September 2018 through March 2018
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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
“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
Read the full essay HERE.
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“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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Congratulations to our team, especially conservation specialists, ERA Architects, for winning the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation for the Daniels Building. The Ontario Heritage Trust writes: “One Spadina Crescent is one of Toronto’s most prominent architectural sites. The historical building, site rehabilitation and new addition re-establishes One Spadina as a gateway to the University campus and reintroduces it to the public perception […] a showcase for the city and an international focal point for education and research on architecture, art and the future of cities. The rehabilitation and new addition at One Spadina Crescent provides a significant expansion to the heritage building for use by the faculty and its students as design studios, fabrication shops, a multi-functional principal hall, library programs, social spaces and offices.”
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Image above from Odeh Engineers
NADAAA’s new residence hall project for the Rhode Island School of Design is going up at 60 Waterman. The team celebrated the ‘topping out’ on January 23rd. Neighbors, friends and the RISD community were invited to sign the final beam before it was hoisted to the 6th floor. In keeping with tradition, a small tree was placed on the beam. The tree, a gesture to the Scandinavian forest spirits, will remain atop the structure until the building is enclosed. After a string of freezing cold days, the building was resplendent during the ceremony, its golden cross-laminated timber (CLT) deck glowing in a steel frame. More than one person commented that it was a shame that the building could not remain that way.
Most architects are acutely aware of the paradox that in trying to build our best civilization we are among the planet’s greatest producers of waste. Construction garbage accounts for a disturbing percentage of the world’s refuse. Hence the excitement around the potential of CLT construction. Made of plies of kiln-dried soft-woods, CLT is poised to make a significant impact to the market in the near term. It can be cut to size in a factory, shipped, and installed without modification. The biggest financial challenge to using CLT tends to be logistics (e.g. how far is the job from the production facility), and with new plants coming online every few months, that may cease to be a problem.
60 Waterman was designed to take advantage of CLT’s dimensional stability and a maximum truck bed size. Five-ply planks were driven from Canada, 8 feet wide and 50 feet long. Due to the relatively light weight, the manufacturer fit many planks on a truck, so there was minimal strain in getting material to the erection crew. Weighing much less than precast concrete planks, CLT is capable of greater coverage, going up faster using a smaller crane and less fussiness than precast concrete plank. The building structure was complete in less than three weeks. CLT has no camber – it is joined to adjacent planks with a spline. If the CLT needs to be modified, it can quickly be cut with a chain saw. Try that with concrete.
Using an Integrated Project Delivery, NADAAA worked with Shawmut Construction and subcontractors to coordinate a central utility spine in the corridors. Mechanical feeds and sidewall sprinklers afford maximum ceiling height and flexibility of layout for the bedrooms. Perhaps the most exciting thing about 60 Waterman’s design is the warmth that wood ceilings will bring to the building interior. That simple gesture is the byproduct of a design process driven to optimize construction time, budget control, and minimize material waste.
Along with the construction partners, NADAAA collaborated closely with structural engineer Odeh Engineers, Inc. to evaluate numerous options for the superstructure. The team ultimately chose the hybrid CLT system due to its inherent sustainability, beauty, and speed of construction. When this building opens in late August, it will be the first hybrid steel-CLT residence hall in New England, although likely not the last.
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Yesterday AIA New York announced the 2019 AIANY award winners and Tanderrum took home an honor award for urban design! See all the winners HERE.
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Rock Creek House is on Interior Design Magazine’s list of amazing wood interiors!
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Foundations in and steel going up on the new residence hall!
Photo by Odeh Engineers
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Hong Kong based Perspective Magazine’s Rebecca Lo includes the Daniels Building in a Toronto round-up honing in on the building’s “key civic spaces that are simply extraordinary […] As episodes, each of these contributes to the larger narrative of Toronto, because they operate as public spaces for the city.” Read the full feature HERE.
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