RISD’s president Rosanne Somerson is photographed above with her team at the Fleet Library for Monocle. Read on HERE. For an in-depth look at the Fleet Library project check HERE.
On this Earth Day 2019, the AIA has announced the recipients of the 2019 AIA COTE Top 10 Awards which includes the Daniels Building. The COTE Top Ten Awards is the industry’s best-known award program for sustainable design excellence. Each year, ten innovative projects are recognized for their integration of design excellence with environmental performance.
The Daniels Building at the University of Toronto embodies a holistic approach to urban design and sustainability. As the new home for the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, its purpose is to engage students and the broader community in dialogue with the built environment. At the center of one of Toronto’s few circular parcels, the project anchors the southwest corner of the University and opens the circle to the public after years of inaccessibility. It restores the historic building while adding a new addition with integrated stormwater management, green roof, voided-slab floors, and ample daylight.
Read more on the sustainable and pedagogical aspects of the Daniels Building including the integration of community voices and needs, the ecological curriculum, water systems, energy and resources usage, and economy of means HERE.
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As of April 2nd, 2019 the MIT Site 4 project was officially the tallest building in Cambridge! Right now the building is at 299′, but will reach 330′ by the end of constrction.
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“These projects showcase innovation across the entire learning continuum, displaying how architects are creating cutting edge spaces that enhance modern pedagogy.”
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‘Manifest Pedagogies’, an exhibit of NADAAA’s three schools of architecture and design opened yesterday at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture. The exhibit also highlights the vision plan NADAAA has developed with the SoA for their Coral Gables campus. The work will be on view through April 18th in the Irvin Korach Gallery (open 8:30am – 8pm).
On April 8th Nader will join a round-table discussion entitled ‘Pedagogy in Question’ with the SoA’s Allan Shulman, Carie Penabad, Joel Lamere, Charlotte von Moos and Christopher Meyer. The round-table will be in the Thomas P. Murphy Design Studio Building at 6:30pm.
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NADAAA is working with the Boston Public Library and the Public Facilities Department to design a replacement for the Adams Street library branch in Dorchester. Construction will begin this summer!
The neighborhood scale is largely residential with mature trees and inviting sidewalks. The new building picks up on the scale of the surrounding houses, colorful Victorian painted clapboards, and a busy main street that connects Hemenway Park to Gallivan Boulevard.
The new program is twice the size of the previous branch, and the generous three-sided site allows for a single-story building, maintaining porous connections to the street and improving the accessible approach. While Adams Street serves as the Library’s front door, there are prominent elevations on Oakton Avenue to the north and Delmont Street to the south. A single pitch monumentalizes the façade on Adams Street, while a breakdown of peaked roofs creates a diminutive scale more appropriate for the side streets.
The folded roof is composed of a series of ruled surfaces, the result of a simple series of striated beams running east/west. Pitches point toward rain gardens, both along the eastern property edge and within a court of native plants at the south.
Effectively a mat building, a southern ‘cut’ brings light and air deep into the core of the footprint. On the north, a Reading Garden will pay homage to a space cultivated and maintained by the Library’s Friends, respecting a grand Pin Oak that will continue to dominate the corner of Oakton and Adams, as well as become a visual focal point for the Library’s interior.
Raymund Ryan writes for The Plan on the Daniels Building:
“To design a school of architecture is an enticing albeit formidable prospect for any thinking architect. In the United States alone, there is the legacy of Mies van der Rohe at IIT, Paul Rudolph at Yale, and John Andrews at Harvard. These buildings from several decades ago were signature, standalone monuments to professional bravura and to the respective institutions. Three or four decades later, out in Los Angeles, SCI-Arc pursued a different, radically less expensive path, colonizing warehouses or factories first in Santa Monica, then in Playa Vista, and now in LA’s rapidly urbanizing Downtown. Echoing mid-century notions of the Museum as Temple and this more recent appropriation of industrial space for artistic production and display, these dueling typologies of the architectural academy find a synthesis in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.”
“There, a grand Gothic Revival building – an isolated urban icon with many gables and embellishments – has been extended in line with the cardinal axes marking the site. Whereas this older edifice contains many small individual rooms, the new structure is essentially one contiguous studio instigating, on this rather tight lot, that modern dream of multifunctional, open floorplan.”
“The new floor plate ascends to allow for a barrier-free mega-studio in which student activity is ideally unimpeded. An extraordinary new roof floats overhead:” it spans in the long direction without the intercession of columns and warps. It is filleted to allow for natural illumination.”
“It is a bravura gesture, this porous canopy sailing free above the heart of the reinvigorated institution. The architects worked through one-to-one mockups – with straight metal stud frames skinned in unusually thin gypsum – to determine curvature and to convince the contractor that this unorthodox construction technique was indeed feasible. Such lissome elements are telltale characteristics of this and other NADAAA projects, whether at the scale of a ceiling or a window or a handrail. The language of each building is not imposed through some academic or artistic diktat but emerges through a scrutiny of fabrication options and the ways in which these components meet one another, not unlike the words in a paragraph.”
Through April 25th artist Torkwase Dyson will present a solo exhibition entitled I Can Drink the Distance at the The Cooper Union’s Gallery at 41 Cooper Square. Dyson is the Spring 2019 Robert Gwathmey Chair in Architecture and Art at The Cooper Union. The exhibition “considers how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through built environments. Attuned to the shape patterns of industry—from the history of global trade to contemporary colonization and extraction—Dyson thinks through the various ways humans oppose the violence of these synergistic systems with methods of improvisation and spatial planning.” More on the exhibition HERE.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Dyson will give a lecture on Tuesday, April 2, in the Cooper Union’s Great Hall, more info HERE.
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The Daniels Building has won the 2019 National CSLA Award for Small-Scale Public Landscapes. A big congratulations and thank you goes to our landscape architecture collaborators Public Work!
“The complete transformation of One Spadina enables profoundly different civic relations, more fluid community connections, and new social and ecological environments embedded within a landscape for learning. With its prominent location and dramatic topographical landscape, the project charts a new role for the institution within the campus and the city.”
-Canadian Society of Landscape Architects
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ARCHITECT’s Katie Gerfen interviewed Katie and Nader for this piece on NADAAA’s design of “a nontraditional library” aka the Research + Design Center at Beaver Country Day School. See the full project feature HERE.
“This addition was going to be a library, but one rebranded into a research and design center. It’s got a strong fabrication component, and its notion of how a library is used is really quite different from any library addition we’ve ever done.” – KF
“There is a connection between the physical distribution of spaces in the addition and pedagogical model the school is working with. They eliminated what you would traditionally call the front door to the library and the insularity of a reading room, and the new ring that connects the auditorium wing, the arts wing, the fabrication wing, and the science wing flows around a courtyard. Essentially the library as we would know it has been exploded around this ring in its entirety and encompassed that continuity of space. The library is seen as a lively space where people come to learn how to do their work, to collaborate, and to make things.” – NT
“The great thing about this client and their method of teaching is the idea that you can take these spaces along the path and program them so that there are small and medium rooms for meeting, and larger classroom spaces—all occurring along what is essentially a ramp that allows an accessible route.” – KF
“The courtyard was a collaboration with landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand, and there was an intended dialogue between a bosque of birch trees that he had conceived of in the courtyard and the façades. We went through many different iterations of timber cladding elements—they became thinner and thinner, and then they became louvers.” -NT
“As we began to develop the architecture around the courtyard and this circulation, which would constantly have you confronting it—either coming down the gallery stairs as you look north or looking south from the fabrication space, it became clear how central it would be.” – KF
“We spent a lot of time with [acoustical engineer] Acentech aurally modeling the space, figuring out what could be hard and reverberative, what needed to be soft and absorptive” – KF
“This project also became an exercise about articulating and framing a didactic space of teaching and learning with certain details that trigger in the students’ minds that something in architecture is happening here. It’s not business as usual.” – NT
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