Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University Steven Holl Architects
With the $300m Lewis Center for Princeton University, Steven Holl has extended a beloved campus with three new buildings. Meanwhile, in London, his bold Maggie's Centre is conceived as a 'breath of life'
Words past Fred A Bernstein
Steven Holl has created a body of work as formally and every bit tectonically inventive equally that of any architect working today. His most successful structure may be the 2007 addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri — known every bit the Bloch Building — which consists of a serial of subterranean galleries that emerge on to a sculpture park as glowing apparitions. Because the galleries, and the infrastructure that supports them, are largely hole-and-corner, the 'lanterns' were able to brand the journey from Holl's sketchpads to real life without losing their purity of class.
His least successful edifice may exist Simmons Hall, a dormitory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2002), essentially a vast rectangle of relentless physical grids interrupted by occasional shafts that resemble the insides of volcanoes. There, formal preoccupations fight with practical considerations; for example, getting air in some rooms requires opening nine tiny windows. The outcome is a clash between aesthetics and everyday life.
The Lewis Heart, a xiv,000 sq m arts complex for Princeton University, bears elements of both the Bloch Edifice and Simmons Hall. Like Bloch, it has pregnant underground elements, allowing information technology to emerge from the basis every bit a series of luminous structures. Like Simmons, information technology is large and programladen, significant practical considerations sometimes compete against architectural experimentation. 'Why is my classroom iii storeys loftier, but with no windows, no storage, and no soundproofing?' emailed a friend who teaches at Princeton when he heard I was writing about the edifice. The answer is that Holl designs ethereal forms — he renders non in pen or pencil merely in watercolour — and sometimes struggles to brand spaces fit inside them comfortably. Simply the three-storey-high studio, while not conventional, is likewise challenging, in the best sense of the word.
In a centre for the arts, unusual and even peculiar spaces can be catalysts for inventiveness. It's a truism that smashing architecture requires constraints; nifty architecture may as well impose them. In fact, Princeton's almost beloved buildings, its collegiate gothic dormitories, are popular largely considering they require students to arrange to fanciful design decisions; the desire to vary their exterior appearance, with narrow and wide bays and other manipulations of volume, make some rooms too big, others also small (I experienced both every bit an undergraduate), and very few but right. Holl (working with Noah Yaffe every bit partner-incharge) was a proficient choice for a campus loved for eschewing architectural homogenisation.
A bit of background: until quite recently, Princeton treated music, dance and theatre largely as extracurricular pursuits, and the campus reflected that: the university's biggest auditorium was one built by a student organisation earlier the Second Earth State of war. But over the past three decades Princeton has upped its commitment to performance within the university. As the university's president announced in 2006: 'The time has come up for Princeton to requite greater recognition to the centrality of the arts in its teaching and research mission.' It needed facilities to lucifer its promises.
A donor (the late insurance magnate Peter Lewis) was located, as was a site (habitation to a railroad train station nearly the southern terminate of campus). Readying the site, 9ha in all, involved moving not only the train station (and tracks) just as well several metropolis streets and a popular convenience store. (The replacement train station and store were designed with great panache by the Arizona builder Rick Joy.) If the process, requiring municipal consent, was tortuous (at one indicate Holl was told to redesign the complex for another site entirely), the program for the Lewis Center was relatively straightforward: a series of performance venues for dance, music and theatre, plus related classrooms and administrative spaces. The university was prepared to build the all-time of the best, including dance studios with sprung (shock-absorbing) floors, music rehearsal rooms with almost complete acoustic isolation, and numerous loftier-tech performance spaces, including one with a ceiling depression enough for students to learn about theatrical lighting without having to climb ladders.
But what class would the complex have? Princeton University'southward central campus consists of the Georgian-Colonialstyle Nassau Hall (1756); a pair of 'Greek temples' built in 1893 for rival debating societies; a few Romanesque-revival piles; and then, forming the bulk of the campus, the collegiate gothic dormitories, mostly built betwixt the 1890s and the 1930s. Information technology's those dorms, evoking Oxford and Cambridge, which most people think of when they retrieve of Princeton.
Since 1960 the academy has experimented with a variety of successors to collegiate gothic, which the powers that be considered unbecoming to a mod institution and/or too expensive to build properly. One of the all-time postwar buildings is IM Pei's Spelman Halls (1973), a precast physical dormitory equanimous of four-storey pavilions that open up on to a constricted pathway. There are also several bookish buildings with patterned-brick facades (making them nominally postmodern) by Venturi Scott Brown; a crinkled science library by Frank Gehry; and laboratories by the likes of Rafael Viñoly.
In the early 2000s, the university — largely at the behest of donors nostalgic for the 'real' Princeton — built a new residential college designed by Demetri Porphyrios to mimic the beloved collegiate gothic buildings. Merely though he was working with the aforementioned materials and ostensibly seeking the aforementioned result equally his predecessors, Porphyrios was required to accommodate hallways lined with rows of nearly identical dorm rooms; that precluded the varied, most syncopated massing that makes the earlier collegiate gothic buildings special. Ironically, information technology is Holl, whose detailing couldn't be any more than modern, who has captured the almost improvisational quality of Princeton'southward 'This Side of Paradise' campus.
Holl won the competition to design the $300m Lewis Center past proposing to cock not one big building (as Renzo Piano reportedly did) only three smallish structures, facing — that is, forming — a courtyard. For a time, he wrestled with what shapes the three buildings would take, eventually settling on a large rectangular solid for music; a cylinder grafted on to a trapezoidal structure for theatre and dance; and a most foursquare belfry (16m x 13m, but fix into a wider base of operations) for classrooms and offices. The massing is meant to mimic the organisation of the collegiate gothic dorms.
Ane shortcoming to Holl's composition is that, considering the three buildings are relatively far autonomously, information technology fails to replicate the excitement of moving through narrow gothic archways into spacious courtyards, a kind of compression and release. Holl has said that the openings had to be broad because the Lewis Center forms a new gateway to the campus. But it is a somewhat awkward gateway: from the train station, the choices are to enter the complex through a conventional 'storefront' facade, climb a stepped ramp to the raised courtyard, or walk around the circuitous birthday.
Holl, meanwhile, has described the arrangement of the buildings equally inspired in part past Malevich'south experiments in suprematism, in which pure forms collide at astute angles (indeed, the music and theatre buildings are only over xvi degrees from parallel). He has also pointed out that the dimensions of his new courtyard are most exactly those of the Campidoglio in Rome. Simply, wisely, he claims neither equally straight precedent: at the Campidoglio, symmetry is key; the courtyard is entered on axis. At the other extreme, suprematist geometry is far more dynamic that Holl's tidy arrangement.
Another quibble: much of the Lewis Eye is covered in a yellow Lecce stone (a kind of limestone), carefully chosen past Holl just with no real precedent on the Princeton campus, where masonry is generally much darker. (Holl has said he chose a shade that telegraphs modernity.)
But let's cut Holl some slack. His courtyard (landscaped by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates) is also a roof, taking the opportunity, unavailable to the architects of the collegiate gothic buildings, to put large rooms hush-hush. Also underground are 140 geothermal wells, each 128m deep, providing nearly of the heating and cooling for the complex.
Directly below the courtyard, Holl inserted a 743 sq m gathering infinite, turning the void between the three visible buildings into, effectively, a fourth building. Skylights — glass openings in the courtyard'southward 21m ten 21m reflecting pool — bring cute dappled light into the space, which besides offers peeks into the 4 performance venues and an fine art gallery. Called the Forum, it is probable to become one of the most popular gathering places on campus.
At the n side of the courtyard is the music building, the near successful of the above-ground structures. A rectangular block, it is devoted almost entirely to a 325 sq m rehearsal hall at the Forum and courtyard levels and nearly xxx smaller practice rooms upstairs. Those are boxes congenital of rosewood with staggered-exposed-border corners, virtually similar tongue-and-groove-built piece of furniture. Each box, separated by at least 25cm from those flanking it, is supported from above by steel rods, ensuring an extraordinary degree of acoustic separation. The rosewood boxes, which themselves have only modest windows, are visible from the courtyard through a facade of unusually transparent glass (Interpane Ipasol Neutral lxx/37), creating a stunning, and almost surreal sight, equally if the contents of a minor town had been lowered into a vitrine. It's rare that a practical necessity generates class then compellingly. Holl seized the opportunity that necessity offered; his music building is a tour-de-force.
To the west of the music building is the half-dozen-storey tower, which is covered largely in milky white glass (made by Holl's frequent collaborator Okalux, in an acid-etched cease). At night the white glass makes information technology a beacon; by day it and the Lecce stone make the building seem a bit blank. And, like the tower Frank Lloyd Wright added to the SC Johnson circuitous in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1950 — to which it bears a passing resemblance — it is less successful inside, where tight spaces and limits on the number of clear-glass panels get in feel claustrophobic. Holl'due south desire to achieve uniformity on the outside, with clear glass prepare into the translucent glass at regular intervals, or at least at studiedly irregular intervals, and to mimic the proportions of Blair Tower — a nearby collegiate gothic touchstone — diminishes the interiors.
To the due south, responding to the music building's crystalline front end with a nearly bare facade, is the theatre and dance building. It contains the centre'south largest stairway, a seemingly lighter-than-air confection, supported from above, and nicknamed the Dancing Stair. The steel guardrail post-obit its curving paths is perforated in a pattern inspired by Laban dance annotation, and is appropriately gossamer. The stairway is at approximately the point where the building'south ii forms, circular and angular, meet. But from inside information technology's hard to become a sense of the overall organisation of the building, and information technology seems a shame that the circular form, and then prominent from exterior, is barely noticeable within.
Simply there's a reason. The main spaces within the buildings — its raison d'etre — are black-box theatres, by definition rectilinear and opaque. There is also what might be called a white box: a huge, square trip the light fantastic studio sheathed on its two exterior sides in the milky Okalux glass. The room is magnificently luminous.
A huge, foursquare dance studio is sheathed on its two exterior sides in milky Okalux glass, making it seem luminous. Dancers call it the cloud studio. Photograph Credit: Paul Warchol
Dancers, who have already nicknamed it the 'cloud studio', say they feel similar they're floating even earlier they accept a pace. Information technology'due south an effect that mayhap no architect but Holl could have achieved. That ethereal room, the welcoming beneath-ground Forum, and the spectacular 'village' of the music practise rooms are plenty to justify Princeton's selection of builder.
Other rooms may take getting used to. Equally Holl said in a recent picture show, quoting Winston Churchill: 'Nosotros shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.'
Source: https://www.designcurial.com/news/lewis-center-maggies-centre-by-steven-holl-architects-6066661/
0 Response to "Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University Steven Holl Architects"
Post a Comment