We are pleased to announce that the Quaker Meeting House and Arts Center at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has won an Institute Honor Award for 2014 from the American Institute of Architects. The 26 winning projects were selected from more than 500 submissions.
Project description from the AIA press release
With a minimum of means, this project transforms a non-descript 1950s gymnasium into a Quaker Meeting House and Arts Center serving the entire middle and upper school community at Sidwell Friends School. The building program includes a worship space, visual art and music rooms, and exhibition areas. The essence of Quaker Meeting, and thus the Meeting House itself, is silence and light. Architecturally this is achieved by filtering light and sound through architecture, landscape, structure, and systems arranged in successive concentric layers around a central source of illumination, both literal and spiritual.
Jury comments
A beautiful project that is very well detailed and imagined. A remarkable transformation.
The obsolete building is thankfully lost in the new one; the new one is open, bright, and engaging.
The exterior is masterfully handled with subtle gestures that give it interest and shape. The architect manages to create a landmark building on the site while simultaneously transforming the interior spaces into an effective worship space.
Fascinating use of light and molding of space. Beautiful reinterpretation with a sensitive vernacular touch.
Tally™ Empowers Architects to Leverage Life Cycle Data at the Speed of Design
Tally™, a new Revit application for calculating the environmental impact of building materials during the design process, is available free through Autodesk Labs and the Tally website. The free trial version expires on March 1, 2014.
Stone Hall is the first of Harvard's venerable Houses to undergo renovation as part of the House Renewal program. Recently, correspondent Colin Manning reported in the Harvard Gazette that students living at Stone Hall since work was completed last summer have "explored and utilized the new academic, social, and study spaces in creative ways." His article includes a video released by the university that describes the importance of reinvigorating Harvard Houses and provides a glimpse inside the pilot project.
In a recent issue of the Journal of Architectural Education, Research Director Billie Faircloth asks a simple question: How is knowledge of the environment acquired?
Excerpt from "Pardon Me, May I Borrow Your Umbrella?"
Journal of Architectural Education, Volume 67, Issue 2, 2013
The fully considered response to "How is knowledge of the environment acquired?" is not one solely based on synthesis of data collected by a device—a weather station, temperature sensor, or suite of sensors. Nor is it one solely based on a methodology which compresses many years of weather data into one "typical" annual data set. The answer to this question requires us to engage the pursuit of a more thorough epistemic interrogation as it may be hypothesized that for some of us numerical values collected from the environment—irradiance, sky cover, temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed and wind direction—are a proxy for our lived-out bodily experiences of the environment. We hypothesize that the more we get to know the metrics of a particular micro or macro climate, the more we may advantageously inhabit it with our bodies and buildings. And this is precisely the hypothesis that should leave us wondering, "What if?"
Want to keep reading? A free download is available to the first 50 readers.
Many Philadelphians remember reform-minded mayor Richardson Dilworth, the namesake of Dilworth Plaza to the west of City Hall. But the layers of history that underlie this site begin much farther back, with the planning of the city by William Penn in 1683. Since then, it has been a public space under continual transformation—as a public park, a race course, a military campground, the locale of the nation's first urban water works, and starting in the late nineteenth century, the site of City Hall.
William Penn's Plan for Philadelphia (1683) included a centrally located square, called Centre Square, for public buildings. The plan was crafted with surveyor Thomas Holme and used to advertise the city to prospective immigrants in Europe.
William Penn's Plan for Philadelphia (1683) shows a grid pattern of streets with five open squares, one in each quarter of the city and one in the center.Read More
Tally™, a new Revit application that allows designers to measure the environmental impact of building materials, is available for a limited time as a free download through the Tally™ website and Autodesk Labs. It is being offered as a public beta from November 19 to February 28, 2014. During the beta phase, software developer KieranTimberlake, together with life cycle data provider PE INTERNATIONAL and software development partner Autodesk, will collect feedback on the technology from Autodesk customers.
WATCH THE TALLY™ INTRO VIDEO
Public previews are scheduled November 19-22 at Greenbuild 2013 in Philadelphia. Product demonstrations will be held at the Autodesk booth on Wednesday, November 20, 1:30-2:30 pm, and Thursday, November 21, 3:00-4:00 pm.
Few studies track the dynamics of green roof plant species over the long term. In this study, researchers returned to survey vegetation of two green roofs several years after their initial establishment.
Environmental researchers Stephanie Carlisle and Max Piana recently presented green roof research findings at the 11th annual Cities Alive Conference in San Francisco, attended by international green roof professionals, designers, and researchers. The theme of this year's conference was resilience, with presentations and research exploring the many ways in which green roofs and walls contribute to social, environmental, and economic resiliency within our cities. The role of green roofs in urban water management and the potential for agriculturally-based green roofs were topics of particular interest.
Growing Resilience: Long Term Plant Dynamics and Green Roof Performance
Focusing on studies of two mature green roofs, one intensive and the other extensive, Stephanie and Max discussed changes in green roof vegetation, challenging the audience to consider the long-term dynamics and transformations of these living systems. Questions under consideration included:
How does green roof vegetation change over time?
How does vegetation performance relate to building and site context?
How do the growth trajectories of an extensive and intensive green roof compare?
The new US embassy in London broke ground today in a ceremony that included Ambassador Matthew Barzun, Director of Overseas Building Operations Lydia Muniz, and Leader of Wandsworth Council Ravi Govindia. The embassy, which will stand on a 4.9-acre site in the Nine Elms neighborhood on the South Bank of the Thames, is expected to be completed in 2017. Its design reflects values of transparency, openness, and equality as well as leading-edge measures of environmental responsibility, including an energy-gathering envelope and on-site water management system.
A sketch by Steve Kieran of the facade of the Palazzo Maccarini in Rome, one of the buildings he "disassembled" during a one-year fellowship in the city.
As part of the Home from Rome series sponsored by the American Academy in Rome, Steve Kieran delivered a lecture this week entitled "Carrying Rome." His lecture traced a passage back to his 1980-81 fellowship in Rome and its influence on thirty years of making architecture.
While in Rome, Steve made more than 3,000 index card-sized sketches that continue to inform design at KieranTimberlake. His drawing of the Palazzo Maccarani, in particular, allowed him to disassemble the entire facade, completed in 1532, to understand how architect Giulio Romano established then flouted convention and then pointed a rhetorical finger at it (minute 24:00 in the video below). Partner James Timberlake was also a Rome fellow, in 1982-83, and the balance of art, intuition, science, and innovation that the two observed in Roman architecture led them to seek a similar balance in their own work. Steve pointed to Brunelleschi's dome in Florence as an exemplar of this equilibrium, explaining that truly compelling beauty hangs in the balance between art and science.
Steve noted, "Rome is still home. The insights I gained through disassembling and recording what I was seeing more than thirty years ago have remained ingrained in every facet of my life as an architect."
Tally™ empowers architects to conduct Life Cycle Assessments directly in a Revit Model.
Philadelphia, PA -- KieranTimberlake announced today the release of Tally™, a new software application that allows designers to measure the environmental impact of building materials directly in a Revit model. The application provides Life Cycle Assessment on demand, backed by the rigor and credibility of GaBi data from PE INTERNATIONAL, a global leader in life cycle information and sustainability consulting. Autodesk, the maker of Revit modeling software, supported development and testing for the application.
