housing, 20 percent of which (92
units) are affordable. Boosting density near
transit, the new residential tower acts as an
“advocate,” marking the terminal station as
the right place for height.
Like politics, all design is local. These
three projects provide a cross section of hous-
ing types in different Boston neighborhoods.
PHOTOGRAPHY: © ALEX FRADKIN
They are an outcome of years-long processes
of negotiation and engagement, multiple
stakeholders, trade-offs, and creative problem
solving at multiple scales. Urban housing is a
constraint-based process that highlights the
agency of architecture as part of a larger
collective endeavor of city-making. n
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 IN FOCUS
All the Comforts of Home
Duvall Decker brings a sense of familiarity and autonomy to two new houses for intellectually disabled
residents at Mississippi’s Baddour Center.
BY MATT HICKMAN
THE TERM transitional housing largely
implies a certain sense of the ephemeral,
referring to a temporary living arrangement
from which residents ultimately transition
into more permanent accommodation. At
the Baddour Center, a 120-acre residential
campus for adults with intellectual disabili-
ties in the far northwestern reaches of Mis-
sissippi, a pair of group homes designed by
Jackson-based Duvall Decker provides its
residents—10 men, five to each 3,530-
square-foot house—with housing to transi-
tion into and live in indefinitely, with a
greater degree of independence than in the
other Center facilities.
“It’s a passage between somebody who needs
a lot of care and somebody who might be able
to take care of themselves,” explains Roy
Decker, cofounding principal of Duvall Decker
along with 2023 Record Women in Architec-
ture Awards honoree Anne Marie Duvall
Decker. “The men in these buildings may
spend the rest of their lives there, so we had the
64 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
weight of that reality on our shoulders.”
The residents, who have multiple types and
levels of disability, previously lived in a fully
staffed group facility at the Baddour Center,
or on the “outside,” where they had acquired
the life skills to largely take care of them-
selves. While each of the new houses receives
a modest amount of daytime support from a
staff member, the setup is a straightforward
one: a few men of various ages living together
under the same roof in a five-bedroom house.
“If you think about it, five guys living
anywhere is a recipe for disaster,” says Decker,
who notes that, thanks in part to several key
design strategies, Baddour Center staff have
reported minimal conflict among residents at
the newest group homes on campus.
Nestled between two existing group homes
on the southern end of the Baddour Center’s
verdant, community-integrated campus in the
small city of Senatobia, the two houses feel
immediately familiar, reassuring residents
with their low-slung profiles, gabled roofs,
prominent light wells resembling traditional
chimneys, and generous front porches.
Providing a comfortable, safe, and accessible
living space to residents was paramount. But
as Duvall Decker points out, this approach
isn’t unique to designing housing for people
with intellectual disabilities. “As special as
their needs may be, in a way these needs are
also universal,” she says.
Certain considerations made for residents
include corridors without blind spots, a kitchen
with direct egress, an absence of dead-end spaces
where social conflict might occur, a separation
of high-sensory areas and low-sensory/private
spaces, and rooms with views into them that
give residents the choice to either engage with
their fellow housemates or not. “These physical
strategies reduce stress and allow for residents to
have a little more time to make a decision about
how they participate, with their peers or with
staff members,” says Decker.
Each sitting differently on the landscape,
the houses are formed by two vestibule-linked
 volumes that give each wing the appearance of
a freestanding smaller house. One wing con-
tains the bedrooms and en suite bathrooms. It
is flanked by a covered outdoor walkway that
provides access to a side entrance through
which residents can come and go from their
bedrooms without setting foot in the other
wing, which contains a living room, spacious
kitchen and dining room, and laundry.
“By turning and splitting the buildings, we
created multiple paths between the houses,” says
Duvall Decker. “It gives you a lot of choices.”
The homes establish a strong connection
with the outdoors so that residents feel bond-
ed with the larger campus, the seasons, and
the cycles of the day. The light chimneys, for
example, pull natural morning light into each
of the bedrooms and common areas.
As Decker explains, the most critical input
came from Baddour Center residents them-
selves. “We did our homework: we dia-
grammed, mapped, thought about codes and
health-department requirements,” he says.
“And then we talked to the residents, and we
Both houses have an angle between their
communal and private wings (opposite) and
feature sheltered outdoor corridors (above,
left) and large light chimneys (above).
felt as if we didn’t know anything.”
“We were aware of the analytical technical
information, but the lived life of the circum-
stances by which the residents occupy their
days, their relationships, and their loves was so
much richer and more complicated,” he adds.
“Mixing that back into the technical safety

7
6
1 PORCH
2 LIVING ROOM

3 1 3 KITCHEN & DINING

1

10 4 LAUNDRY & HALF

9 BATH

5 COVERED WALKWAY
8
6 BEDROOM
5
7 BATHROOM
5 8 CART & BIKE
PARKING
PHOTOGRAPHY: © ANDREW WELCH PHOTO

10 9 FRONT ENTRANCE

10 SIDE ENTRANCE
8

0 20 FT.
NEW TRANSITIONAL HOME 1 NEW TRANSITIONAL HOME 2
6 M.

65
 IN FOCUS

Spacious front porches overlooking the

Baddour Center’s bucolic campus serve as a
space for residents to socialize or seek respite.

requirements is how the plans were built.”

Residents were most keen on seeing large
front porches—with living rooms overlooking
these through oversize windows—and at-
tached garages for bicycle and golf cart park-
ing incorporated into each home. Another
request honored in the final design was for
more space but not necessarily increased
square footage. “He kept saying ‘not bigger,
but more space,’ ” recounts Decker of a con-
versation with one resident. “What he was

PHOTOGRAPHY: © ANDREW WELCH PHOTO

describing was taller ceilings and volume.
This was a clue to the fact that residents felt
the traditional group homes had a kind of
oppressiveness to them.”
“These buildings are really simple,” adds
Decker. “There’s nothing extraordinary in the
space-making, except the way it is all knit
together in relation to the residents’ needs,
which makes it special for them.” n

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 PERELMAN PERFORMING ARTS CENTER | NEW YORK | REX

Inside
the Box
Three reconfigurable theaters form the heart
of the final public building at Ground Zero.
BY IZZY KORNBLATT
PHOTOGRAPHY BY IWAN BAAN

IN 2003, in the essay “Delirious No More,” Rem Koolhaas

cast the planned rebuilding of the World Trade Center as a
death knell for the feverish experimentalism he had so en-
thusiastically chronicled 25 years earlier in Delirious New
York. In the gargantuan scale and literal symbolism of Daniel
Libeskind’s competition-winning rebuilding scheme—in
essence, voids on the sites of the old towers and a perimeter
of new towers culminating at 1,776 feet—monumentaliza-
tion took the place of imagination. Vast sums of public mon-
ey bought a decades-long series of ribbon-cuttings, and
commerce made its return—not organically, as a new begin-
ning for the site, but opportunistically, in the form of a high-
end mall and kiosks around the memorial that peddle official
9/11 Museum–themed merchandise. Even as Lower
Manhattan, far from being deserted, grew into a lively resi-
dential area, Ground Zero remained an artificial zone of
granite and marble. “New York,” Koolhaas had warned, “will
be marked by a massive representation of hurt that projects
only the overbearing self-pity of the powerful.”
The 138-foot-tall translucent marble cube of the Perelman
Performing Arts Center is the latest monument on these 16
acres of Lower Manhattan. Rising directly opposite the 9/11
Memorial and adjacent to the impregnable base of SOM’s
One World Trade Center, the 129,000-square-foot building
was designed by REX with Davis Brody Bond as the final
civic project for Ground Zero under Libeskind’s master plan
(one commercial tower and one residential tower have yet to
be built). As such, it offers a modicum of closure even as it
trumpets the achievements of those responsible for guiding
the rebuilding over the past two decades. Inside and out, the
walls of the $500 million building are inscribed with their
names: the developer Larry Silverstein, the Port Authority of
New York and New Jersey, the Lower Manhattan Develop-
ment Corporation, Citi, Goldman Sachs, former deputy
mayor John E. Zuccotti, and, of course, Ronald Perelman,
the businessman who kickstarted the project with a $75 mil-
lion gift in 2016.

70 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
71
 But if the Perelman Center is in this sense par for the Ground Zero
course, hidden within its mute walls is an attempt to challenge archi-
tectural convention of the sort that has until now been absent from the
site. The building is conceived around three performance venues,
located on the fourth floor, which can be separated or combined in 10
spatial permutations. Movable floors, seating, balconies, and other
equipment then allow each permutation to be further customized; in
total, according to REX principal Joshua Ramus, there are more than
60 possible configurations, catering to performances of all kinds. (The
center’s inaugural season encompasses multiple varieties of theater,
music, and dance, among other events.) This highly scripted mode of
flexibility is distinct from that of black-box theaters, which begin as
empty spaces: “strategic specificity,” Ramus says, “can prove to be more
flexible than universal space.”
From an ingenious system of lifts beneath the floors that each fold
down into an impossibly small steel drum, to four mechanized guillo-
tine walls, to movable panels near the ceilings that allow each space to
be acoustically optimized for a given configuration, the building is
filled with machinery designed to ease the implementation of this
flexibility. Acoustics, code compliance, circulation needs, and access to
the scene elevator and back-of-house, among other factors, have all
been considered across each configuration, enabling artists to experi-
ment freely with the building. “The design encourages play,” says Bill
Rauch, Perelman’s artistic director.
Creating so complex a machine at Ground Zero was no easy feat.
The Perelman Center sits on four levels of underground infrastruc-
72 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
ture—two rail tunnels, a pedestrian concourse, and a vehicular ramp;
and its ground floor, clad in black granite, is dedicated to Port
Authority infrastructure, including a truck entrance that provides
access to underground loading docks across the World Trade Center
site. Further complicating matters, much of the underground infra-
structure was designed and built years ago, when planning for a per-
forming arts center had yet to progress beyond an initial scheme by
Frank Gehry. Gehry’s design, which was abandoned in 2014, had
fixed the location of the scene elevator, used for bringing large set
pieces from the loading dock to the theaters—and so, when REX was
hired in 2015, the architects had to design around the elevator while
working with structural engineers to identify points for the building’s
columns to tie into the below-grade structure. They found only seven
such points, and, as a result, the building had to be as light as pos-
sible—even its egress stairs are enclosed in plate steel rather than
concrete—and its steel columns had to “play a game of Twister,” as
Ramus puts it, as they snake their way up and culminate in an enor-
mous hat truss around the perimeter of the upper floors. Enclosed
within that truss are the three venues, each of which is a self-support-
ing structure resting on rubber pads that isolate it from vibrations.
A sloping cut into the granite base opens up room for a grand entry
stair on the south side; ascending visitors pass under a cantilevered
corner of the marble cube and up into a lobby-cum-restaurant, de-
signed by Rockwell Group, on the second floor. This space, with its
felt-covered walls and large variety of cushioned furnishings, contrasts
sharply with the rectilinear exterior and overall sobriety of the build-
AN ENTRY STAIR (above) cuts under the
center’s translucent marble facade (above and
right). The building sits directly opposite the
9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero (opposite).

ing. Curved wooden ribs with integrated

LED lighting line the ceilings, forming
whorled nodes that periodically protrude
downward; firm founder David Rockwell
describes the total effect as “a little like the
lining of an oyster.” Around the floor’s perim-
eter is a continuous double-height hallway, lit
evenly in amber through the marble facade,
and at its back, behind the restaurant, is a
narrow terrace.
Stairways and elevators then take visitors
up, past the back-of-house spaces on the third
floor, to the theaters above. There they find
themselves in a set of dark circulatory spaces
that can be freely reconfigured so as to shift
the boundary between front and back of
house; another orange-hued perimeter hall,
this one triple height, provides access to the
three venues, configured in plan in a large L,
and a rehearsal room. The venues, which in
their most basic configurations seat 99, 250,

73
 7

4 4

2
1

0 30 FT. 0 30 FT.
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN SECOND-FLOOR PLAN
10 M. 10 M.

10
11
16

17
13

4 4

12 18

15
14

10

0 30 FT. 0 30 FT.
THIRD-FLOOR PLAN FOURTH-FLOOR PLAN
10 M. 10 M.

1 ENTRY STAIR 7 TERRACE 13 JOHN E. ZUCCOTTI THEATER

2 STORAGE AND BUILDING SERVICES 8 OFFICES 14 MIKE NICHOLS THEATER

3 TRUCK RAMP 9 THEATER TRAP ROOM 15 DORIS DUKE FOUNDATION THEATER

4 SCENE ELEVATOR 10 DRESSING ROOMS 16 REHEARSAL ROOM

5 LOBBY 11 COSTUMES 17 PRODUCTION ZONE

6 RESTAURANT 12 GREEN ROOM 18 THEATER SCENE DOCK

74 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
THE LOBBY and restaurant, designed by Rockwell Group, feature
felt-covered walls and lighting integrated into curving wood ribs.
and 450 patrons, respectively, are surprisingly small and straightfor-
ward. The only adornment of note is wood paneling, cut into a variety
of vertically oriented molding-like profiles for optimal acoustic diffu-
sion, which lines the walls of all three rooms.
The Perelman Center is not the first theater project to pursue archi-
tectural mutability, nor is it the first to posit a link between ultraflexible
architecture and radical or innovative art. The same theme animates the
Dee and Charles Wyly Theater in Dallas (record, February 2010),
designed by Ramus, as partner in charge of the project at REX/OMA,
and Koolhaas. Earlier Koolhaas projects had explored this theme in
different ways—in the oversize doors that link the expo hall, conference
center, and concert venue at the Congrexpo near the Lille international
rail depot (1994), for example, and the segmented movable floor pro-
posed for the unbuilt Ghent Forum (2004). And another architect of
similar inclination, Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio+Renfro, led the
design of the Shed at Hudson Yards in Midtown Manhattan (record,
May 2019), where an enormous ETFE-clad sheath literally rolls out
over an adjacent plaza on 6-foot-diameter wheels.
Beyond the shared commitment to mutability, the Perelman Center
and Shed have much in common. Both are conceived as “cultural”
components of master-planned Manhattan megadevelopments. Both
consist of newly formed institutions dedicated to producing interdisci-
plinary arts programming married to luxe, purpose-built buildings.
And both have been enabled by the largesse of Manhattan’s rich and
powerful. The two even share a primary benefactor, Michael Bloom-
berg, whose gifts have totaled around $130 million to each.
Both also raise similar questions about the limits of mutability as an
architectural concept. To what degree are these elaborate mechanisms
employed not for practical ends but rather for the purposes of attracting
media attention and philanthropic support? Arts organizations have an
easier time raising money for capital projects than operations, and one
might argue that, by making mutability part of the architecture of the
Perelman Center, REX has reduced pressure on future operating
budgets. But, ultimately, how necessary, and how useful, are its 60-
some configurations?
Many of the architects who in the past championed mutability did
so in order to mount critiques of elite institutions. Cedric Price’s un-
built proposal for the Fun Palace, created with the theater producer
Joan Littlewood in the early 1960s, consisted of an enormous, endlessly
reconfigurable structure where people of all walks of life would be
welcomed to participate in performing and creating art. And the ambi-
tion that underlies many of OMA’s ultraflexible performing arts proj-
ects, such as the Taipei Performing Arts Center (record, December
2022), has been to refigure the relationship between performance and
public: to liberate theater, opera, and other forms of performance from
75
 SAMPLE CONFIGURATIONS
ILLUSTRATED SECTION
Credits
ARCHITECT: REX — Joshua Ramus, principal
designer; Alysen Hiller Fiore, project leader; Maur
Dessauvage, Adam Chizmar, Wanjiao Chen,
project team
ARCHITECT OF RECORD: Davis Brody Bond —
Carl F. Krebs, David K. Williams, partners; John
Henle, Joseph Navarro, associate partners; Pedro
Pereira, Adelina Mazyrko, Gayataro Desai, Valerie
Theodore, Cylde Chen, Simon Lee, Maraike Crom,
project team
INTERIOR ARCHITECT (RESTAURANT AND
LOBBY): Rockwell Group — David Rockwell,
president; Michael Fischer, principal; Erika Britton,
Sonya Chao, Ally Conchieri, Nazli Ergani, Scott
Ferebee, Mariel Levine, project team
ENGINEERS: Magnusson Klemencic Associates,
Silman (structural); Jaros, Baum & Bolles (m/e/p)
CONSULTANTS: Charcoalblue (theater); Front
(facade); FMDC (stone); Threshold (acoustics);
Tillotson Design Associates (lighting)
76 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
CONSTRUCTION MANAGER:
Sciame Construction
CLIENT: Perelman Performing Arts Center at
the World Trade Center (PAC NYC)
SIZE: 129,000 square feet
COST: $500 million (construction)
COMPLETION DATE: September 2023
Sources
CURTAIN WALL: Granoguli, LSI Stone
(marble); AGC Interpane (insulated panels);
Gartner
RAINSCREEN: Campolonghi (granite); POHL
(aluminum)
SPECIALIZED EQUIPMENT: Gala Systems
(stage/seat lifts); The Chicago Flyhouse,
Hudson Scenic Studios, Sightline Commercial
Solutions (theater equipment); Clark Door
(guillotine walls and doors)
the architectural conventions that keep them
sequestered in a rarefied cultural realm.
Ramus’s own soon-to-debut Lindemann
Performing Arts Center at Brown University,
where a glazed horizontal volume cuts
through the main theater, enabling passersby
to glimpse performances from the surround-
ing streets, takes its place within this lineage.
The Perelman Center, by contrast, and
due in large part to its marble facade, takes
on no such project. The envelope is doubtless
a technical feat: its insulated panels, each
fronted with a ½-inch piece of Portuguese
marble sandwiched between two pieces of
glass and each weighing almost 300 pounds,
necessitated a production chain spanning
four countries. Book-matching the nearly
5,000 panels, and then fitting them into
symmetrical patterns on four largely identical
facades, required an extraordinary degree of
coordination on the part of REX’s staff and
consultants.
Ramus argues that the building’s stark
simplicity and the luminosity of its facade—
at night, it glows an even amber—will create
a sense of mystery and draw in the public. But
the facade is also a tool that keeps what hap-
pens inside the center invisible, and this is no
accident: it was a preference of the client
during the initial competition, Ramus recalls,
that activity within the building not be visible
from the 9/11 Memorial. And a critical
element of REX’s design that would have at
least suggested a link between performance
and the outside world—glass walls facing the
marble facade on the third floor, within the
back-of-house spaces, and in two of the
A COMPLEX SYSTEM of guillotine walls and floor lifts (right)
enable the theaters (above), to be arranged in over 60
configurations (eight of which are illustrated at opposite, top).

theaters and the rehearsal room on the fourth—was cut.

One consequence of this change is that the drama of the
facade cannot often be appreciated from indoors; one’s
awareness of the outside world disappears all too easily.
Another is that the single floor dedicated to staff and per­
formers is entirely without natural light.
At the Perelman Center, the timeworn pattern of
Modern architecture repeats itself: a formal technique
conceived to effect social change is subsequently repurposed
to perpetuate the status quo. Here the inflated social status
of the performing arts is reasserted rather than challenged.
Perhaps this conclusion was preordained: one suspects that
the powers that have controlled the Ground Zero rebuilding
would have had it no other way. Nonetheless, entombed
within these marble walls, the impulse to use architecture to
enable the creation of new forms of art, to change how
spaces are occupied, to reconfigure the city—the original
promise of the rebuilding—can still be detected. It is the
ghost in the strange machine that is the Perelman Cen­
ter—a quiet reminder of how things might have turned out
differently. n

77
 EAST FLATBUSH LIBRARY I BROOKLYN I LEVENBETTS

An Open Book
A once gloomy library, closed off to the street, is resurrected as a welcoming, light-filled community hub.
BY JOSEPHINE MINUTILLO
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NAHO KUBOTA

78 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

WHEN CONFRONTED with the reno-
vation of a dull, one-story, brick- and glass-
block-clad library with a 100-foot-deep floor
plate, there are some obvious moves an archi-
tect can make. Redesigning the street-facing
elevation to be more welcoming from the
exterior and more porous to the interior is one
such move. Reorganizing the floor plan is
another. But to really make a difference in
what was a dark and gloomy space, punch
giant holes in the roof and bring in daylight.
THE RENOVATED
one-story library
announces itself on
the street (opposite
and above) and
welcomes visitors
into a soaring space
filled with daylight
(left).
It seems simple enough. Or incredibly
daunting, considering you’d have to convince
your client, in this case the Brooklyn Public
Library and the New York City Department of
Design and Construction (DDC), to devote a
good chunk of the construction budget for the
8,000-square-foot refurbishment to skylights
and the accompanying roof alterations. Not to
mention, architecturally and urbanistically,
this low, deep mat-building type is one of the
most difficult to resurrect. And, in the wrong
79
 THE DEEP light scoops dominate the central
space (opposite). Finishes include translucent
polycarbonate walls (this image).

1 ENTRY VESTIBULE hands, it may only produce so-so results. In the

2 READING ROOM right hands, however—in this case the 15-per-
10
3 STAFF WORK AREA
son practice LEVENBETTS—the outcome is
4 MAIN DESK
a brilliant beacon on a street where neighbors
include shabby storefronts for a laundromat
5 JANITOR’S CLOSET
11 and meat market, among others, that leads to a
6 RESTROOMS
dynamic and light-filled community hub.
7 STAFF LOUNGE 6
“Labrouste’s centrally lit library was a
8 CHILDREN’S NOOK 12 starting point for us,” says Stella Betts, who
9 CHILDREN’S ROOM leads the New York–based firm with husband
10 CONFERENCE ROOM David Leven. It currently has three other
5 2 13
11 LIBRARIAN’S OFFICE libraries in progress throughout the city—
12 ADULT NOOK two of them, like this one, through DDC’s
13
13 MEETING ROOM Design and Construction Excellence pro-
14 STORAGE 4
14 gram, and the other through the New York
City Economic Development Corporation.
15 MULTIPURPOSE
But, while Labrouste famously fashioned his
reading room for Paris’s Bibliothèque Natio-
nale under circular roof openings and um-
3
1 brella domes, LEVENBETTS chose a point-
ed geometry that is expressed in both the
hexagonal organization of the plan and the
faceted skylight openings.
0 15 FT.
FLOOR PLAN The plan emerged from the need to have
5 M.

80 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
81

FACADE AXONOMETRIC
all areas of the central space visible from the
one information/security desk near the en-
trance, and the generous 8½-foot-deep light
scoops—positioned in three wide rows along
existing structural lines and spanning the
entirety of that space—contort to face north
above the 10-foot-high ceiling. Beyond the
walls of the central hexagon, set askew with-
in the rectangular building footprint, are
tucked rooms of various sizes and shapes.
These perimeter spaces, which include a staff
office, meeting rooms, restrooms, and stor-
age and maintenance closets, conceal all
HVAC equipment above dropped ceilings
and discreetly locate mechanical returns in,
and supply fresh air through, slots along the
82 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
ceiling line of the main reading room.
Aesthetically, the warmth of wood and
pops of color in these spaces contrast with the
muted palette of the main reading area.
There, corrugated translucent polycarbonate
partitions mingle with mirror-finished stain-
less-steel column covers beneath the soft,
white acoustic ceiling, which is perforated in a
pattern of irregular circles that extends up
through the skylights. (Fitting together those
ceiling panels, especially in this faceted area,
without disrupting the pattern was a particu-
lar challenge, and accomplished by bead-
caulking and sanding the joints.) Thin LED
strips along the ceiling are replicated bouncily
on the reflective columns. Despite being
monochromatic, this cloudlike space offers a
symphony of textures and treatments.
The same could be said for the new exte-
rior. Once again, corrugations offer visual
interest, but also a distinctly different, and
elevated, street presence. The 17-foot-high
facade consists of two configurations of wavy,
gray-painted aluminum panels, which are
flipped to essentially create four panel types
and a highly variegated pattern along the
80-foot-wide frontage. The rainscreen is
clipped together, bolted onto the building
structure, and fit into a precisely cut soffit,
designed to mirror the many crimps and
curves. Where there is a large meeting room
just to the right of the central entrance, the
aluminum is perforated to connect occupants,
often children doing activities, to the street.
Where there is a smaller staff office on the
other side, the aluminum remains opaque for
privacy. As a finishing touch, the words
EAST FLATBUSH are painted in large
white letters onto the entire length of the
facade—an emphatic gesture connecting
the building to its place, even if only subtly
perceptible.
Inaugurated in June after a nearly three-
year closure, the refreshed library was imme-
diately embraced, especially on the hot August
day of my visit, when it doubled as a cooling
center. It is a space, unlike its previous itera-
tion, where visitors are happy to spend a few
hours. Its upgrade is not only a boon to the
community, but also to LEVENBETTS, a
small practice for which programs like DDC’s
Design and Construction Excellence afford
the opportunity to undertake more public and
civic work. The firm, through the same DDC
program, is now embarking on a much larger
renovation of the Queens Museum. n
ROOMS AND NOOKS along the perimeter
feature wood accents and pops of color (above
and right). The aluminum facade is a beacon in
the neighborhood (opposite).

Credits
ARCHITECT: LEVENBETTS
ENGINEERS: Silman (structural); Plus Group
Consulting Engineering (m/e/p)
CONSULTANT: Lumen Architecture (lighting)
GENERAL CONTRACTOR: XBR
CLIENT: NYC Department of Design and
Construction/Brooklyn Public Library
SIZE: 8,000 square feet
COST: $10.1 million (construction)
COMPLETION DATE: June 2023

Sources
DOORS AND WINDOWS: Kawneer, Arcadia
GLASS: Vitro (exterior and interior)
SKYLIGHTS: Velux
LIGHTING: Selux, Zumtobel, Leviton
ACOUSTICAL CEILINGS: GypSorb (reading
room); Atkar and Armstrong (perimeter rooms)
RESILIENT FLOORING: Forbo
TILE: Daltile

83
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 RESIDENTIAL
Beyond-the-Family House
Madrid | Ignacio G. Galán and OF Architects
BY LEOPOLDO VILLARDI
PHOTOGRAPHY: © IMAGEN SUBLIMINAL
ON THE OUTSKIRTS of Madrid, amid a
sea of warm brick and terra-cotta, a serrated
silhouette of azure cuts across a crimped
backdrop of corrugated steel. This playfully
unconventional facade belongs to a house
commissioned by an elderly couple newly
adapting to mobility challenges. Wary of the
isolation experienced by the husband’s father
in an institutionalized nursing home, and
increasingly struggling with the four-story,
stair-riddled layout of their longtime resi-
dence, they turned to a team of architects to
design a home where they could comfortably
age in place.
Beyond-the-Family House is the product
of a transatlantic partnership forged between
New York–based Ignacio G. Galán and
Madrid-based husband-and-wife duo Álvaro
A small pool is used for exercise (above).
Martín Fidalgo and Arantza Ozaeta of OF
Architects. The three met in architecture
school at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid,
and have stayed in close touch since. “We
work on some projects together, and others we
work on independently. It’s a bit like an open
relationship,” says Galán with a laugh.
87
 RESIDENTIAL

The house is neither nostalgic nor imper-

sonal, but full of charming quirks—despite
what the industrial palette might immediately
conjure. It’s compact, too, with a floor plate of
about 1,000 square feet.
An empty corner lot in Peñagrande, where
the clients already lived, proved to be ideal.
The couple could frequent the same butcher
and grocer, and stay close to old friends.
They hail from a generation that cherishes
casual encounters, so these relationships were
important to maintain—their new patio,
shaded by fledgling trees and lined by a low,
unimposing expanded-metal fence, ensures
that they can greet strolling neighbors.
The first level, entered at grade through a
small vestibule, organizes living, eating, and
cooking alongside a primary bedroom suite—
a configuration that is “practically nonexistent
in Spain,” says Galán. Walls were dimen-
sioned to perfectly fit the eclectic mix of
furniture that the couple has amassed over
decades, and the husband, a retired engineer,
10
can tend to his collection of bonsai trees in a
secluded rear garden.
Overhead, three sawtooth openings tele-
9
scope in width to create a zigzagging ceiling
line. They also point southward, which may
seem counterintuitive, but their clerestory
windows are set back, behind a perforated
7 6 3
scrim, and calibrated according to seasonal
solar angles. In the summer, direct sunlight
is all but avoided, and, on winter days, typi-
cally cool in this semi-arid climate, warm
12 11 rays graze the room. A ribbon of book-
matched oak lines their soffits, drawing
the eye up. Also used for pocket doors and
millwork, the oak pairs well with the sage
0 10 FT.
SECTION A - A green exposed H-section columns and
3 M.
swinging metal doors along the eastern wall.
These conceal a half-bath, stairs to the upper
8 5
and lower floors, and a wardrobe, which
hovers above an opening in the floor plate
that one day may need to accommodate a
12 small elevator.
6 One level up, two guest rooms separated
4
A 7 by a living area and kitchenette can host
3 1 family members or friends on extended stays.
A

2
1 PATIO 7 PRIMARY SUITE
2 POOL 8 REAR GARDEN

3 VESTIBULE 9 GUEST ROOM

4 KITCHEN 10 ROOF TERRACE

5 DINING 11 LOWER PATIO

0 10 FT.
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN 6 LIVING 12 PARKING
3 M.

88 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
 Below, there is a rentable unit, with its
own terrace, where the wife’s nonagenarian
mother now resides. Mobility restricted,
she walks up the gentle incline of the
sidewalk to visit her daughter, who is no
stranger to patient care as a former pedia-
trician. But the couple knows, one day, that
this apartment will be vacant, and they’ve
discussed leasing it to a student at the
nearby university who, from time to time,
might join them for meals.
At about 16 inches deep, the rear-venti-
lated facade, with its bright ceramic rain-
screen and thick insulation, pays dividends.
Paired with a radiant cooling system em-
bedded into the terrazzo floor, plus com-
mon-sense window placement that stirs
airflow, and an automated system of lou-
vers, this thickness makes for an energy-
efficient—and comfortable—residence,
without the need for air-conditioning. In
fact, the small photovoltaic array on the
roof sufficiently powered the home through
the summer. The savings have not gone
unnoticed, especially in Europe, where the
conflict in Ukraine has inflated the cost of
utilities and building materials (the couple
paid for the house by selling their old one).
“When designing for people our age or
younger, we often reflect on our own mem-
ories,” Fidalgo says. “But we haven’t entered
this stage of life yet, and the project made
us face reality in a very different way.” With
a discerning eye, the architects have im-
proved their clients’ quality of life, from the
myriad ways they can now share their home
with others to the house’s ability to evolve
with their changing needs. “We want them
to grow older the very best way that they
can—happily. n

Sawtooth clerestories
flood the interiors
with daylight (above).
Sage green H-section
columns (left and far
left) structure the
house. The rentable
unit has its own
terrace (opposite).
PHOTOGRAPHY: © IMAGEN SUBLIMINAL

89
 RESIDENTIAL
Geode ADU
Burlingame, California | IwamotoScott Architecture
BY CLARE JACOBSON
GEODE ADU, designed by San Francisco–
based IwamotoScott Architecture, offers a
quiet complement to a Midcentury Modern
Californian dwelling. Many ADUs (acces-
sory dwelling units) are designed to be back-
yard homes for relatives or renters. Although
this one has everything necessary to serve as
a residence, it was primarily designed as a
work studio for the homeowner. “That’s my
home, and it’s very lived in,” he says of his
1964 Eichler house, designed by architect A.
Quincy Jones, “but I need an organized space
to work. I walk through the door and feel
relaxed—it’s pleasing.”
The main house on the property luxuri-
antly spreads around a central atrium, a com-
mon feature of houses built by the developer
Joseph Eichler. The 640-square-foot Geode
ADU (the maximum size allowed in the city
of Burlingame, south of San Francisco) is, by
1
FLOOR PLAN
SECTION A - A
90 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
contrast, necessarily compact, carved into a
hill and fitted with built-in cabinets that
Craig Scott, principal of IwamotoScott,
compares to those on a boat. The overall
effect is indeed calm.
Much of that effect derives from the natu-
ral and neutral material palette. Clean lines
and exceptional craft reinforce the feeling.
But calmness here does not mean it’s simple.
“We started with a more orthogonal, rational
approach,” says Scott, “but the site’s odd
shape made that hard to justify.” Geode has
an eight-sided plan, to take best advantage of
the site. The plan centers on a living area,
with a bathroom, kitchenette, office, garden,
and storage springing off tangentially. And
the small space has sectional complexity, with
what the designers call a “reinterpretation of
the butterfly roof,” as well as steps leading up
to a desk area. The owner, a creative director,
A less) doors hide messiness. Scott points out
5
4
2 here,” he says, “and that’s really a beautiful
3
A
0 6 FT.
2 M.
6 The ADU’s prismatic form contrasts with the
0 6 FT.
2 M.
enjoys circumambulating the stepped path to
process ideas as he works.
Geode ADU shares few characteristics,
other than vertical siding and radiant floor
heating, with the main residence; more sig-
nificant is the spatial interplay between the
two. IwamotoScott directed Geode’s large
northeast window toward a break in the
A-framed roof of the Eichler house. From the
elevated office, the owner can see through
this gap all the way across San Francisco Bay
to Mount Diablo. With an even larger north-
west window-wall, opening onto a patio, the
quaint quarters feel spacious. A clerestory-lit
interior garden behind the office desk brings
additional light into the ADU and, inten-
tionally or not, serves as a stunning back-
ground for virtual meetings.
For Geode ADU to live up to its crystal-
line moniker, its details need to be pristine.
An exposed ridgeline brings dimensionality
to the bathroom; trapezoidal shelves fit into a
sharp, angled nook; seamless (and handle-
two particularly tricky details—a flue to a gas
fireplace running through a TV cabinet, and
the long-span desk with hidden drawers and
power cables. The precision was difficult to
achieve but essential to the homeowner’s
quest for serenity. “I’m in different world
thing—that architecture can have such an
effect on people.” n
Clare Jacobson is a San Francisco–based design
writer and editor.
1 PATIO
2 LIVING/SLEEPING
3 WORK AREA
4 BATHROOM
5 KITCHENETTE
PHOTOGRAPHY: © BRUCE DAMONTE
6 MAIN HOUSE
main house (opposite, top). The interior is fitted
with custom cabinets, and well-placed glazing
provides ample daylight (opposite, bottom left
and right).
91
 RESIDENTIAL
Blind Dormer House
Toronto | Anya Moryoussef Architect
BY ALEX BOZIKOVIC
A HOUSE with a gabled roof is the most
elemental of architectural forms. But a newly
remodeled residence in Toronto by Anya
Moryoussef Architect puts a strange new face
on this familiar shape: its front is an enigmatic
composition of staggered windows in a field
of white brick, capped with a dormer that
presents a blank face to the street.
“It is familiar, yet also unfamiliar and a bit
uncanny,” Anya Moryoussef says of the proj-
92 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
ect, which she’s dubbed the Blind Dormer
House. The 2,200-square-foot project is a
“cultural probe,” she says, into our ideas about
home and their architectural expression.
Blind Dormer is a remodel of a two-story
1920s dwelling in a former streetcar suburb near
downtown Toronto. It retains the original side
walls and foundation, their masonry and con-
crete preserving the bulk of the old structure’s
embodied energy. Moryoussef, a Canadian who
spent three years working with Sarah Wig-
glesworth in London, is committed to minimiz-
ing the waste and emissions generated by her
projects; she also sees the house’s existing ele-
ments as a spur to creativity. “Inevitably, there
are disjunctions,” she says, “between the exterior
shell and what’s going on inside.”
The client for the remodel is in the process
of starting a family, and wanted the residence
to accommodate a variety of family configura-
tions. Accordingly, Moryoussef designed a
house that splits the difference between indi-
vidual rooms and an open plan. It also shares
kinship with Adolf Loos’s Villa Müller: in
both, an inscrutable exterior wraps a house rich
with color, texture, and three-dimensional
complexity.
From the front door, a half-flight of stairs
leads up to a piano nobile with a kitchen that is
separated from a dining area and living room
by freestanding cabinets. In the kitchen,
figured calacatta viola marble slabs form the
counters and backsplash—the red and purple
veining boldly jumps out in the white interior.
Nearby, an open stair connects to the
second floor and the basement. This circula-
tion route puts guests in conversation with the
site’s main feature—a towering oak in the
front yard, whose trunk is visible through a
two-story slot window. White oak carries into
the house with millwork veneers and wide-
plank flooring.
The second floor consists of two rooms
linked by a bathroom: one looks over the
dining area below; the other is currently used
as the primary bedroom. But, in the future,
this pair of spaces could also serve as a child’s
bedroom and sitting room—or many other
arrangements. The top-floor attic, currently
used as a home office, enjoys an en suite pow-
der room tucked into the titular blind dormer
(although it presents a blank face to the street,
an aperture above brings in ample daylight).
For the architect, the design transforms a
conventional house into something inherently
more flexible, preempting the spatial changes
that inevitably come with the cycle of aging
and generational change. And, if passersby PHOTOGRAPHY: © DOUBLESPACE PHOTOGRAPHY
can’t quite understand its logic from the street,
the white facade provides a backdrop for a
lush garden (by Designland) and that oak,
against which the changing of the seasons
play out. “The house is a blank canvas for this
tree and the shadows it casts,” Moryoussef
says. “I consider the light and shadow part of
the architecture.” n
Alex Bozikovic is the architecture critic at The
Globe and Mail in Toronto.
Asymmetrically placed windows (opposite)
offer glimpses of a towering oak (top). Inside,
muted tones (above) are contrasted by bold
figured marble (right).

9 A

2
8

5
4 3

1
2
1

7 0 10 FT.
6 GROUND-FLOOR PLAN
3 M.

1 VESTIBULE 4 LIVING 7 LAUNDRY

0 10 FT. 2 DINING 5 PATIO 8 NURSERY
SECTION A - A
3 M.
3 KITCHEN 6 MECHANICAL 9 OFFICE

93
 RESIDENTIAL
Werfstraat
Brussels | Bovenbouw Architectuur
BY TIM ABRAHAMS
INTRIGUED by the premise of the 2014
exhibition Pasticcio at the Flemish Arch­
itecture Institute, a couple wanting to replace
their house on Werfstraat in Brussels called
the exhibition designers, Bovenbouw. The
show had brought together a group of Eu­
ropean architects, including that Belgian
office, who were reinventing building tradi­
tions that had emerged before the Modern
movement. The clients, who run a telecom­
munications company, did not want a glim­
mering glass­and­steel building, nor did they
want something dull and retro. “They were
fascinated by the idea that buildings could be
contemporary without all the Modernist
tropes,” says principal Dirk Somers.
To make way for the residence, Bovenbouw
demolished the client’s existing house, a
converted two­story workshop that no longer
provided enough space for their family and
didn’t in any architectural sense address the
scale of the street, with its heterogeneous mix
of office buildings, warehouses, apartment
buildings, and an art gallery. The new four­
story house features a symmetrical rhythm of
recessed windows that is interrupted by a
blank protrusion, hanging over the entrance,
similar in fashion to Palladio’s Casa Cogollo
in Vicenza, Italy, the main historical influ­
ence. This unexpected gesture not only gives
2 1
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN
1 VESTIBULE
2 GARAGE
94 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
the shallow building some depth (the plot is
24 feet deep at its shallowest), but it also
creates space on two floors for curved lateral
windows with oblique views toward a tree­
lined boulevard, and, above it, supports a
generous south­facing balcony overlooking
the street.
This bold move both demands and accen­
tuates ingenious, fabric­like brickwork. The
facade, 50 feet high from the ground to cor­
nice, is richly textured with courses of con­
ventional bricks, cut to five different sizes.
Brick stretchers have been laid above and
below the windows, while headers run in
ribbons between floors. More extreme are the
bricks stood up as “sailors,” exposing their
broad undersides. This variety allowed the
builders to seamlessly contour the outermost
wythe (there is an air cavity behind it) to
create rounded corners and curved window
reveals. Such plasticity is redolent of the many
stone Art Nouveau buildings in Brussels.
Yet the building, in plan, is clear and
symmetrical, with a strong central entrance.
A guest room and garage are placed on the
ground floor; above this are two children’s
rooms and a shared playroom. The parents
have their own floor, with bedroom, private
bathroom, and study. The uppermost floor
contains a kitchen, living room, and the
4 4
5
3 3
7
FOURTH-FLOOR PLAN
3 ELEVATOR 5 GUEST ROOM
4 STAIR 6 KITCHEN/DINING
balcony, but a furnished terrace with a half­
bath makes the roof level usable as well.
Both the plot and the building code indi­
cated that the best location for the staircase
was to the east, rather than at the center, so a
curved corridor on the ground floor leading
to the oval circulation tower became neces­
sary. This curvature reconciles the symmetry
of the building with the more utilitarian
needs of the staircase, enabling the old and
the modern to coexist and, hence, becoming
a unifying design feature.
This consistency of geometry in the detail­
ing helps make Werfstraat a convincing,
clever blend of contemporary and classical
principles. It is an intensely urban house too,
one that addresses the street with brio and
confidence but, on a shallow site, also offers
seclusion and privacy. n
6
PHOTOGRAPHY: © DAVID DE BRUIJN
0 10 FT.
3 M.
7 LIVING
8 BALCONY
Fabric-like brickwork adorns the street-facing facade
(right). Bursts of color enliven the kitchen (top), oval
staircase (above), and the primary bathroom (opposite).

95
 RESIDENTIAL
Stick House, Brick Garden
Brooklyn, New York | Abruzzo Bodziak Architects
BY JOANN GONCHAR, FAIA
THE LATEST residential revamp project
by Abruzzo Bodziak Architects (ABA),
“Stick House, Brick Garden,” sits amid a
pleasing architectural jumble in Greenpoint, a
Brooklyn neighborhood developed in the late
19th century that initially attracted workers
and their families, with its once-plentiful jobs
on nearby docks, in shipbuilding, or in facto-
ries. The house’s tree-lined street, a few
blocks from the East River, includes humble
two-story wood-framed rowhouses, three-
96 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
and four-story brick tenement buildings, and
shiny new condos. The variety, says Emily
Abruzzo, ABA cofounder, with Gerald
Bodziak, “made it hard for us to know what to
relate to,” referring to the design approach for
the renovation and expansion. The firm, a
2016 Design Vanguard, which does a mix of
civic and residential work, exhibitions, and
research, prefers to riff on what already exists,
explains Abruzzo, rather than invent forms
entirely from scratch. “That has never been
interesting to us,” she says.
ABA’s clients are Bettina and Fergus
McCall, a British couple who both work in
the TV and film industry (he in visual post-
production and she in digital archiving and
editing). They had bought their unassuming
three-bedroom, 3½-bath, circa-1890 row-
house in 2010, undertaking a few modest
renovations and repairs before moving in,
including updating an upstairs bathroom. But
soon they began to consider a more compre-
hensive overhaul. The property, which like
many others nearby consisted of two wood-
framed floors over a masonry lower level,
possessed notable assets, in particular an
ample front yard and a capacious rear garden.
But it also had serious deficiencies—it was
dark, had little insulation behind its vinyl-
siding-clad facades, and its front bedrooms,
one each for their two then-teenage children,
were cramped, with one much smaller than
the other.
Although zoning regulations would have
permitted the architects to greatly enlarge the
house by going upward, the McCalls did not
want that much added space. So, instead,
ABA proposed moving the front facade
forward by about 8 feet and extending the
floor plates. The solution preserved the rear
garden and still allowed for a gracious entry
court, while expanding the living area by
about 20 percent, to nearly 2,700 square feet.
The strategy made some rearrangement of the
interior possible, with a combined kitchen,
dining area, and living room extending from
front to back on the first floor, a more equi-
table bedroom configuration above, and
renovation of those bathrooms the McCalls
had not previously updated. It also permitted
insertion of floor-to-ceiling double-hung,
divided-lite windows—a client stipulation. PHOTOGRAPHY: © MICHAEL VAHRENWALD/ESTO
“Bettina said to us, ‘It is not a home if it
doesn’t have lites,’ ” relates Abruzzo.
The windows, then, along with the
house’s existing structure, became the jump-
ing-off point for the design of the new front
elevation. “Thinking of the project as a wood
house, since it was historically of wood,
informed all of the decisions,” says Abruzzo,
explaining that the windows helped establish
the gridlike organization of the stained cedar
panels and battens, which sit above a new
The entry court’s brick
pavers (opposite) continue
into the lower level (right).
Floor-to-ceiling windows
(above) and an enlarged
skylight over the main
stair incorporating LEDs
(far right) brighten the
interior.

97
 RESIDENTIAL

A brick outdoor “room” at the rear (right)

steps up to a lush garden (this image).

brick base. Brick is also used for a low wall at

the sidewalk’s edge, which incorporates
planters and seating, and for the entry court’s
10 11 12 pavers. The material extends inside, down a
short flight of steps, and into the lower level
(which houses an office space and a study)
6 and out to the backyard, where a terraced
1 2 outdoor “room” steps up to the lush garden.
8
13 The masonry, explains Abruzzo, made
9 sense, not only for its contextual qualities
but, in addition, for its ability—with the
help of redundant drainage—to withstand
0 10 FT. intense rainfall or tidal flooding. (Though
SECTION A - A
3 M.
not technically in a high-risk zone, the
house’s proximity to the river concerned the
clients.)
A A
7 The architects also carried the new front
2
6
facade’s logic to the inside walls to create grids
with the baseboards, trim, and moldings—all
1
5
from standard lumber—and provide a frame-
8 work for hanging art. All-white walls and
3 4
kitchen millwork, along with white oak floors
(in many areas original), complement the light
that streams in from the new, tall windows,
and from an enlarged skylight over the exist-
0 10 FT.
FIRST-FLOOR PLAN ing stair to the second level.
3 M.
ABA’s moves, from expanding the house
just a few feet forward, to combining typical
1 ENTRY COURT 6 PANTRY 11 CLOSET
materials in unexpected ways, have produced
2 ENTRY HALL 7 HALF BATH 12 BATH
a project that is at once surprising and famil-
3 LIVING 8 OUTDOOR ROOM 13 GARDEN iar. Stick House, Brick Garden is sympathetic
4 DINING 9 STUDY to its neighborhood’s roots, yet is light-filled,
5 KITCHEN 10 BEDROOM comfortable, and contemporary. n

98 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
 Archtober Festival:
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O CT. 1 - 3 1 , 2 0 2 3

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MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

BORRASSÀ | BARCELONA | PERIS+TORAL ARQUITECTES

Inner Calm
At the edge of the Catalan capital, social housing is
reconsidered from the inside out.
BY LEOPOLDO VILLARDI
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSÉ HEVIA

103
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

BRICK LATTICE on terraces (above), balconies

(opposite), and in stairwells (above, left) stirs
airflow. Protruding headers line the entry (left).

EL BESÒS I EL MARESME is not what

most people envision when they think of
Barcelona. The neighborhood lacks the mean-
dering gothic quality of las Ramblas, and it
falls outside Ildefons Cerdà’s chamfered-
square-gridded Eixample, which unified the
city at the turn of the last century. El Besòs i
el Maresme is a working-class community
built up in the 1950s and ’60s, and much of
the housing stock reflects this—repetitive,
bar-shaped apartment blocks with nondescript
architecture abound. But a new 54-unit social
housing complex on Carrer de Lluís Borrassà,
designed by local firm Peris+Toral, shows that
apartment buildings can be far more digni-
fied, even on a budget.
The seven-person firm, led by the hus-
band-and-wife team of Marta Peris and José
Toral, has developed a specialty in social
housing, much of it built in Catalonia and on
the Balearic Islands. Borrassà, a commission

104 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

won through a competition in 2016, is part of a longstanding effort
dating back to the 1990s to reinvigorate the surrounding area, with
such projects as Parc Diagonal Mar (2002) by Enric Miralles and
Benedetta Tagliabue, and the Fòrum Building by Herzog & de
Meuron (2004), only a few blocks farther south.
Built for the Municipal Institute of Housing and Renovation,
Borrassà’s massing—a five-story bar with a tower rising out of it—was
predetermined by zoning. “We asked ourselves: do we treat this build-
ing as a block that grows into a tower, or as a tower that morphs into a
block?” says Toral. With the surrounding context and environmental
factors in mind, the architects opted for the latter.
Beginning with the top six stories, Peris+Toral pinwheeled four
apartments—each roughly 29½ feet by 23 feet in dimension—around a
shared landing, giving each unit a corner of the building and, with it,
two exposures for cross ventilation. A pair of circulation cores is sand-
wiched between them, providing access and egress. This general layout
continues downward through the bar-shaped midsection, where
Peris+Toral mirrored the pinwheeling arrangement on the opposite end
of the building. Stitching the two groupings together is an unexpected
top-lit atrium.
“It’s atypical to find these kinds of spaces in social housing,” Toral
says, pointing to a few significant examples that informed the design of
Borrassà. In particular, an 1851 familistère in Paris proved influential—
at Cité Napoléon, two parallel buildings are connected by floating
pedestrian streets under a clear glass canopy. At Borrassà, polycarbon-
ate roof panels diffuse sunlight, bathing brick walls and curving walk-
ways in a luminous glow. With grayish white terrazzo and river stones
underfoot, and even larger round pebbles (to sit on) designed by indus-
105
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

5 6
6
3 2

2
3 3
6
1 6

0 15 FT. 0 15 FT.
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN SECOND-FLOOR PLAN
5 M. 5 M.

1 SIDEWALK ENTRY 7 ATRIUM trial-design duo Los Díez, the space carries a
2 ELEVATOR 8 GARAGE certain aura of tranquility.
3 CHANGING ROOM 9 TERRACE It isn’t all just for looks—the cavity is
4 FIELD ENTRY 10 ROOF TERRACE designed as a habitable solar chimney. As air
5 GARAGE RAMP 11 ATRIUM INLET 10 warms inside, it rises through the atrium,
venting through a series of louvered openings
6 APARTMENT 12 ATRIUM OUTLET
at the top. This causes the atmospheric pres-
sure to fall slightly, forcing in cooler, denser
air via an inlet at the bottom of the atrium.
The effect is perceptible, and pleasant—on a
still, hot August afternoon, the gentle breeze
made for a refreshing welcome. An anemom-
eter on the roof closes the louvers when gusts
become too strong, preventing the atrium
from becoming a wind tunnel. When the
weather is cooler, the louvers close as well,
holding on to the heat.
Around the atrium and throughout the
building, a handful of units have been sacri-
ficed to make way for social areas. Terraces on
the top and the fifth floors offer expansive
views of the city and the sea. These can be
9 accessed via elevators or open-air stairwells
9
11 that spiral around a ribbon of 6-gauge metal
plates, folded once at the top to create hand-
rails. On the ground floor, there are locker
rooms for people playing sports on the fields
abutting the building to the north. Even the
12 below-grade parking garage, through some
1
sectional dexterity along the sidewalk, has
7 access to natural daylight and ventilation.
“These elements are important to us, no
matter what we’re designing,” Toral says,
3 arguing that it makes such spaces easier to
adapt for new uses in the future. It’s clear in
walking around the building that environ-
mental and social considerations were founda-
tional, and not an afterthought.
Barcelona is historically a city of stucco and
stone—Borrassà stands out for its buff-brick
8
construction. Flush joints with a white mortar
keep the walls flat and bright; texture instead
derives from the systematized patchwork of
solid and permeable walls, windows, and
balconies created from four different apart-
AXONOMETRIC ment layouts.

106 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

AIR ENTERS the atrium through an inlet (right), rises
toward polycarbonate roof panels (above, right) and
vents at the top (above).

Within each unit, two bedrooms (9 feet by 11¾

feet), a bathroom, and a balcony (10¼ feet by 4½ feet)
slide around one another, forming a kitchen and a
living room from the space left over. The strategy is
similar to the one explored in Peris+Toral’s 85-unit
mass-timber social housing complex in Cornellà
(record, September 2021), although at Borrassà the
bedrooms and the living spaces are not the same size.
The apartments are low-key and understated, like the
simple white-metal thresholds leading into them—but
the architects’ deft use of a simple palette and empha-
sis on bioclimatic principles add special moments.
Some bedrooms look out onto balconies, which are
partially shaded by brise-soleils of so-called “hit-and-
miss” brickwork, while others have windows that cut
through the main facade. Units that share a wall with
the atrium peer into it, with inward-swinging win-
dows allowing tenants to cash in on the additional
airflow.
A short list of active technologies supplement the
heavy-hitting passive-design moves. Photovoltaic

107
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

4
3

1 1

4
3

2
1 1

1 1

4
2

3
1 1

UNIT PLANS

1 BEDROOM
2 LIVING AREA

3 KITCHEN
4 BATHROOM

108 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

A NOTCH with steel bracing accentuates the
fifth-floor terrace (right). Each apartment has
its own balcony (opposite, both).

arrays on the roof help power water heaters,

and graywater is used to flush toilets. There
isn’t a single air-conditioning unit in the
building.
Despite its scant budget and predetermined
massing, Borrassà packs a lot of architectural
punch. “Current sustainability standards are
too heavily based on point systems. You can do
something very, very wrong and then compen-
sate for it by, say, planting trees,” says Toral.
“Sure, that might offset some carbon, but it’s
not the way to make better and more impact-
ful buildings from the start.” A short walk
away, Peris+Toral is wrapping up its largest
project to date—a 140-unit apartment build-
ing on Carrer de Veneçuela, with dedicated
housing for the elderly and refugees. There, an
eight-story atrium scales up, and will no doubt
repeat, the successes of Borrassà. n

Credits
ARCHITECT: Peris + Toral Arquitectes — Marta
Peris, José Toral, principals; Guillem Pascual,
Ana Espinosa, Maria Megias, Izaskun González,
Cristina Porta, Miguel Bernat, design team
ASSOCIATE ARCHITECT:
L3J — Jaime Pastor Sánchez
ENGINEER: L3J Tècnics Associats (m/e/p)
CONSULTANTS: March-Rius Arquitectes
Tècnics (survey); Societat Orgànica
(environmental)
GENERAL CONTRACTOR:
Copisa Constructora Pirenaica
CLIENT: Institut Municipal de L’Habitatge i
Rehabilitació de Barcelona
SIZE: 66,100 square feet
COST: $6.9 million
COMPLETION DATE: October 2022

Sources
MASONRY: Cerámica PIERA (brick); JULIÁN
ARUMÍ (precast concrete)
WINDOWS: Cortizo, UIN2 (metal frame);
Vidresponent (glazing); Aislux Catalunya
(skylights)
DOORS: Andreu (metal); Bamar Puertas (wood
and fire-control)
LIGHTING: Hep Tech, Novalux Lighting, Lluria
Lighting System, Mean Well Enterprises
FINISHES: Financiera Maderera (millwork);
REVETÓN (anti-carbon paint); Invicto Química
(anti-graffiti paint); Topcret Tecnología en
Revestimientos (microcement); Pavimentos
URBINA (terrazzo)
HARDWARE: Tesa (locksets); JNF (closers/pulls)
ENERGY: Antylop (energy-management
system); LONGi (solar panels)

109
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING
PARKLIFE | MELBOURNE | AUSTIN MAYNARD ARCHITECTS
Going for Gold
A novel housing model paves the way for Australia’s first operationally carbon-neutral residential precinct.
BY DILLON WEBSTER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TOM ROSS
“HOW DO YOU FEEL about all that yellow?” is often the first
question asked of residents living in ParkLife, a new apartment build-
ing in the colorful Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, known as much
for its blend of historic multiculturalism as it is for the young creatives
who flock there. Designed by local firm Austin Maynard Architects,
the building—along with five simultaneously constructed adjacent
complexes—comprises the Village, one of the most sustainable residen-
tial precincts in Australia. Here a novel housing model, aiming to
address affordability and provide environmentally conscious housing,
puts architects in the shoes of developers.
110 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
Over the last decade, housing provider Nightingale has been pio-
neering a new approach to the housing crisis in Melbourne, which, by
some estimates, will require the construction of 1.6 million new homes
in the next 35 years to keep up with demand. With an eye for design-
forward solutions, the not-for-profit organization partners with archi-
tects who are willing to bear some financial risk and, in a sense, oper-
ate as their own client. Nightingale, on the other hand, manages site
acquisition, construction delivery, community engagement, and even
the handing over of keys to tenants. The model has allowed units to
sell for anywhere between 5 and 20 percent less than market value.
POPS OF YELLOW dot ParkLife’s shared
spaces (this image) and balconies (opposite).
111
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

ParkLife is the second housing project that Austin Maynard

Architects has undertaken in this role of architect-developer, its
first being Terrace House, also in Brunswick. “This time
around, we were better prepared to make early decisions, to
evaluate cost savings during the design process, and to know
which areas of sustainability to focus on,” says director Mark
Austin. The designers refined facade elements, such as thermal
bridges, coming up with a simple skin of vertically ribbed
high-performance insulated steel panels in bright white—a
color chosen for its high reflectance to reduce heat gain in
summer. Most Australian residences have mechanical heating
and cooling, but here the firm opted for an Energy Recovery
Ventilation system that continuously provides fresh air using
heat exchangers, ensuring comfortable living conditions and
reducing long-term environmental impacts.
The eight-story building is divided into 37 units, primarily
one- and two-bedroom, with occasional three-bedrooms and
studios. Five of those units have been allocated to subsidized
housing, making it the first residential precinct in Australia to
do this without a government partnership. There is a strong

10
6
8 8
6 7 9
9

5 5
5

3 12

11
9 9

2
1

0 15 FT. 0 15 FT.
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN FOURTH-FLOOR PLAN EIGHTH-FLOOR PLAN
5 M. 5 M.

1 ENTRY 4 GARDEN/LIGHTWELL 7 ONE-BEDROOM UNIT 10 ONE-BEDROOM DUPLEX 13 AMPHITHEATER

2 RETAIL 5 ELEVATOR 8 STUDIO UNIT 11 TWO-BEDROOM DUPLEX 14 LAUNDRY

3 BIKE STORAGE 6 SERVICES 9 TWO-BEDROOM UNIT 12 CIRCULATION 15 COMMUNAL SPACE

112 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

BIKE STORAGE on the ground floor is easy to
access (opposite and right). Netting encloses
circulation (above) and balconies (above, right).

focus on sustainable outcomes, as well—the

Village as a whole claims to be carbon-neutral
in operation, and ParkLife uses no gas, fea-
tures a 28.8kW photovoltaic array on its roof,
and collects graywater.
Although planning provisions would nor-
mally require an apartment building the size
of ParkLife to provide over 40 parking spaces,
this requirement was waived with support
from the local council, given its proximity to
public transportation—a busy train line and
cycling path act as conduits to downtown
Melbourne. “When we first moved in, we
owned a car and rented a parking space near-
by. But we realized that we slowly stopped
using the car,” says Claire Ward, an architect
at Austin Maynard who decided to buy an
apartment in the building. “We got rid of the
car and invested in four bikes to get around.”
By eliminating parking, and thus the need to
excavate and build a below-grade garage,
significant savings were passed on to the firm.

113
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

APARTMENT INTERIORS feature yellow accents (above), but are

more muted than shared spaces (left). Communal areas on the
roof include an amphitheater (opposite).

And, with less traffic, the street became a pedestrianized ex-

tension of the apartments.
In fact, just beyond the main entry, residents have access to
storage for 95 bikes. It’s a location that isn’t tucked into a hard-
to-reach niche—rather, it is “easy, convenient, and therefore
used,” as frankly put by Ray Dinh, another architect at Austin
Maynard who has taken up residence at ParkLife. The rooftop
has a communal garden, shared laundry, an outdoor dining
space, and—in response to a sight line height restriction—a
sloped southern portion forms a functional amphitheater.
While the design of social spaces is often idealistic in execution,
Dinh comments that these actually work. Those living in
ParkLife have a dedicated Slack channel, which they use to
organize and maintain the shared areas of the building.
The simultaneous construction of the Village’s buildings
allowed the six architecture teams to design in tandem and
mutually benefit from each other. For example, ParkLife shares
a lightwell and courtyard with the adjacent structure, Ever-
green (by Clare Cousins Architects), and then mirrors this
lightwell on the other side to create the H shape of its plan.
This configuration allows for completely external circulation

114 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

enclosed with a simple wire netting. Many residents have spilled out it as the designers. At ParkLife, where those two groups overlap,
into these communal areas, with open doors signaling to neighbors Austin Maynard Architects’ financial risk, as well as its cultural one,
that they’re welcome—fulfilling a core design intent that these spaces seems to have paid off. n
act as an extension of their living rooms.
It’s clear that the residents of ParkLife are committed to, and remain Dillon Webster is an architectural-heritage consultant and freelance writer,
engaged by, the economic, environmental, and social sustainability prin- currently residing in Melbourne.
ciples behind the Village. Most units were procured through a balloting
system before permits were granted; apartment owners then joined com- Credits Sources
munity meetings that helped refine the final design. To navigate budget ARCHITECT: Austin Maynard FACADE: Askin Volcore, Jakob
Architects — Andrew Maynard, Mark Webnet (netting), National Masonry
constraints, a base level of finishes was applied to all units, with optional Austin, principals; Mark Stranan, ROOFING: Lysaght, Klip-lok
upgrades made available in the early stages of the construction process. associate
Small but potent touches from Austin Maynard’s single-family residential WINDOWS: Bucalu
ENGINEERS: WSP (structural, civil,
work are incorporated, making the apartments feel custom, such as m/e/p); Arup (acoustical) LIGHTING: Ambience Lighting
slightly shorter door openings, which seem to heighten internal spaces, CONSULTANTS: Access Studio BIKE STORAGE: Erain (stacker);
(access); Openwork (landscape); Cora (rails)
and recycled timber flooring.
Leigh Design (waste); Steve Watson INTERIOR FINISHES: Recycled
So, what do they think of all that sunny yellow? Those vibrant & Partners (survey); WT (cost Timber Innovations, Terrazzo
bursts have become a collective point of pride for Claire, Ray, and the consultant) Australian Marble (floors); Classic
rest of the residents of ParkLife, which has earned a reputation for GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Ceramics (tiles); Dulux (paint);
being the party building of The Village. In Australia, there is a cul- Hacer Group United Products (basins); Sussex
(faucets); Caroma (toilets); Britex
tural aversion to multifamily high-rise living—the sustainability- CLIENT: Austin Maynard Nightingale (tubs)
minded and social-centric tactics, like shared laundry facilities or Development
ditching a long-held car, fall outside the established comfort zone. SIZE: 45,300 square feet
The success of any deliberately built community-oriented apartment COST: withheld
building relies on residents to be all-in—to become just as invested in COMPLETION DATE: May 2022

115
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

KEYBRIDGE I LONDON I ALLIES AND MORRISON

Minding
the Gap
Materiality and variety of scale ease the shift between old
and new buildings in London’s Vauxhall neighborhood.
BY CHRIS FOGES
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RORY GARDINER

116 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

UNTIL THE turn of this century, London
had only a smattering of high-rise apartment
buildings. In recent years, however, the pur-
suit of density has seen hundreds mushroom.
Most appear as alien interlopers, out of scale
and sympathy with the townscape. Keybridge,
designed by Allies and Morrison, is an excep-
tion. Comprising 598 apartments, along with
an elementary school, shops, and workspace,
the development in Vauxhall, southeast of the
city center, nests three brick-clad towers
among a riotous jumble of mid-rise apartment
blocks and diminutive rowhouses. Seen from
any direction, the layered ensemble seems to
extend the texture of its low-rise neighbor-
hood even as it ascends into the sky.
When Allies and Morrison was appointed
in 2012, the three-acre site was occupied by an
ugly Brutalist telephone exchange. Its owner,
who intended to sell the land with approved
plans in place, was keen to leave a positive
legacy, says partner Alfredo Caraballo.
Although the brief sought high density, there
was also a commitment to make a good piece
of city and a pleasant place to live.
The site sits between two distinct urban
conditions. To the northwest, beyond a rail-
way viaduct, lies a 500-acre regeneration zone
stretching along the River Thames. Former
industrial land is now peppered with glassy
residential towers that set expectations for
height at Keybridge, but otherwise exemplify
what not to do. “I call them perfume bot-
tles—designed to be seen in isolation,” says
Caraballo. “We wanted tall buildings that
could be ‘background,’ woven into the ordi-
nary fabric.”
Cues were instead drawn from the patch-
work variety of the site’s immediate environs.
Its principal frontage is on South Lambeth
Road, where modern warehouses mingle with
redbrick Victorian rowhouses and mansion
blocks—a loosely defined type of grand
19th-century apartment building. All con-
tributed to the firm’s typological mix and
architectural imagery.
In plan, the whole 690,000-square-foot
scheme comprises three buildings, but many
more are suggested by their configuration as
complex agglomerations of disparate parts. By
the viaduct, three towers (18, 22, and 36
stories) rise from podiums, cranked in plan,
that recreate the familiar scale and irregular-
ity of surrounding streets. One sits above the
school, encircled by rooftop play spaces, while
THE DENSE DEVELOPMENT replaces a
Brutalist telephone exchange with a cluster
of largely brick buildings in tune with their
context.

117
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

the other two have a shared base containing facili-

ties for residents, including a club lounge.
The tallest appear to twist as they rise in a series
of steps, with angled sides that lend an ever-
changing appearance to the cluster. It’s a deft piece
of scenography, evoking the haphazard informality
of places that evolve over time. “Their structure is
actually very rational, with orthogonal column
grids and rectangular plans with chamfered ends,”
says Caraballo. “The aim was to make simple
buildings but complex spaces in between.”
Two new mansion blocks facing South
Lambeth Road create a foreground to the towers
and are also articulated in a way that belies an
underlying order, with varied rooflines and slight
folds in the facades. Their bulk is softened by a
constellation of smaller structures. Most visibly,
the two-story penthouses picked out in white
terra-cotta resemble rows of ordinary London
houses, with pitched roofs and gable ends. A small
stretch of apartments, presented as rowhouses,
remakes the edge of quiet Wyvil Road to the south

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Griffin Griffin
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OAD OAD
WYVIL R WYVIL R

0 100 FT.
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN EIGHTH-FLOOR PLAN 30 M.

1 TOWNHOUSES 4 BICYCLE PARKING 7 PARKING LOT ENTRANCE 10 TOWER APARTMENTS

2 SCHOOL 5 BAKERY 8 ROOFTOP TOWNHOUSES 11 COMMUNAL TERRACE

3 TOWER COMMUNAL AREA 6 RETAIL 9 MANSION BLOCK 12 PRIVATE TERRACE
APARTMENTS

118 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

KEYBRIDGE (opposite and below) eases the
transition between Victorian homes and the
Battersea Opportunity Area to its north (right).

and brings the height of the development

down to that of its neighbors.
From surrounding streets, the elaborate
collage does create the impression of hetero-
geneous buildings jostling in harmonious
disorder. The whole mass is inescapably tall,
but the gradations in height soften the im-
pact, recalling the cascade of buildings in an
Italian hill town.
An equally important driver of the “weird”
plan was the public realm, says Caraballo: “It’s
a very human-centric place, designed around
the experience of moving through.” One-third
of the site is open space, composed in a con-
sciously picturesque manner to expand and
contract, and to draw nearby heritage build-
ings into the architectural conversation.
A “piazza” on one corner is flanked by a
19th-century church previously obscured by
the telephone exchange. From within the
central garden, the buildings frame a view of
Georgian townhouses across South Lambeth
Road. A curved lane running between these
two spaces narrows to just 29 feet, but, since
buildings are not parallel, residents’ privacy is
preserved. Lined with trees and trickling rills,
the meandering route makes an easeful end to
the journey home.

119
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

THE MIX is arranged across the site to carve out fluid

public and private spaces (opposite). Residences feature
gracious lobbies (bottom) and daylight-filled interiors with
a variety of balconies (left and below).

PHOTOGRAPHY: © TIM CROCKER (OPPOSITE); ANNA STATHAKI (TOP, RIGHT); COURTESY MOUNT ANVIL (BOTTOM)

120 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

 Facades that appear at oblique angles on all sides are clad in reddish really exemplary. It recognizes the fact that housing comprises the
brick, tying the development to its context and unifying its diverse parts. lion’s share of the city and therefore bears special responsibility for its
Historically inflected variety in the details relieves monotony and tunes character, and skillfully reconciles market-driven development with the
every facade to its setting. One soaring face is a simple grid, with brick public good. After the city’s shaky start with tall buildings, Keybridge
piers that narrow subtly as the building rises. Another is stubbled with shows how London might aim higher. n
projecting headers. Masonry arches distinguish the school as a civic
building, and rustication dignifies double-height storefronts. Deep Credits SIZE: 690,000 square feet
reveals to the warehouse-style windows of the mansion blocks lend a ARCHITECT: Allies and Morrison COST: withheld
reassuring sense of weight and solidity, as does a giant-order brick loggia — Alfredo Caraballo, partner; Neil COMPLETION DATE: August 2020
veiling two-story terra-cotta-clad penthouses in the towers. Shaughnessy, Laurie Hallows,
directors
There’s variety among the apartment types, too, from mansion-block Sources
ARCHITECT OF RECORD:
penthouses with vaulted ceilings that are entered via roof terraces to Stockwool MASONRY: Vandersanden
residences that open onto private gardens at ground level. “Choice en- ENGINEERS: Waterman, WSP CURTAIN WALL:
courages diversity among residents,” says Caraballo. Most floor plans are (structural); Waterman (m/e/p) Reynaers Aluminium
typical of new-build housing in London, with eight or so apartments on CONSULTANTS: Townshend RAINSCREEN: James and Taylor
each level accessed from a central elevator core, but there’s differentiation Landscape Architects, Planit-IE (terra-cotta tile)
(landscape architecture); Sense MOISTURE BARRIER: Tyvek
even among the more regular residences—some have enclosed winter (cost); GL Hearn (planning); JSM
gardens, others have projecting balconies. Ranging in size from Engineering (balconies); ROOF: Prima Porcelain Pavers (tile)
425-square-foot studios to 1,900-square-foot three-bedrooms, they are GENERAL CONTRACTOR: GLAZING: Central Units; Sky Glass
more generous than London’s miserly minimum space standards dictate, Mount Anvil
allowing some flexibility in use. CLIENT: BT Property/Mount Anvil
It is at the urban scale, though, that Allies and Morrison’s work is OWNER: Mount Anvil

121
122 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
VALE PEREIRO I LISBON I NOMOS ARCHITECTS

Out of the Blue

An aging office building gets a new lease on life—and a tiled facade—in a residential conversion.
BY IZZY KORNBLATT
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIANO MURA

THE COLORFUL, patterned tile called

azulejo that adorns the facades of buildings
across Lisbon has, like cod, port wine, and all
things nautical, become a cultural signifier
of Portugueseness—a marker of local authen-
ticity so significant as to be the subject of an
entire museum, the Museu Nacional do
Azulejo, and the prime offering in countless
souvenir shops. But, like those other signi-
fiers, azulejo is a cultural hybrid, the product
not of local isolation but of global intercon-
nection. It reached Portugal from North
Africa via Spain; it subsequently evolved
under Chinese and Dutch influence; and,
during the colonial era, it made its way as far
afield as Brazil, India, and lusophone Africa.
It seems only fitting, then, that the tile-
covered Vale Pereiro apartments, located not
far from the Avenida da Liberdade in central
Lisbon, were designed some 900 miles away
in Geneva by the firm Nomos, which has
additional offices in Lisbon and Madrid.
Here the tiling is hardly traditional—it con-
sists of 5½-inch squares hand-glazed locally
in a deep cobalt blue and placed in a uniform
grid—but nonetheless the association with its
historical counterparts is apparent, especially
since the building it faces across the narrow
Rua Vale do Pereiro is adorned with the
more typical blue-and-white azulejos. Both
the street and the facade of Vale Pereiro are
kinked, and so the new tiling, when seen
from a distance and in the oblique, becomes a
shimmering focal point—a gesture toward
Portuguese identity, elevated, by its location,
into an urban marker.
Before it was the Vale Pereiro, and before
its facade was enameled in blue, this building
was a drab 40-year-old block of offices front-
ed with glass and painted concrete. After
acquiring the structure along with a permit to

VALE PEREIRO stands at a kink in the street

(opposite). A new stair, added at the back of the
building, is rendered in cheery yellow (right).

123
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

3 3

1
4
6

A
6 5

0 15 FT.
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN
5 M.

2
5

5
3

4
4

AXONOMETRIC
5

0 15 FT.
FIFTH-FLOOR PLAN
5 M.

6 demolish and replace it with a residential

building in 2016, the developer, Capvest,
1 LOBBY
brought in Nomos to study alternative pos-
2 NEW STAIR 4
sibilities. For several reasons, sustainability
3 GARDEN benefits not least among them, the architects
4
4 APARTMENT preferred retaining the existing structure.
5 BALCONY 5 “We tried to keep the building’s soul,” says
4
6 ROOF TERRACE Katrien Vertenten, the Nomos partner in
7 PARKING 4
charge of the project, noting that its siting
was effective and its concrete structure sound.
3 Nonetheless, converting the five-story
4
structure into 13 for-sale apartments of vary-
7
ing sizes was no easy undertaking. Its low
ceiling heights presented a particularly dif-
7 ficult obstacle—Capvest aimed to create
spacious, luxurious apartments that could
0 15 FT. command premium prices—and one that
SECTION A - A
5 M. became the basis for one of Nomos’s most
radical interventions: cutting into the slabs to
create double-height spaces in many of the

124 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

DOUBLE-HEIGHT SPACES (below, right) are
expressed on the facade as bump-outs. Balconies
or gardens are incorporated into each unit (right).

units. As a result, the 39,000-square-foot

building is in section something of a Tetris
screen, the various apartments forming verti-
cally interlocking room arrangements. The
aesthetic interest of these moves then also
becomes the basis of the composition of the
facade, where tiled bump-outs mark the
double-height spaces in each unit, and exist-
ing yellow-painted beams indicate where the
slabs have been cut directly behind them.
Vertenten and her colleagues moved the
building’s entrance from one side to its center,
where they inserted a small common area and
elevator lobby. Because the remainder of the
ground floor now houses two apartments, the
architects created a set of buffer spaces shield-
ed by gridded trellises and glass block along
the remainder of the street frontage. These
“winter gardens,” as Vertenten refers to them,
provide the occupants of the units with a
measure of privacy while still allowing for
cross ventilation.
Throughout the interiors, the sharp con-
trast between the low-ceilinged and double-
height rooms imbues the units with the spa-
tial drama of compression and release; each
type of space becomes more interesting in
relation to the other. The interior finishes—
terrazzo floors, painted cabinetry, dark wood
paneling, and, especially, textured paint on all
surfaces above the lowest overhead beams—
serve to highlight the building’s distinct
spatial qualities while providing an under-
stated backdrop for the lives of its occupants.
There is lightheartedness here too, pri-
marily on the rear elevation, which is ren-
dered in a sky blue with balustrades on each
floor and a sculptural outdoor stair—all
added in the renovation—painted a cheery
yellow. This elevation serves as an informal,
private counterpoint to the buttoned-up
public-facing front, and its design enables all
of the units to have dedicated outdoor spaces.
At grade, the land behind the building is
split into private gardens for the two ground-
level units; the balconies above adjoin each
of the upper-level units. There are additional
balconies on the building’s front, and the
two fifth-floor penthouses each have both a
balcony and a roof deck.
No one who strolls down the street and
glimpses Vale Pereiro for the first time will
suspect that it is a work of adaptive reuse. But
this is exactly the point. The preexisting
structure was retained not for its historicity

125
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

126 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

INTERIOR FINISHES are sleek (opposite,
bottom and opposite, top right). A new stair at
the rear, and smaller stairs leading to two roof
decks, add playful notes to the design (this
page and opposite, top left).

but for its usefulness—and what is perhaps

most intriguing is that it proved useful both
pragmatically, as a means of saving money (its
two floors of underground parking helped
with this) and reducing environmental im-
pact, and aesthetically. “When you’re working
within an existing structure, the forms you
create are almost a necessity,” says Nomos
partner Lucas Camponovo. “They’re logical,
but also expressive, and even glamorous.” The
design of Vale Pereiro preceded the pandemic,
but there’s nonetheless a lesson here for archi-
tects and developers planning to convert
disused office buildings to new uses in the age
of remote work.
Vale Pereiro, then, is a hybrid on several
levels. Like the azulejos for which Lisbon is
famous, it straddles the divides between old
and new, between invention and tradition,
and between the local and the global. Almost
all of its apartments have now sold, but, so far,
few of the buyers have been Portuguese—a
reflection of the extent to which central
Lisbon has, for better or worse, become the
territory of tourists and expatriates. This state
of affairs is “a bit sad,” Vertenten concedes,
but it may help to keep in mind an observa-
tion made by the late cultural geographer
Doreen Massey, who argued against what she
termed “internalist and essentialist” notions
of place: “places,” she wrote, “are always
already hybrid.” n

Credits
ARCHITECT: Nomos Architects — Katrien
Vertenten, Lucas Camponovo, Massimo Bianco,
Ophélie Herranz, Paul Galindo, design leads;
Verónica Pires, Gabriela Pratas, Jorge Paquete,
architects
ENGINEER: Engsol
CONSULTANTS: Joaquim Pedro Silva Carvalho
(electrical); Jorge Manuel Inácio Paixão
(ventilation, insulation)
GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Tecnorém
Engenharia e Construções
CLIENT: Capvest Group
SIZE: 39,000 square feet
COST: $4.8 million (construction)
COMPLETION DATE: July 2023 (occupancy)

Sources
EXTERIOR TILE: Aleluia Cerâmicas
GLASS BLOCK: Seves Glassblock
WINDOWS: Reynaers Aluminium

127
MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

TIMBER TOWER I PARIS I MOREAU KUSUNOKI

Pushing
Limits
Amid changing regulations, Moreau Kusunoki
completes a singular wood tower in Paris.
BY ANDREW AYERS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARIS MEZULIS

LOCATED in rapidly and

densely developing
Bruneseau (opposite, top),
the tower consists of joined
14-story and nine-story
volumes (left). A landscaped
terrace for all residents
(opposite, bottom) tops the
shorter one.
PLANNED IN the 1980s and officially
launched in 1991, Paris Rive Gauche is the
French capital’s biggest redevelopment pro-
gram since Haussmann’s transformation of
the city in the mid-19th century. Stretching
eastward along the Seine from the Gare
d’Austerlitz to the city limits, it concerns over
320 acres of partly obsolete railroad infra-
structure in the 13th arrondissement.
Thirty years on, the final and most dif-
ficult sector, in Bruneseau, is rising from the
ground, on the strip of land running along-
side Paris’s notorious boulevard périphérique,
the eight-lane highway that rings the city.
But traffic noise and infrastructure are not
the only obstacles to redeveloping this part of
the city, for it is littered with sundry indus-
trial facilities and is also the point where the
railroads fan out. Indeed so “hostile” did Yves
Lion, Bruneseau’s coordinating architect,
consider the sector that he advocated towers
as the only building type capable of providing
the density needed to satisfy developers’
profit margins in a context requiring costly
foundations.
For Lion’s proposal to be adopted, the
Conseil de Paris had to vote in favor of abol-
ishing the 121-foot height limit that had
governed construction in the capital’s outer
arrondissements since the mid-1970s—which
it did, controversially, in 2010, only to reverse
the decision just this April. In the 13 years
between, two monumental towers have
climbed toward the sky—Renzo Piano’s
525-foot-high courthouse in the 17th (2017)
and Jean Nouvel’s 590-foot Tours Duo in
Bruneseau (2022). Ground has also been
broken on a third, Herzog & de Meuron’s
much-contested 590-foot Tour Triangle in
the 15th (due 2025). But the past 13 years
have also seen completion of a good number
of 164-foot-tall residential buildings—just
below the legal limit that would require on-
site fire personnel 24/7—of which this
77-apartment scheme by Paris-based Moreau
Kusunoki is one.
Organized by SEMAPA, a publicly
owned company that is overseeing Paris Rive
Gauche, the 2018 design competition was “a
race among developers, each of which teamed
up with an architect, to see who could pro-
pose the most original project,” says Nicolas
Moreau, one-half, alongside Hiroko Kusu-
noki, of the Franco-Japanese duo that won
fame in the 2015 Guggenheim Helsinki
contest. “The city was strongly represented on
the jury and, as with the Réinventer Paris
programs, was expecting innovation,” he
continues, referring to the 2014 and 2017

129
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

14
4 5 6 7
1 DRYWALL
15 2 INSULATION

3 CLT
1 2 3
4 CONCRETE on
8 m

SE
n Si
13

IN
5 ACOUSTIC FELT J ea

E
ée
r m
6 WOOD FLOOR d'A
al
9 ér
7 GLUE-LAMINATED G én
10 du lier
WOOD BEAM d Ber
v ar pt iste
11 ule n -Ba
8 ROLLER SHUTTER Bo Jea
Rue e
iqu
9 DOUBLE-GLAZED ér
12 r iph
WINDOW Pé

10 CHARRED WOOD
CLADDING

11 GLUE-LAMINATED
WOOD COLUMN
12 STEEL GUARDRAIL

13 PRECAST
CONCRETE BALCONY

14 BAMBOO DECKING

15 LARCH PLANK

0 20 FT. 0 100 FT.

BALCONY SECTION SITE PLAN
5 M. 30 M.

9
A

7
3

10 6
2

4 5
8 5
1

9 9
A

0 30 FT. 9
GROUND-FLOOR PLAN NINTH-FLOOR PLAN
10 M.

1 RESIDENTIAL ENTRY 5 SHARED TERRACE 9 THREE-BEDROOM

2 RESTAURANT 6 SHARED KITCHEN 10 DUPLEX

3 UPPER GALLERY 7 STUDIO

4 LOWER GALLERY 8 TWO-BEDROOM SECTION A - A

130 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

THE CONCRETE BASE, on the ground floor, will house
an art gallery with a dramatic spiral stair (right), the
residential lobby (bottom), and a restaurant.

open calls to find inventive yet commercially viable

redevelopment schemes for various municipally
owned sites. For French property giant Emerige,
which has previously worked with Pritzker laureates
David Chipperfield and RCR, Moreau Kusunoki
proposed an experimental mass-timber tower that
would push expression of the material about as far as
it could go.
Located in the shadow of Nouvel’s off-kilter tow-
ers, Moreau Kusunoki’s building occupies a wedge-
shaped site where the rue Jean-Baptiste-Berlier meets
the Boulevard du Général-d’Armée-Jean-Simon, at a
point where the latter takes the form of a bridge that
spans the railroads and links to the river crossing.
One of three mass-timber towers planned for
Bruneseau, the project piles up two levels of under-
ground parking, a ground and second floor contain-
ing a future art gallery and a restaurant, and, on the
boulevard, 14 floors of apartments that range from
studios to five-room duplexes, while the rear part of
the building, also containing apartments, is articu-
lated as a nine-floor volume. The architects consid-
ered using structural cross-laminated timber (CLT)
panels, “but, to ensure full future adaptability, we
opted for a mass-timber frame, with wooden floors
and facades too,” explains Moreau. Their initial
intention was to expose the frame externally, but they
soon realized that would be impractical with respect
to water penetration. Indeed, they admit, the project
entailed a steep learning curve concerning the limits
and pitfalls of timber construction.
Rather than the structurally pure object Moreau
Kusunoki was aiming for, the result is a clever hybrid,
dressed up to resemble the initial intention but actu-
ally involving three different construction logics. As
in many mass-timber towers, the base and core are
concrete. A complex piece of civil engineering, the
four-story base (garage and levels 1 and 2) cantilevers
over the boulevard bridge at the front, is reinforced to
bear the loads of a planned metro extension at the
rear, and incorporates measures to eliminate train
vibration. Featuring spruce glulam columns, as well
as glulam beams at its perimeter, the mass-timber
frame also incorporates steel, which spans the inte-
rior. This is because, for fire resistance, the glulam
members are oversized, which would have made
ceiling heights too low had they been used through-
out. To prevent water penetration, the frame is en-
closed behind facade panels—a prefabricated sand-
wich of CLT and timber-shaving insulation. But, just
as at Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, in New
York, the structure is expressed outside in decorative
form—instead of Mies’s bronze, we find larch-clad
string courses and pilasters. Finally, the precast
concrete balconies are carried by exoskeletons that

131
 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING

THE STRUCTURAL frame is expressed on the exterior as a grid of glulam days before the French fire service issued a circular, on January 1, 2020,
members clad in weather-resistant larch. prohibiting exposed external wood until further notice. Along with the
recently reinstated height limits, these new restrictions mean that
rise up the building like scaffolding, their glulam members clad in nothing quite like this timber tower will be seen in Paris again. n
hard-wearing larch for weather protection.
Except for the glulam columns, the interior mass-timber elements Credits CLIENT: Emerige
are concealed, wrapped in protective layers of concrete, insulation, and ARCHITECT: Moreau Kusunoki — SIZE: 70,200 square feet
plasterboard. But, on the exterior, the prefabricated facade panels put Nicolas Moreau, Hiroko Kusunoki, COST: $21 million (construction)
wood on display, since they are clad in a layer of charred timber, a principals; Nastassia Nasser,
project manager, competition and COMPLETION DATE: June 2023
traditional Japanese technique the architects first proposed for the design development; Chiara Munari,
Guggenheim. For Moreau, this is a stable, fire-resistant finish whose Maxime Aupiais, Elise Niogret, SOURCES
darkness will hide modifications, while for Kusunoki it is part of a assistants, design development;
Seyfedine Bentili, project manager, WOOD-STEEL STRUCTURE:
philosophy of wabi sabi, a worldview based on the acceptance of tran- construction Gustave, Arborsphere, KLH, JPF
sience and imperfection, expressed here in the symphony of grays that Ducret, Binderholz, Pollmeier
CONSULTANTS: C&E (structure
make up the elevations: differently colored and textured concrete, and facade); Edeis (m/e/p); MOZ WOOD FACADES: Techniwood,
charcoal, and pre-aged larch. Paysage (landscape); ACOUSTB Ligne alpes

Frustrated by the compromises they faced in Bruneseau, the archi- (acoustics); Citae (sustainability); WINDOWS: MC France
Athlance (timber); BTP (code and DOORS: Prometalic, Legallais,
tects devised workarounds, including setting columns back from the security); Yann Kersalé + BOA Malerba
facade, to achieve an all-timber exposed frame for a competition in (lighting)
DOOR HARDWARE:
Montpellier. But it now seems unlikely that they will achieve their GENERAL CONTRACTOR: Moreau Kusunoki with Izé
dream in France. Construction of their Bruneseau building began just Bouygues

132 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

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 CEU OFFICE CONVERSIONS
The High Life
Can adapting empty commercial towers revive business districts and allay the housing shortage?
BY JAMES S. RUSSELL, FAIA EMERITUS
WITH HYBRID and remote work sched-
ules leaving millions of square feet of empty
office space, “private owners are suffering,”
says Eran Chen, a founder of the New York
architecture firm ODA. “They may lose
PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY BEDROCK
buildings to their banks; cities are losing real-
estate tax dollars,” he adds. “And nobody likes
an empty office district.”
Given the urgency of filling all the empty
space, converting offices to residential use is
seen as a twofer: making obsolete buildings
useful again and allaying a national shortage
of housing. Also, conversions can put units
online quicker than new construction. Down-
towns diversified by housing—and supplied
with ample cultural and recreational ameni-
ties—draw more people. They extend 9-to-5
commercial monocultures to 18-hour “live/
work/play destinations,” in real-estate short-
hand.
Some architects advocate office-to-residen-
tial conversions as a climate-responsible
solution, taking advantage of transit-rich
neighborhoods and conserving the substantial
embodied carbon of existing buildings, com-
pared to new construction. (Estimates vary
widely, but a building’s frame and its founda-
tions alone can account for 30 percent of a
building’s embodied carbon.) As SOM
Adaptive Reuse Practice leader Frank Mahan
puts it, “With a stagnant office market, a
housing shortage, and climate change, we
could address all three existential crises of our
time at once.”
Several European countries and cities have
regulations aimed at reducing emissions from
building materials. In London, for instance, a
requirement for building life cycle assess-
ments of carbon intensity is tilting the playing
135
 CEU OFFICE CONVERSIONS

rates—and uncertainty over where these are

headed—make projects riskier and developers
reluctant. “Everyone’s waiting for incentives,”
says Adam Yarinsky, principal at Architecture
Research Office (ARO), which can include
some combination of tax abatements, relaxed
building codes, and zoning bonuses. A 10-
year tax abatement and a mixed-use zoning
district have been in place in Philadelphia
since 1996. “It has led to the conversion of
180 buildings of all sizes to residential use,
including 9 million square feet of office
space,” explains Levy, of the Center City
District. After the 9/11 terror attacks, New
York incentivized dozens of conversions of
buildings in Lower Manhattan that had long
languished. The current mayor, Eric Adams,
hopes to bring such incentives to additional
parts of the city that have underused office
buildings, but so far these efforts have been
thwarted by the need for state legislation that
would enable them.

CONVERSION CANDIDATES
Some kinds of office structures are easier to
adapt than others. Since the late 1980s, many
THE BOOK TOWER (previous page) in Detroit has a generous number of windows, making ODA’s con- modest commercial buildings from the late
version of the 1927 office tower into apartments (above) and hotel rooms relatively straightforward. 19th and early 20th centuries have been
handsomely converted to residential use.
field toward retaining and adapting buildings such projects post-pandemic has not yet These loft-style structures were built to be
“because you have to compare the carbon materialized, even as large-scale remote work flexible, accommodating offices, wholesalers,
footprint of the existing building to what you persists. It turns out that the volatile financial and small industrial uses, and therefore often
would build new,” explains Russell Fortmeyer, and regulatory environment has made devel- come with high ceilings, regular (if column-
global sustainability leader for architecture opers skittish. Conversions that could allevi- studded) floor plans, and tall windows.
firm Woods Bagot. In the U.S., Fortmeyer ate the dire shortage of affordable housing in Slim early 20th-century towers, many
points to California’s recently instituted code the U.S. are even more daunting. These among the most famous buildings in their
limits for embodied carbon which apply to the factors not only affect the viability of projects cities, have also proved desirable for residen-
construction and renovation of commercial but also architectural approaches to them, as tial conversion, particularly at the higher end
buildings larger than 100,000 square feet. He well as technological tactics. of the market. Their shallow exterior wall-to-
maintains that the new regulations could Higher construction costs and interest core distance and high ceilings bathe their
make conversion the more affordable path,
since project teams opting to build new will

+
be competing for the limited supply of low-
carbon materials, such as mass timber or
green concrete, and thus paying a premium. _
Though opportunistic politicians have
harmfully vilified downtowns in older cities
as hotbeds of crime and violence, the appeal
of in-city living is largely undimmed, with
many metro areas luring back those who left
during the pandemic. Philadelphia has seen
most of its housing growth in recent years in
the downtown core and surrounding neigh-
borhoods, according to Paul Levy, president
+
and CEO of the Center City District, a busi-
_
RETAIN CARVE ADD

ness-improvement organization, and his city

is hardly alone.
Office building conversions are not new, of
course. However, a widely expected boom in 1633 BROADWAY — ADAPTATION DIAGRAMS

136 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

 BASE REACTION PLOT — EXISTING BASE REACTION PLOT — PROPOSED BASE REACTION PLOT — LATERAL STABILITY

1633 BROADWAY — GRAVITY LOADS & LATERAL-STIFFENING DIAGRAMS

interiors in daylight from windows that are
often appealingly oversize. The $400 million
transformation of the long-abandoned 1926
Book Tower in Detroit (Louis Kamper, origi-
nal architect) into a combination of hotel
rooms and rental apartments was “a simple
conversion,” says ODA’s Chen, since the floor
plates matched a residential-building depth,
IMAGES: COURTESY BEDROCK (OPPOSITE, TOP); © SOM (OPPOSITE, BOTTOM; TOP; BOTTOM, LEFT & RIGHT); © SOM/MIYSIS
(BOTTOM CENTER)
and it had an ample number of windows. In
addition to designing the apartment layouts,
his firm restored the exterior and extensively
renovated a spectacular domed and vaulted
art-glass lobby ceiling.
In New York, recent conversions of early
20th-century towers include such trophy
properties as Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth
Building (1912), and the 1932 headquarters of
Irving Trust, designed by Voorhees, Gmelin
and Walker, with its elegantly slender silhou-
ette and its restrained fluted-limestone sur-
face. Frank Woolworth had dubbed his 792-
foot tower, for a time the tallest building in
the world, “the Cathedral of Commerce,” but
in 2018, the late Thierry W. Despont, with

1633 BROADWAY — FRAMING DIAGRAM

FOR AN EARLY 1970s office building (above, left) in New York’s Times Square, SOM has proposed removing building volume (opposite, bottom) and
stacking it to create a stepped tower (above, middle). Strategically stiffening the frame (diagrams top and right, above) would limit drift.

137
 CEU OFFICE CONVERSIONS
SLCE Architects, converted its top 26 floors
into 33 luxury apartments. The design team
also fit a six-level penthouse within the build-
ing’s copper-clad pyramid-shaped roof. The
lower 29 stories remain in use as offices.
The recently completed luxury conversion
of Irving Trust, now called One Wall Street,
was designed by an extensive team that in-
cluded SLCE, MdeAS Architects, Ashe
Leandro, and Deborah Berke Partners (now
TenBerke) for Macklowe Properties.
According to MdeAS principal, Dan Shan-
non, One Wall Street’s proportion of wall
surface to oversize windows eased the task
of laying out the apartments. (High-
performance replacement windows were
curved to match the fluting as the originals
did.) Freestanding, it opens to views on all
sides. “The quality of the architecture is part
of the attraction, for people who don’t want
cookie-cutter design,” he says.
As with Irving Trust, the famous neo-
138 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
Gothic architecture of Chicago’s Tribune
Tower (John Mead Howells and Raymond
Hood)—with sweeping views from its upper
floors and relatively shallow floor plates
(ranging from 13,000 on lower levels to 1,800
square feet near the top)—made the 1925
skyscraper well suited to luxury-apartment
layouts. Architects SCB transformed the
tower into 162 condominiums of 50 unique
layouts. Since the building’s population is
lower in its residential incarnation, the archi-
tects shaped a more compact core, removing
six of nine elevator shafts and replacing some
with a relocated exit stair.
Conversion of the Tribune Tower’s base—
a 65,000-square-foot assemblage of three
buildings, erected between 1920 and 1950, in
heights ranging from four to eight stories—
required a different approach. There, SCB
carved an 80-foot-wide landscaped courtyard
out of the structures, stiffening steel column-
and-beam connections to make up for the loss
AT CHICAGO’S Tribune Tower (left), SCB cut
a courtyard (above and opposite, top) from
the base to create floor plates suitable for
apartment layouts (opposite, bottom).
of lateral support. The courtyard left behind
two wings on either side, narrow enough to
host desirable residential layouts. The founda-
tion’s load-bearing capacity allowed the addi-
tion of four floors on one of the wings, creat-
IMAGES: © DAVE BURKE (LEFT); DARRIS LEE HARRIS (ABOVE); SCB (OPPOSITE)
ing what SCB associate principal Steve Hub-
bard refers to as “very valuable” units.
DEEP-FLOOR DILEMMA
Large office structures with deep floor plates
are particularly challenging to convert, be-
cause so much of their floor space is too far
from windows to be desirable (or, in many
jurisdictions, legal). These buildings, mainly
from the 1950s through the 1980s, may have
deteriorated fixed-glass curtain walls, unlike
older towers that came with operable win-
dows. If their potential can be unlocked, they
can deliver a great number of units and take
some of the least desirable buildings out of
the office inventory.
Such conversions can entail removing
EXISTING CARVING OUT THE COURTYARD COURTYARD & 4-STORY ADDITION

TRIBUNE TOWER — COURTYARD DIAGRAMS

building volume to provide more perimeter institutional, and cultural uses. Like other walls will probably warrant replacement with
for capturing daylight, breezes, and views, as competing projects, its ideas are speculative, thermally efficient envelopes that include
was done at the Tribune Tower’s base. In a but they broaden the spectrum of building- operable windows, a requirement for living
speculative project in this vein, ARO pro- reuse possibilities. spaces and bedrooms in many jurisdictions.
posed removing square footage from the Especially when converting buildings But such retrofits, if the new exterior walls
bulky base of a 21-story wedding-cake set- constructed since the 1950s, the exterior walls are highly insulated, can also allow mechani-
back tower completed in 1952 in Manhattan represent a particularly difficult problem. cal systems to be considerably downsized,
by Sylvan Bien. ARO placed the removed With expanses of fixed tinted glass and sub- slashing energy costs, points out ARO’s
square footage atop higher floors, shaping standard energy performance, their curtain Yarinsky.
new setbacks and terraces to add value to the
apartments. Such radical reshaping is not as
daunting as it sounds, says Yarinsky. “We
proposed to add new loads where we assumed
the load capacity already existed, in this way
minimizing burdens on the foundations and
structure.”
A similarly theoretical scheme was created
by SOM for an ideas competition sponsored
by the trade organizations the Steel Institute
of New York and the Ornamental Metal
Institute of New York. The brief called for the
conversion of 1633 Broadway, a 48-story,
2.5 million-square-foot tower with deep floor
plates designed by Emery Roth & Sons in
Manhattan’s Times Square. “The sponsors
selected about the toughest building for con-
version they could find,” says Mahan. But its
great size “also justifies significant massing
and structural modifications.” The firm’s
entry opened up the monolithic rectangular
slab of the 1971 tower by cutting six court-
yards in, strategically reinforcing the struc-
tural frame, and stacking the removed square
footage in a stepped volume atop the building.
The scheme diversified the incomes of resi-
dents by dividing the building vertically into
adjoining condo, affordable housing, and 0 30 FT.
TRIBUNE TOWER - LEVEL 7 PLAN
co-living towers atop a base of commercial, 10 M.

139
 CEU OFFICE CONVERSIONS
To enable a greater number of conversions,
cities may need to alter building codes and
zoning regulations. New York is looking at
reducing the size of required operable bed-
room windows, as well as a currently man-
dated clear area around them, says Yarinsky,
because many candidates for adaptation are
unable to comply. Developers maintain that
making such openings optional would render
conversions more affordable. There’s push-
back, however, from those who argue that
rooms dependent on mechanical ventilation
become uninhabitable in the event of power
failures, and that the wellness benefits of
light, air, and views of greenery should trump
the cost consideration. “Must we return our
buildings to Dickensian horror?” asks Ian
Lomas, a principal at the Los Angeles office
of Woods Bagot.
Other policies under consideration in New
York, aimed at spurring more conversions of
office buildings into housing—especially
affordable housing—include changes that
would allow residential development in parts
of the city currently zoned only for office space
and manufacturing, and the launch of an
140 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
ALONG WITH a 1960s annex, the 1932 tower, built as the headquarters of Irving Trust (left), is now
known as One Wall Street and houses 566 condominiums (above).
Office Conversion Accelerator program to
help owners expedite projects. Meanwhile, in
San Francisco, Mayor London Breed’s admin-
istration has issued a Request for Interest,
asking downtown building owners and devel-
opers for conversion ideas for their underuti-
lized building stock. The hope is to identify
projects where the city could speed up or
enhance such projects through zoning or regu-
latory changes. Similarly, in Chicago, the
LaSalle Reimagined initiative, whose goal is
to revive what was once considered Chicago’s
Wall Street, includes incentives to hasten the
transformation of office towers into residential
buildings. Five developers and five properties
(all but one built before World War II) were
selected as finalists earlier this year. According
to the city, the conversion projects represent
nearly $1 billion in investment and will create
1,600 units, 600 of them affordable.
The Chicago program also has a retail
component that would support street-level
businesses serving the LaSalle corridor’s
new residents while also addressing the post-
Covid loss of foot traffic. Qualifying busi-
nesses can receive grants for such projects as
storefront upgrades, interior renovations, and
design fees.
Of course, converting underutilized
commercial properties not only has the poten-
tial to reinvigorate once-lively downtowns
and satisfy a huge need for housing, but, as
Lomas, the Woods Bagot principal (who also
worked in London), points out, there’s an
importance to history. “In Europe, there’s
always an assumption that what’s gone before
has value,” he says. “There is an emotional
connection. You add the layering you need
to that.” n
CONTINUING EDUCATION
To earn one AIA learning unit (LU), including one hour
of health, safety, and welfare (HSW) credit, read “The
High Life,” review the supplemental material found at
PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY MACKLOWE PROPERTIES: EVOLUTION VR (LEFT), EVEN JOSEPH (RIGHT)
architecturalrecord.com, and complete the quiz at
continuingeducation.bnpmedia.com. Upon passing the
test, you will receive a certificate of completion, and
your credit will be automatically reported to the AIA.
Additional information regarding credit-reporting and
continuing-education requirements can be found at
continuingeducation.bnpmedia.com.
Learning Objectives
1 Discuss the economic, environmental, and social
arguments for converting vacant office buildings
into housing.
2 Describe different office-building typologies and
discuss the conversion challenges they pose.
3 Discuss structural retrofit measures that may be
required to convert an office building into housing.
4 Outline code, zoning, and other regulatory
changes that could hasten transformation of
vacant office towers into housing.
AIA/CES Course #K2310A
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 ACADEMY
OF DIGITAL LEARNING
Focus On: Business and Technology of Architecture

Become an expert on Business and Technology of

Architecture through Architectural Record’s Academy of
Digital Learning.

Upon successful completion of the Business and

Technology of Architecture Academy, you will earn
2 AIA LU/HSW + 6 AIA LU/Elective + 0.8 ICC CEU
+ 8 IIBEC CEH + 3 GBCI CE Hours + 2 IDCEC CEU and
a digital badge that demonstrates your mastery and
achievement.

Earn your digital badge and showcase your expertise!

CREDITS: 2 AIA LU/HSW + 6 AIA LU/Elective + 0.8 ICC CEU + 8 IIBEC CEH + 3 GBCI CE Hours + 2 IDCEC CEU

From a new generation of digital tools to harnessing the power of AI to advance the
built environment, the architectural field is facing a gravitational shift in the way we
approach the business of design and construction. Industry professionals are having
to navigate monumental challenges such as labor shortages, the COVID-19 pandemic,
supply chain issues, economic instability, privacy concerns, and the climate crisis. At
the same time, design professionals have never had so many advanced tools at their
disposal, whether cloud-based platforms that facilitate intensive communication and
collaboration or sophisticated virtual modeling capabilities and new software for
reducing waste and carbon emissions on their projects.

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Brought to you by
CONTINUING EDUCATION
In this section, you will find four compelling courses highlighting creative solutions for tomorrow’s buildings brought to you by industry leaders.

CONTINUING EDUCATION
Read a course, and then visit our online Continuing Education Center at ce.architecturalrecord.com to take the quiz free of charge to earn credits.

Photo courtesy of © Mark Herboth; CRL Photo courtesy of Engberg Anderson Architects

p144 p154

What Are the Current Trends in Interior Design? Growing Good Homes
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143

CONTINUING EDUCATION
The current trends in commercial interior
design are varied, reflecting more
sophistication in design and greater
functionality in materials and products.
Photo courtesy of ©Mark Herboth; CRL
What Are the Current
Trends in Interior Design?
Building owners and users want both
good design and functionality
Sponsored by ASI Group, CRL, Inpro and Tamlyn
By Peter J. Arsenault, FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP
S
ocial and economic conditions
often change. Interior design often
evolves based on those changes as
a response to emerging needs or desires.
As such, designers, owners, consultants,
and many others need to be aware of the
changes and formulate appropriate design
approaches. Product manufacturers are
particularly keen on keeping up with such
changes so they can stay ahead of the curve
and be positioned to provide the materials,
colors, textures, patterns, or other attributes
that are being sought for construction and
renovation projects. In this course, we will
look at some of the current situations that
144 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
EDUCATIONAL-ADVERTISEMENT
are driving trends in interior design. We
will also look at some of the responses and
offerings from manufacturers that design
professionals and others need to be aware
of in order to create relevant, current, and
successful building interiors.
DESIGN TRENDS
Building interiors are becoming more so-
phisticated overall, balancing aesthetics with
sustainability, visual impacts with health
and wellness, and contemporary styles with
solidity. In the following sections, we take a
look at how some of these design aspects play
out in commercial buildings of all types.
CONTINUING EDUCATION
1 AIA LU/HSW 0.1 ICC CEU
1 IDCEC CEU/HSW
Learning Objectives
After reading this article, you should
be able to:
1. Explain the ways that different interior
products can help improve interior
designs that not only elevate the
human experience but also provide
for health and safety.
2. Identify and recognize the significance
of color, texture, and sustainable
design as part of an interior design
strategy to promote health and
wellness in buildings.
3. Assess some products and materials
that can enhance interiors while
contributing to the welfare of building
occupants and users.
4. Determine ways to incorporate
advanced principles of commercial
restroom design for higher appeal,
safer use, and improved cleanliness.
To receive AIA credit, you are required to
read the entire article and pass the quiz.
Visit ce.architecturalrecord.com for the
complete text and to take the quiz for free.
AIA COURSE #K2310K
CORPORATE WORKPLACE?
NO, IT’S YOUR
LOCKER ROOM.
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 WHAT ARE THE CURRENT TRENDS IN INTERIOR DESIGN?
Photos courtesy of Tamlyn
CONTINUING EDUCATION
Aluminum trim can be fabricated in custom shapes, profiles, and colors to suit the needs of a
particular project including a variety of recessed base trims with a reveal as shown here.
INTERIOR WALL DELINEATION
A general trend in modern interior design
includes the use of minimalist lines and
the intentional absence of traditional wood
moldings for doors, windows, ceilings, and
base conditions. With the modernization of
such projects, comes the need for sleek and
modern detailing of interior wall and ceiling
surfaces and their junctions. Recessed reveals,
for example, are often used to separate
adjoining wall panels or to isolate those wall
sections from the floor or ceiling.
The design issue becomes how to create
the desired look in a consistent, predictable
manner that is readily buildable and budget-
friendly. The answer lies in the use of extruded
aluminum interior trim pieces fabricated in
stock or custom profiles. Such aluminum trim
products have been used on building exteriors
to hold and surround exterior cladding panels
for quite some time. This same basic technique
is available for use on interior surfaces and has
worked quite well in all types of buildings.
Aluminum Trim Attributes
Aluminum interior trim is available in a
variety of traditional, contemporary, and
modern looks to create subdued, elegant looks
or emphatic three-dimensional appearances.
The profiles of aluminum trim are varied
but seamless across its full length. Complex
shapes can be realized in one-piece extruded
aluminum sections without having to employ
mechanical joining methods. The resultant
profile typically is stronger than a comparable
assemblage and less likely to loosen over time.
A common misconception is that
aluminum interior trim profiles can only be
utilized in plain drywall applications. The
truth is, however, that these profiles can
accommodate any type of wall material the
designer may be implementing into a design.
Whether it's glass, tile, veneered panels, or
wallpapered panels, these products can pair
up with all of them, and others besides. This
is true whether the project is a hospitality,
146 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
residential, education, healthcare, or retail
new building or renovation.
There is also the ability to create custom
profile details specific to a particular
project or group of projects where desired.
Manufacturers can offer design assistance
and continuing education to help designers
understand the capabilities and possibilities
of such custom trim work for any type of wall
material. Though most have a catalog offering
diverse standard options, they also under-
stand that sometimes the need for a small
change to an existing profile or an idea “from
scratch” would make all the difference for a
project. It is possible that they can support
high volumes or short lead times and still
work within project budget constraints.
Of course, the color and finish of the
trim is an important design consideration.
Fortunately, there are many different finish
options available. Extruded aluminum trim
can be specified in anodized aluminum in
standard colors such as clear, champagne,
bronze, and black. Factory prefinished trim
can include liquid paint (i.e., acrylics, alkyds,
polyesters, and others) or powder coatings.
At least one manufacturer can provide
custom pattern matching on the aluminum
to include logos, match wood panels, match
stone walls, or even create a wood grain look.
Alternatively, it can be specified simply with
a paint primer ready to receive final finish
coats in the field of virtually any color. With
this variety of choices, the trim can appear
to blend in with the adjacent wall panels
or it can be used to highlight all or some of
the visual lines it creates. This flexibility in
using familiar and long-lasting finish options
means that both the design and the perfor-
mance level can be controlled.
Aluminum Trim for
Design and Durability
Places that need to achieve good interior
looks with a lot of durability, such as retail,
hospitality, educational, or other settings,
EDUCATIONAL-ADVERTISEMENT
quickly see the benefit of using extruded
aluminum trim in conjunction with pre-
finished wall panels or site finished gypsum
board. For example, many fast-food restau-
rants often go through cycles of renovat-
ing and updating their locations to remain
appealing to customers and competitive in
the marketplace. The current trend among
many of them, such as McDonald’s, Dunkin’
Donuts, Burger King, and others, is to move
to a sleeker and more modern motif replac-
ing some prior looks that are more visually
cluttered and outdated in appearance. In the
process, many are using pre-finished wall
panels with a selected wood grain or color
as their primary wall surface. Then they
incorporate aluminum trim in coordinated
finishes to provide durable corner and wall
base conditions. They may also use alumi-
num trim pieces to create intentional reveals
in the walls between the panels or at interior
corners. Along the ceiling line, some incor-
porate an extruded aluminum trim piece
that acts as a ceiling molding to complete the
overall look and design intent.
Other settings may similarly require
durability but may have a different aesthetic
in mind. In these cases, extruded aluminum
trim may be used with gypsum board to
create defining lines along a wall surface or at
the intersection of wall elements. Reveals are
particularly popular in that regard and can
be provided in a thin, minimalistic manner
to simply reinforce vertical or horizontal
lines, or to create an artistic accent on a wall.
For a bolder, more three-dimensional profile,
two-piece assemblies are available that allow
a squared, rounded, or oblong shape to be
inserted into a reveal that protrudes past the
wall surface and creates a different shadow
line and overall look.
INTERIOR GLASS PARTITIONS
In many cases, interior designs are en-
hanced by an alternative to opaque interior
walls, specifically the use of interior glass
partitions to create a sense of openness and
transparency. This works quite well to con-
nect adjacent spaces or for the free passage
and sharing of daylight and views between
spaces. The benefits of daylighting have been
well-documented in many different studies.
In workplaces, it has been shown to improve
productivity and morale by having a connec-
tion to the exterior compared to working in a
windowless enclosure. In healthcare settings,
it has been shown to improve recovery times
and aid in healing. When daylight can be
used to replace electric lighting, then energy
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 WHAT ARE THE CURRENT TRENDS IN INTERIOR DESIGN?
savings can also be realized. Hence, interior
glass partitions are a design tool that can be
CONTINUING EDUCATION
used to foster all of these benefits.
Architects and designers considering the
use of interior glass partitions in commercial
buildings can select from three basic types,
discussed as follows:
• Framed Partitions: The common means
to support a glass partition is to use an
aluminum framing system. Some can
be thick and noticeable and make their
own design statement. Others can use a
low-profile frame and vertical extrusions,
which set them apart from traditional
framed partition systems by providing
greater visibility and daylight diffusion.
Such systems can be designed with an
all-vertical panel appearance with a top
and bottom rail. Alternatively, they can
incorporate a free-positioning grid system
to create both horizontal and vertical
framing configurations to be visually
consistent with the building design. The
nature of this framing system, when
attached to the adjacent walls, floor, and
ceiling, allows for greater acoustic privacy
and strength, particularly if one-inch
insulating glass panels are used. This may
be particularly important in government
buildings, law firms, executive offices,
human resource departments, conference
rooms, and similar situations.
Framed partitions can be specified
with low-profile framing (e.g., 1-7/8”) to
minimize the appearance of the frame.
The framing itself can be finished in a
choice of standard or special-order colors
such as matte black, satin anodized,
brushed nickel, or powder coat colors.
The glazing can be selected from standard
choices of monolithic, insulating, or
laminated glass and installed readily
using a dry-glazed system. Doors can be
incorporated that are either made from
glass or wood and installed in a pivot
style. Doors can be sized up to 10 feet in
height and 36 inches wide.
• Frameless Design: Many contemporary
office interiors can benefit from all glass
partitions with minimalist designs.
Concealed glass channels with no vertical
extrusions can produce expansive glass
spans that are conducive to dynamic
workspaces and be customized to the
specific needs of a project. Such systems
are ideal for conference rooms, office
fronts, study rooms, waiting rooms, and
148 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
Interior glass partitions are available in systems that are framed, frameless, or free-standing
to suit the needs of a particular interior design.
lobbies. Frameless design offers greater
transparency and facilitates daylight-
ing being spread throughout building
interiors. Frameless glass partitions can
be used up to 12 feet in height using 3/8",
1/2", 5/8", or 3/4" thick tempered glass.
The perimeter framing is minimized and
available in a variety of finishes to blend
in with the surroundings including matte
black, bronze anodized, satin anodized,
polished brass, polished stainless, brushed
stainless, and black powder coat.
Depending on the type of frameless
system selected, doors can be provided in
a variety of ways. Standard-height doors
(up to 9 feet tall) can be pivoting or slid-
ing using a variety of door handles and
hardware. Some systems are designed to
accommodate full-height doors (up to 10
feet tall) using full-length door rails for a
cleaner, more contemporary look and less
interruption of views.
• Freestanding Partitions: In some cases,
the space where a glass partition is desired
has a high ceiling or no adjacent walls to
attach to. In that case, configurations are
possible using a combination of stainless-
steel end posts, center posts, and corner
posts in standard and custom sizes. They
are commonly available in 5-foot, 6-foot,
and 7-foot post heights. The posts are
available in shaped depths and narrow
widths with as little as ¾” face trim. This
provides an expansive all-glass look with
no top rail required. The glass can be as
tall as 8 feet and doors can be installed
that are sliding or swing style. Such
systems are ideal for commercial interiors
with high or exposed ceilings or large
open areas such as transportation hubs,
education, sports stadiums, healthcare,
and government buildings.
EDUCATIONAL-ADVERTISEMENT
Photo courtesy of © Lawrence Anderson; CRL
Overall, the use of interior glass partitions
is an effective and appealing option for creat-
ing dynamic and vibrant spaces that allow for
better daylighting and visual connectivity.
DURABLE INTERIOR DESIGN
Interior designs that are valued for their
quality and visual appearance need to be
durable to withstand the rigors of everyday
use. It has been said that “exteriors face
the elements; interiors face the occupants."
While architects are familiar with designing
exteriors to withstand the weather and other
aspects of “the elements”, the design of inte-
riors similarly needs to consider the effects
of building occupants using, and sometimes
abusing, that interior. That means designing
spaces with materials that are appropriate to
their level of use and anticipated conditions.
Might some of those materials cost a bit
more than others? Of course, they will, but
investing in quality products at the outset of
a new or renovated building project will most
likely reduce maintenance and operational
costs later. This not only saves money for the
building owner or operator, but it also helps
to curb carbon emissions by not requiring
the removal and replacement of materials
and systems later on.
The good news about durable interiors
is that style and aesthetics don’t need to be
sacrificed to achieve good performance.
That has led to the trend of selecting from
materials and systems that achieve both good
visual appeal and long-term durability. This
is manifest in a number of ways, with two
examples discussed as follows:
• Wall Protection: Protection of walls in
buildings is not limited just to foot traf-
fic and people, but also needs to address
protection from moving equipment,
cleaning equipment, deliveries, and
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 WHAT ARE THE CURRENT TRENDS IN INTERIOR DESIGN?
Photos courtesy of Inpro
CONTINUING EDUCATION
The use of protective wall coverings can add to the short-term and long-term appeal of a space.
things needed for special events. One ap-
proach is referred to as targeted wall pro-
tection where a specific set of products is
used that are designed to absorb impact
and protect the underlying portion. By
targeting the most vulnerable areas,
protection can be added by using corner
guard or wall guard products specifi-
cally where they are needed. Taking the
concept of wall protection further, sheets
of rigid wall covering have been used
where large surfaces need to be made
more durable and easier to clean. Most
of these products offered in the U.S. are
Class A fire-rated with many choices of
product types, finishes, and colors to
enhance, rather than detract from, an in-
terior design scheme. For wall areas that
need some protection but desire a softer
look, resilient, textured wall covering is
available. A thicker wall covering with
special top coatings makes for a very du-
rable product that is quite cleanable and
resilient against stains, markings, and
graffiti. From a design standpoint, there
are textured wall coverings available in
a variety of colors and patterns that can
be combined with other wall protection
products from a manufacturer for a total
coordinated look.
• Artwork and Imagery: There is a popular
trend to incorporate more imagery and
artwork into building interiors. However,
the challenge becomes how to do that
without it getting deteriorated or dam-
aged while it’s on the walls. Perhaps the
best solution is to have high-resolution
imagery printed on the back side of a
transparent, but durable polyethylene
terephthalate glycol (PETG) plastic panel.
The panel acts as a protective coating for
the artwork/ imagery and the wall behind
150 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
it as well. It allows for large, oversized
images that can be selected by a designer
or owner to cover a portion of a wall or
an entire surface. Images can include
stock or original artwork, photographs,
logos, mascot images, or any other type of
graphic feature.
A growing interior design trend that has
been directly related to human health and
welfare is the use of biophilia in buildings.
Defined literally as a love of living things or
a love of nature, biophilic design is a concept
focused on increasing occupant connectiv-
ity to the natural environment in creative
ways. When direct links to the outside
aren’t practical or feasible, then the use of
large-scale graphics and imagery that portray
scenes from nature can be used.
Such large-scale, biophilic imagery can
be incorporated into an overall interior
design strategy in a number of different
ways. The first is to use digitally printed art
or imagery back printed on clear protective
sheets. This technique allows nature scenes
to be turned into whole-wall imagery or
uses large-scale graphics to create inspiring
biophilic designs. Along with truly endless
design capabilities, this approach also
provides high-impact durability to wall
surfaces. Since the graphic is back printed
on the protective sheet, there is no worry
about the image being scratched over time.
That means high-resolution photographs,
artwork, or any other biophilic graphic can
be printed and incorporated onto as large a
wall space as a design may call for.
All of these materials and others that are
used as part of a building interior can be
balanced between their visual and physical
design aspects and their long-term ability to
retain those attributes.
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WASHROOM DESIGN
Every commercial, institutional, and indus-
trial building needs one or (usually) more
washrooms. Architects and interior design-
ers recognize that the facade of a building,
the landscape, the entryway, the lobby, etc.,
are noticed once or twice a day by occupants
of the building. However, the most used or
frequented part of a building besides the pri-
mary activity areas (work areas, classrooms,
etc.) is the washroom. Although they are
often seen as non-revenue generating parts of
a building, washrooms can make a consider-
able difference in how people perceive the
building both as a pleasant place to be (or
not) and for the value of rent. Hence, they
should receive as much, if not more design at-
tention as other areas of the building.
Recognizing the significance that
restrooms can garner in all building types,
there are several key interior design trends
and concepts to consider.
• Design for Appearance: The overall
design concept of a building often carries
through to the washrooms. Toilet parti-
tions make one of the biggest visual and
material impacts and come in several
material options such as powder-coated
steel, stainless steel, solid plastic, plastic
laminate, and phenolic. Each has its
strengths and weaknesses in terms of
design options as well as cleanliness
and durability for different situations.
Similarly, washroom accessories come
with material and appearance choices.
Type 304 stainless steel is the standard
for the washroom industry but that is not
always consistent with an overall design
intent. At least one manufacturer has
introduced a line of matte black finished
accessories which often blend in better
with a particular design scheme.
• Design for Privacy: There is a height-
ened awareness of the need for privacy
in restrooms. It is important to note that
privacy has always been important; it is
just that more people seem to be giving
it the appropriate attention it deserves.
For many people, there is simply a
need to feel safe which can cause public
restrooms to bring out deep-rooted
fears. While some people may be mildly
bothered by the thought of using a public
washroom, others are paralyzed by the
prospect—to the point that they cannot
use the washroom while it is occupied by
others. Hence, privacy is not an optional
attribute for many.
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 WHAT ARE THE CURRENT TRENDS IN INTERIOR DESIGN?
Fortunately, privacy can be ensured with
good design and proper installation of extra
CONTINUING EDUCATION
tall privacy partitions. Attention needs to
be given to uneven floors or changes in wall
dimensions during construction which can
cause gaps between the doors and pilasters
and can even cause locking mechanisms to
get compromised if the stalls are installed
askew. If there is concern about that
happening, there are several options to con-
sider. For example, one manufacturer makes
metal partitions that have an integrated
privacy system built-in as their standard
offering so there is no retrofitting of privacy
strips needed. Another good option would
be to specify European-style partitions that
are defined by extra height on both doors
and panels, adjustable pedestals to compen-
sate for uneven floors, superior hardware,
and routed edges at sightlines between
doors and pilasters that eliminate visibility
into the stalls.
• Design for Accessibility: Ensuring
accessibility for people with every type
of physical ability is fundamental and
dictated by building codes and ADA
civil rights legislation. Therefore, it is
important to work with manufacturers
of restroom equipment that fully address
issues like circulation path, maneuver-
ability, clear floor space, reach ranges,
and even door swings among others. If
manufacturers of washroom accessories
and partitions don’t have the experience
to meet these unique needs, specifying
products that adhere to the requirements
can be a challenge.
Altogether, washrooms should be treated
as any other space that needs to be designed
with selections made by manufacturers that
allow for the needed options and choices.
FUNCTIONALITY TRENDS
While design and appearance is always
important, so is the functionality of any
interior space. User concerns as well as needs
for maintenance and facility management
play a large role in the satisfaction of all of
the people who use building interiors. The
following sections address some of the corre-
sponding functionality aspects of the design
elements discussed.
152 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
Attention to the design of washrooms should include careful selection of visual elements
such as taller toilet partitions and accessories available in colors including matte black.
Using Aluminum
Interior Trim Effectively
Since aluminum is highly durable, recy-
clable, lightweight, and non-combustible, it
is a popular and logical choice for interior
trim. Extruded aluminum trim avoids and
overcomes some of the issues associated with
other materials. Wood trim, for example,
is easily prone to damage, may not meet
fire-resistance requirements in some cases,
and is organic, meaning it can promote mold
and mildew growth if it gets wet. Painted
steel can chip and rust while plastic interior
trim is not known for its long-term durabil-
ity. Aluminum interior trim is also easier
to clean than other materials, usually with
a low-profile edge that makes the junction
with wall panels easier to clean as well.
The inherent durability of extruded
aluminum has been proven in countless
projects for the protection of the edges of all
the materials it is combined with. Aluminum
extrusion is a highly versatile metal-forming
process that has been used for a wide array
of products in construction. Most extruded
shapes for architectural use are fabricated
from 6063 aluminum alloy, with magnesium
and silicon as the alloying elements. Type
6063-T5 Aluminum, commonly referred to
as the architectural alloy, has a very smooth
surface and is the best alloy suited for
anodizing applications. The T5 designation
indicates it has been artificially aged and
moderately heat-treated. Extruded alumi-
num products are readily available and are
designed to be used with standard products
such as 5/8-inch-½” thick panels.
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Photos courtesy of ASI Group
Extruded aluminum is also a very sus-
tainable material since it is usually made up
of a significant amount of recycled material.
Commonly, the aluminum used in build-
ings contains 75-100 percent postindustrial
and post-consumer content. That means
extruded aluminum trim can contribute to
LEED points for buildings seeking certifica-
tion or green building status. Specifically,
aluminum interior trim products can earn
or contribute to credits in categories MR 4.1
and MR 4.2. These credits require a mini-
mum percentage of the value of the building
materials to be recycled. Since there may be a
lot of linear feet of such aluminum trim, the
contribution can be significant.
When specifying aluminum trim, it
is important to coordinate the material
attributes with the profile shapes being used.
Specifically, profiles can include reveals that
are recessed by the depth of the wall panels
or moldings, bases, and aluminum millwork
pieces which may be recessed or protruded.
There are also corner pieces that can match
the style of other profiles, be a traditional
edge, or have an expressive rounded shape. In
some cases, a two-piece trim system can be
called for to help with harder-to-install situa-
tions or greater durability. Specialty pieces are
also available that address acoustical concerns
or fire resistance rating requirements.
Peter J. Arsenault, FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP
is a nationally known architect, and a prolific
author advancing better interiors by design. www.
pjaarch.com www.linkedin.com/in/pjaarch
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CONTINUING EDUCATION
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153

Timber Lofts in
Milwaukee. A direct
reflection of its historic,
yet trendsetting, locale,
Milwaukee’s first mass
timber building, Timber
Lofts, is an adaptive
CONTINUING EDUCATION
reuse project that
combines a 130-year-old
warehouse renovation
with new construction
on an adjacent parcel.16
Photo courtesy of Engberg Anderson Architects
Growing Good Homes
How wood can promote well-being in
the quest for affordability
Sponsored by Think Wood | By Erika Fredrickson
A
nationwide housing crisis has led
to an urgent need for more hous-
ing. In response, architects and the
building industry are looking for innovative
solutions to quickly build more affordable
multifamily structures, mixed-use develop-
ments, and single-family homes. Key to
addressing the housing crisis is a creative,
diverse design approach that supports the
health, safety, and well-being of those most
impacted by the crisis: low-income workers,
the houseless, people of color, the elderly,
and, increasingly, the middle-class. At the
same time, the construction industry faces
a grim reality—that the building industry
is a significant contributor to the emissions
of the greenhouse gases that impact climate
change. This course looks at how structure
systems like light-frame construction and
mass timber can help address the urgent
timeline and budget of the housing problem,
154 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3
EDUCATIONAL-ADVERTISEMENT
and how wood’s low-carbon benefits and
innovative, flexible applications can help to
mitigate climate change.
LIGHT-FRAME WOOD CONSTRUCTION
AND CREATIVE HOUSING SOLUTIONS
The current housing crisis in the United States
is a complex issue with no single solution. One
major factor in the crisis is a housing shortage.
The U.S. has a deficit of 3.8 million housing
units,1 according to a 2021 report by econo-
mists at Freddie Mac. The government-spon-
sored purchaser of mortgage-backed securities
claims the shortage is driven by a 40-year
collapse in the construction of homes smaller
than 1,400 square feet.2 Up for Growth, a
national policy network focused on housing
equity, released a 2022 report that came to
the same conclusion3 using data on the total
demand for housing and the total supply of
available, habitable units.
CONTINUING EDUCATION
1.5 AIA LU/HSW
Learning Objectives
After reading this article, you should
be able to:
1. Describe how light-frame and mass
timber construction can help meet
health and safety goals in affordable
housing.
2. List some ways wood’s design
elements can support occupant well-
being in transitional housing.
3. Discuss mass timber benefits for
multifamily housing and single-family
housing.
4. List the ways in which wood’s carbon
benefits help architects reach
sustainability goals, while also serving
the greater well-being of building
occupants.
To receive AIA credit, you are required to
read the entire article and pass the quiz.
Visit ce.architecturalrecord.com for the
complete text and to take the quiz for free.
AIA COURSE #K2308U
EDUCATIONAL-ADVERTISEMENT
As the demand for housing exceeds the
supply, the cost of housing increases, mak-
ing it harder for low- and moderate-income
households to afford a place to live. In areas
where the housing shortage is particularly
acute, affordable housing options may become
even scarcer, because landlords and property
owners can charge higher rents and sell their
properties for more money. This trend causes
a ripple effect in which affordable housing
becomes even more difficult to find and
the problem of houselessness and housing
insecurity becomes more widespread.
The U.S. Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD) sets the standard
of housing affordability at 30% of household
income,4 though that metric has come under
scrutiny5 for not addressing complexities
enough. Within the housing crisis issue, there
are two main issues when we discuss “af-
fordable” housing. First, there is “affordable
housing” which is a housing type specifically
designated for qualified low-income people.
Second, there is the broader issue of “afford-
ability,” which, in this case, has to do with
low housing stock and high prices making
housing less affordable to many people, in
general. In other words, one problem is that
the lack of housing is impacting those whose
household incomes are at or below 30%
of their area’s median income6 —and even
when they qualify for subsidized housing,
their ability to find a home is still limited
by supply. Another problem is that many
middle-income Americans who once paid
less than 30% of their income on housing
are now among those paying 30% or more7
because income has not caught up with rent
or mortgage costs. Currently, the median U.S.
household income is $67,521.8 In June 2022,
the median asking rent in the U.S. rose above
$2,000.9 That amount, according to the HUD
definition, is only “affordable” to households
earning at least $80,000 per year.
Besides having a major impact on low-
and middle-income Americans, the rise
of housing costs and low supply of units is
disproportionately affecting communities
of color.10 Persistent racial disparities in
economic stability11 and wealth position
people of color at a disadvantage.
And because they are more likely to expe-
rience discrimination in the rental market,
Think Wood provides commercial, multifamily and single-family home design and build resources to architects, developers,
and contractors, including education, research, design tools, and innovative project profiles. www.thinkwood.com.
including being charged higher rents or
being denied access to housing altogether, a
housing crisis only perpetuates the dispari-
ties. The rising housing costs also contribute
to gentrification, which impacts low-income
neighborhoods, leading to the displacement
of long-time residents, including people of
color. Gentrification often leads to the loss
of cultural and social ties that communities
of color have built over generations.
One reason for the shortage can be attrib-
uted to the 2007 housing crash, which hit the
construction industry hard, putting small
home builders out of business and rattling
the survivors. The industry has only recently
begun to recover in a way that reflects a
pre-bubble pace of construction. According
to Harvard University’s 2022 edition of
its annual State of the Nation’s Housing
report, a decade of underbuilding has
created a backlog for housing so large that it
could take a decade or more of record-level
homebuilding to increase affordability.
One challenge is that a lot of new
construction is being priced at the upper
end of the market, not at the middle or
lower end of the market where it is needed
most. Another problem is that some once-
affordable housing is aging out of subsidy
programs, including some that was built
with U.S. Department of Agriculture grants
in the 1960s, which is sometimes the only
affordable housing option remaining in
more rural areas. And in most cases, it’s the
elderly, people of color, and people on the
edge of houselessness that will suffer the
impacts most.
Meanwhile, strong demand and low
supply have increased housing prices. In
March 2022, home price appreciation was at
20.6%.12 In addition, those who can afford
to buy have sometimes been bidding 30%
above the asking price.13 The Pew Research
Institute reports that those skyrocketing
costs have outpaced income for both low-
and moderate-income people.14 For low-
income people, even when properties accept
tenant-based rental assistance, the housing
itself may not be affordable in the current
market. For moderate-income people with
student debt or new millennial parents who
formed families over the pandemic, the
housing deficit and income-housing cost
GROWING GOOD HOMES
gap are causing strain. The Institute’s 2021
survey reported that 70% of Americans
CONTINUING EDUCATION
believe young adults today have a harder
time buying a home than their parents did.15
The lack of affordable housing supply and
the income-housing gap being experienced
by middle-income households have created
an urgent need for housing that is affordable
to a broad range of people.
As organizations and governments
seek new policies to address the issue of
housing affordability, the architecture,
engineering, and construction industry
must consider designs and materials that
can help offer solutions. Those solutions
must result in diverse housing options that
support the broad range of people affected
by housing affordability issues. Adaptive
reuse, multifamily and multi-use projects,
and sustainable designs can all contribute
to closing the housing shortage gap and
providing affordable space. In addition,
technologies such as modular construction
can help both reduce costs and timelines,
so that projects go up faster, while still sup-
porting sustainability goals and the health,
safety, and well-being of occupants.
In this course, we will focus on light-
frame wood and mass timber construction
as one piece of the puzzle in addressing the
housing crisis.
Light-Frame Wood and
Mass Timber Construction
Light-frame wood construction is a popu-
lar building method that uses dimensional
lumber, typically made from softwoods
like pine, spruce, and fir, to create the
structural frame of a building. Wood is an
abundant resource in North America, and
because tradespeople are familiar with the
materials and methods of wood construc-
tion, labor for light-frame construction
projects can be cost-effective.
Erika Fredrickson is a writer/editor focusing on
technology, environment, and history. She frequently
contributes to continuing education courses and
publications through Confluence Communications.
http://www.confluencec.com
155
 EDUCATIONAL-ADVERTISEMENT
CONTINUING EDUCATION

Photo courtesy of Forms+Surfaces.

The requirements of site security and safety increasingly

govern the design of today’s most visible commercial
and public spaces. New advancements in security bollard
manufacturing allow for creation of a secure perimeter
while preserving the desired design aesthetic.

Designed to Protect CONTINUING EDUCATION

1 AIA LU/HSW 1 PDH

Selecting security bollard solutions
0.1 ICC CEU
that are engineered to protect as
1 IDCEC CEU/HSW
intended and look good while doing it
Learning Objectives
Sponsored by Forms+Surfaces | By Amanda C Voss, MPP After reading this article, you should
be able to:
1. Assess project security needs to
appropriately specify bollards as

S
ite security is a major concern in
today’s unpredictable world. Public
and private buildings, government
facilities, campuses, and public parks
are all susceptible to accidental as well as
deliberate vehicle infringement. Design
professionals, city planners, facilities man-
agers, and engineers must now be increas-
ingly sensitive to the safety and security
requirements of public and private spaces,
and balancing these concerns with a site’s
aesthetic criteria.
Barriers or devices used to prevent vehicle
ingress are referred to as vehicle security bar-
riers. Bollards are one of the most commonly
used vehicle security barriers. A bollard
refers to a constructed post used to demar-
cate an architectural or protective perimeter.
Bollards can be specified with almost any
material, with the most common manu-
facture being from metal, stone, cement, or
plastic. Traditionally, bollard material and
style have been defined by their function.
security barriers.
2. Describe current testing and standards
used to certify bollard performance
in the field, which allows product
specification with confidence.
3. Examine bollard foundation
engineering and the impact of its
design on the effective performance of
the bollard as a barrier system.
4. Explore modern design innovations
for security bollards that allow high
durability in combination with lighting
performance and exceptional aesthetics.

SPECIFYING SAFE SOLUTIONS To receive AIA credit, you are required to

FOR AN UNPREDICTABLE WORLD
There are many ways in which to create
safeguards for structures and people while
maintaining a standoff distance for vehicles.
Amanda Voss, MPP, is an author, editor, and
policy analyst. Writing for multiple publications,
she has also served as the managing editor for
Energy Design Update.
read the entire article and pass the quiz.
Visit ce.architecturalrecord.com for the
complete text and to take the quiz for free.
AIA COURSE #K2210P

Forms+Surfaces designs and manufactures architectural products used in public spaces around the world—indoors,
outdoors, and everywhere in between. Our diverse product line invites creativity and provides real-world solutions to
the challenges our customers face every day.

156 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3


Photo courtesy of Graphisoft
BIM and Communication
Improving the design process through
enhanced communication tools
Sponsored by Graphisoft
R
iding the cutting edge of technology
can be a daunting and formidable
challenge for architects, especially
when it requires change within the organiza-
tion. However, the advantages of mastering
innovation can provide both a competitive
advantage and an improved workflow.
Such is the case with Building Information
Modeling (BIM) software.
Modern BIM applications create a
virtual model of a building, incorporating
detailed information about its physical
and functional characteristics as well as
information about materials, systems, and
components. Cutting-edge technology in
design software does more than liberate
the architect from traditional design tools,
it also enhances the design process for the
client. The ability to share this information,
GRAPHISOFT® ignited the BIM revolution in 1984 with ARCHICAD®, the industry's first BIM software for architects. GRAPHI-
SOFT continues to lead the industry with innovative solutions such as its revolutionary BIMcloud®, the world’s first real-time
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the world’s leading mobile app for BIM visualization. GRAPHISOFT is part of the Nemetschek Group. www.graphisoft.com
EDUCATIONAL-ADVERTISEMENT
in real time, within the architecture firm,
or with builders and engineers, greatly
improves communication amongst the team,
reducing errors and increasing efficiency
in the design process. Utilizing virtual
reality to tour a 3D-modeled environment to
provide the client with assurances that the
project will be exciting, practical, func-
tional, and efficient as expected.
When an architectural firm embraces BIM
software, careful selection of the software
can allow for an enhanced workflow and a
more efficient design process. Integration is
key to increasing productivity, creativity, and
collaboration and requires full buy-in from
everyone on the team, from the principles of
the firm to the structural engineers.
The Duke Ellington
School of the Arts, an
1890s building, relied
on BIM software to
facilitate the extensive
CONTINUING EDUCATION
cosmetic—as well as
structural—renovation
of the building, to bring
it into the 21st century.
CONTINUING EDUCATION
1 AIA LU/ELECTIVE
0.1 ICC CEU
Learning Objectives
After reading this article, you should
be able to:
1. Explain how implementing a design-
focused BIM process can improve
productivity and coordination on
projects, as well as elevate creativity.
2. Discuss how an integrated 3D design
workflow allows teams to contribute
ideas to a shared model without
having to switch to different software
for visualization, presentation, or
documentation.
3. Identify rapid concepting strategies that
can engage architecture, engineering,
and construction partners earlier in the
design process, allowing contractors
to explore the 3D model in real time to
discuss ideas and identify efficiencies.
4. List the steps to improve client
engagement with tools such as BIMx,
virtual reality, and real-time visualization.
To receive AIA credit, you are required to
read the entire article and pass the quiz.
Visit ce.architecturalrecord.com for the
complete text and to take the quiz for free.
AIA COURSE #K2309Q
157
 Unlimited Online Access
Access original news articles written by preeminent
Architectural Record editors and contributors,
along with interviews, videos and relevant features
selected from around the web.

Find it all at www.architecturalrecord.com

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159
 DATES & Events

Upcoming Exhibitions Ongoing Exhibitions showcases the photographs of downtown

Ettore Sottsass 1947–1974
New York
October 26–December 16, 2023
The Friedman Benda gallery in Manhattan’s
Chelsea neighborhood presents the ninth part
of an ongoing series of exhibitions exploring
the expansive work of Italian architect and
designer Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007).
Described as “one of the most significant
counterforces to Modernism in design his-
tory,” Sottsass moved between the disciplines
of industrial and furniture design, ceramics,
painting, photography, and architecture over
the course of his six-decade artistic career.
This exhibition focuses on his longtime
collaboration with Poltronova, a Florence,
Italy–based furniture manufacturer, and
includes the 7-foot-tall Due Menhir e Grande
Fallo (1966), one of only four ceramic triptych
columns ever created by the artist. For more,
visit friedmanbenda.com.
Make Do With Now: New Directions in
Japanese Architecture
Copenhagen
Through November 20, 2023
On view at the CAFx Halmtorvet 27 as part
of the Copenhagen Architecture Festival, this
exhibition introduces the thinking and proj-
ects of a new generation of architects and
urban practitioners working in Japan today.
Noting the distinct impact of the Great East
Japan Earthquake and Fukushima nuclear
disaster of 2011 on this group, the exhibit
demonstrates their range of critical, ecologi-
cal, and social practices that utilize limited
resources and found materials, and work with
existing spaces. See cafx.dk.
Beautiful City—Empty City
Houston
Through January 19, 2024
Presented by AIA Houston, this exhibition
Houston captured by Leonid Furmansky
during the pandemic. Shot largely at night,
the images of a vacant landscape invite specu-
lation about Houston’s architecture and the
economic and social systems that finance and
maintain it. A series of lectures, walking
tours, and a photography workshop for chil-
dren will accompany the exhibition. See
aiahouston.org.
Darkroom of Educational Modernism: On
Form & Function
Berlin
Through January 20, 2024
Since the 1990s, Vancouver and Vienna–
based artists Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber
have been visiting, researching, and photo-
graphing postwar Modernist educational
buildings around the world, among them
Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of
Technology campus in Chicago, Arthur
Erickson’s Simon Fraser University in

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160 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

Vancouver, B.C., and the Hermann Hensel­
mann collective’s Haus des Lehrers. The New
Society for Visual Arts presents a selection of
the duo’s photographs from their long­term
project, which critiques the legacy of Mod­
ernism by making colonialism, racism, and
classism visible in its architectural and ideo­
logical products. For more, see ngbk.de/en.
A Rehearsal on Legacy with Zaha Hadid
Cincinnati
Through January 28, 2024
An exhibition at the Contemporary Arts
Center, looks at the legacy of the late archi­
tect as a “point of departure full of possibili­
ties and reflections” rather than presenting an
overview. Alongside a selection of paintings
and ephemera by Hadid is a host of newly
commissioned works in a diverse set of media
including sculpture, textiles, sound, and
video, plus installations and performance.
The exhibition uses Hadid’s distinct mode of
architectural thinking as a starting point that
opens a range of evolving concepts, questions,
and practice. Participating artists include
musician Khyam Allami, sculptor Rand
Abdul Jabbar, and architects Hamed
Bukhamseen and Ali Ismail Karimi. For
more, see contemporaryartscenter.org.
Generation Proxima: Emerging
Environmental Practices in Portuguese
Architecture
New York
Through March 23, 2024
This exhibit at the Center for Architecture
provides an overview of emerging architec­
tural practices in Portugal through an envi­
ronmental lens. Work by the seven highlight­
ed firms—Artéria, Colectivo Warehouse,
Gorvell, Nuno Pimenta, Oficina Pedrez,
OODA, and Ponto Atelier—responds to
environmental challenges by exploring new
materials and construction methods, using
fewer resources, and reintroducing nature as a
guiding design principle. The exhibition
builds on curator Pedro Gadanho’s recently
published book, Climax Change!, which dis­
cusses how the climate crisis will impact
architectural practice. For more information,
see centerforarchitecture.com.
How to Build a Low Carbon Home
London
Through March 31, 2024
The Design Museum presents an exhibition
that showcases the ancient building materials
of wood, stone, and straw as keys to a low­
carbon future. Models, samples, tools, and
photographs from contemporary architecture
and engineering firms Material Cultures,
Waugh Thistleton, Groupwork, and Webb
Yates take the visitor through the journey of
these materials, from fields, forests, and
quarries to building sites, demonstrating how
radically rethinking the fundamentals can be
just as ecologically valuable as experimental
new inventions. See designmuseum.org.
Events
Design Miami/Paris
Paris
October 18–22, 2023
The arts fair Design Miami hosts its first
event in the French capital, at L’hôtel de
Maisons, a landmark 18th­century mansion.
From 25 American and European galleries,
will be design objects, furnishings, and jew­
elry in contemporary, midcentury, and Italian
styles. See designmiami.com
Competitions
2023 James Harrison Steedman Fellowship
in Architecture
Deadline: November 1, 2023
Established in 1926, this $75,000 award is
granted biannually to an emerging architect
to support six to 12 months of international
travel for research purposes. The fellowship is
jointly administered by the Sam Fox School
of Design & Visual Arts at Washington
University in St. Louis and AIA St. Louis
and is open to any anyone who has earned an
accredited degree in architecture in the past
eight years. With Tatiana Bilbao overseeing
this year’s jury, the 2023 application is ori­
ented around the theme “Care,” asking for
project­proposal submissions that consider the
relationship between the act of building and
the ecosystem. For more information, see
steedmanfellowship.wustl.edu.
E-mail information two months in advance to
schulmanp@bnpmedia.com.
stcloudwindow.com
800.383.9311
161
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 SNAPSHOT

Greening the site was integral to the design of Flor

Lofts, by Koning Eizenberg Architecture (KEA), for the
nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust along a virtually
treeless stretch of downtown Los Angeles. To provide an
affordable, healthy environment for a formerly
homeless population struggling with such challenges as
mental illness and substance abuse, KEA designed a
six-story structure that’s U-shaped in plan, with 98
studio apartments and a manager’s residence, plus
supportive services, massed around a leafy courtyard.
Key circulation elements, including connecting bridges
and a fire stair, remain outdoors in this mild climate,
PHOTOGRAPHY: © ERIC STAUDENMAIER
promoting social interaction, exercise, security, and cost
savings. Sarah Amelar

164 ARCHITECTURAL RECORD O C TO B E R 2 0 2 3

 The DESIGN:ED Podcast by Architectural Record takes you inside
the profession through informal conversations with the field’s leading
architects and designers. Tune in to hear inspiring stories from design
leaders, posted twice a month.

Hosted by Austin, Texas–based architect Aaron Prinz, Architectural

Record’s DESIGN:ED podcast features the most renowned architects of
our time – such as Thom Mayne, Deborah Berke, Bjarke Ingels, Michael
Murphy, and Billie Tsien, as well as rising professionals in the next
generation, such as Pascale Sablan, Jesus Robles Jr, and Jenny Wu.

SEPTEMBER PODCAST GUESTS:

Hana Kassem & Patricia Viel

Hana Kassem Patricia Viel Christoph Ingenhoven

KPF ACPV Architects Ingenhoven Architects

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Chandra Robinson Angela Brooks, Lawrence Lorcan O’Herlihy

LEVER Architecture Scarpa, & Jeff Huber Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects
Brooks + Scarpa

Now all DESIGN.ED Podcasts will offer AIA LUs. Listen to conversations with design legends and emerging stars
while earning CEUs. After listening to the podcast, visit https://continuingeducation.bnpmedia.com/podcasts
and take a quick quiz to earn one learning unit towards your license requirements.

PLATINUM SPONSORSHIP:

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