Rapt Studio Crafts A Bold Modernist Office With Artistic Flair

Many architects and designers involve first-time clients in projects to educate them about the process and other basics. But when multidisciplinary practice Rapt Studio was hired by Macquarie Group—a global financial services firm with substantial investments in real estate development—to renovate its new office in a landmarked 1964 Philadelphia building by the distinguished Italian-American architect Pietro Belluschi, designer and client were already on the same page.

Both Rapt and Macquarie have a portfolio of office projects in which design informality and can-do spirit relax traditional workplace protocol to trigger “spatial connectivity,” as Macquarie global design director Andrew Burdick puts it. “The client already wanted to take advantage of the building to create face-to-face collisions between people,” notes Kumar Atre, head of design research at Rapt. “We did too.” Indeed, the studio’s CEO and chief creative officer David Gallulo could be quoting the client when he says, “We wanted to respect the existing space and also really connect people,” summarizing their shared intentions. Recently inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame, Gallulo is well-versed in connecting and connections, with Rapt, ranking 98th on our top 100 Giants list, having completed projects for such high-profile clients as Tinder, Dropbox, and VF Corporation. 

Rapt Studio Breathes New Life Into Macquarie Group’s Office

This project entailed renovating the ground-floor lobby, top three floors, and roof terrace of the nine-story structure—145,000 square feet in all. Both parties agreed that achieving the interactive office landscape they envisioned required a kind of collaboration with Belluschi across architectural generations, drawing from the character of his building: an International Style slab with a sculpted concrete frame and sleek glass-and-aluminum facades sheathed in sunscreens made of Plexiglas, a material invented by the Rohm and Haas Company, whose headquarters it originally was.

Belluschi, one of the country’s foremost mid-century modernists, had designed a beautiful shell: 39,000-square-foot, open-plan floor plates beneath coffered concrete ceilings. But before the recent renovation, the existing interior build-out imposed a hierarchical office layout, isolating executive staff in perimeter offices around a central secretarial pool. Floors were stratified in a pancaked stack, and dropped ceilings further generalized the already bland universal space. Respecting Belluschi’s shell, Rapt aimed at creating a more contiguous, collaborative environment with specific programs and zones mapped horizontally and vertically throughout the three floors—essentially socializing the interior in a transformed office paradigm. 

Tour Around This Sleek Glass-And-Aluminum Office In Philadelphia

“We had to translate the language of the historic building into a series of spaces that were never there, while making them feel original,” Arte explains. The Rapt team was, in a sense, “restoring” the building to what it might have been had Belluschi designed it today, extending his architectural vocabulary into an office vernacular that is less hierarchical but more civic and egalitarian—an appropriate goal for a building in the heart of historic Philadelphia.

Right from the lobby, Rapt introduces these themes and intensions, riffing off the bones and wit of Belluschi’s envelope. He had established a strict grid of chamfered concrete columns, their capitals flaring into wide angular canopies that turn the ceiling into a field of dramatically folded plates. Several large cruciform chandeliers—composed of countless Plexiglas icicles and, like the building, listed—extend along the length of the volume. Mirroring the spatial theatrics, Rapt has inserted a series of custom wall installations between the columns—vertical rows of leather-and-felt straps, twisted to echo the angled concrete around them. Also custom, generously scaled furnishings, including a concierge desk, benches, banquettes, and planters, anchor the space, while commissioned video art playing on large screens adds color and energy.

Cruciform Chandeliers Brighten This Workplace Design 

More Plexiglas diffuses ceiling light in the elevators leading to reception on the ninth floor, where a sequence of spaces unfolds—Guggenheim Museum–style, from the top down—via a rectangular atrium stairwell breaking through the three-story pancake to connect all levels. Each landing opens onto a large public area that acts like the anchor tenant in a shopping mall, a magnet that draws people in a progression of vertical connectivity. The company canteen is located on the eighth floor, beneath the reception and guest relations concourse on the ninth, with a training hub on the seventh. Theses public zones are balanced by office space—mostly open, but some private—and meeting rooms of various sizes. 

But the atrium is the heart of the project, one that beats with excitement because of the energetic irregularity with which the stair angles its way through the otherwise staidly orthogonal architecture. Belluschi’s grid is disciplined and his geometry Euclidean, but Rapt’s meandering stair walks on the wild side, bringing the ’60’s building into the 21st century. Each landing meets the floor plate at a slightly different level and angle, so walking up and down  the stairs, Burdick notes, “isn’t a chore” but a discovery. The angularity surprises the space with an informality that encourages social encounter, introducing people to one another. It helps that the staircase is tall, dark, and handsome. Deep-bronze, coated-steel balustrades give it a graphic profile, which is complemented by a backdrop wall of vertical wood slats, echoing the warmth and dynamism of the installations in the lobby far below.

Belluschi’s beautifully finished coffered concrete ceilings, with their sense of rhythm and substance, inspire lighting as striking as the lobby’s glamorous chandeliers. A regimented array of dronelike custom fixtures beams light into each recess with an intensity that seems to dematerialize the concrete while casting a soft glow back into the transformed interiors below—perfectly encapsulating the project’s spirit of collaboration across time and space. 

Step Inside This Modernist Office by Rapt Studio

This Striking Sculptural Staircase Takes The Stage

RAPT STUDIO: SAM FARHANG; CAITLIN SWAIM; ESIN EKINCIOGLU; SCOTT MCMANUS; LAURA PACHECO PEÑA. L2PARTRIDGE: ARCHITECT OF RECORD. TILLOTSON DESIGN ASSOCIATES: LIGHTING CONSULTANT. FUTURE GREEN STUDIO: LANDSCAPE CONSULTANT. ARCHITECTURAL CASEWORK: MILLWORK. CENTRAL METALS: CUSTOM STAIRS. PMDI SIGNS: CUSTOM SIGNAGE. BALA CONSULTING ENGINEERS: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER, MEP. STRUCTURE TONE: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

FROM FRONT ERIK BRUCE: CUSTOM INSTALLATION (LOBBY). BRICK IT: FLOOR TILE. CAESARSTONE: QUARTZ SURFACE. BERNHARDT DESIGN: LOUNGE CHAIRS. WALTER KNOLL: STOOLS. GLOBAL LEATHER: INSTALLATION LEATHER. MAHARAM: INSTALLATION FABRIC, UPHOLSTERY FABRIC, UPHOLSTERY LEATHER (LOBBY), CURTAIN FABRIC (WORKPLACE). LAPALMA: WINDOW COUNTER SYSTEM (TRAINING). GRAND RAPIDS CHAIR: SIDE CHAIRS. AUDO COPENHAGEN: PEDESTAL TABLES. JAMIE STERN FURNITURE, CARPET, LEATHER & FABRIC: CUSTOM BENCHES (TRAINING), CUSTOM BANQUETTES (CANTEEN). DESIGNTEX: WALLCOVERING (TRAINING, CANTEEN). HAY: BARSTOOLS (TRAINING), LOW COFFEE TABLES, STOOLS (WORKPLACE). ANDREU WORLD: ROUND TABLES (CANTEEN). EQUITONE: RIDGED WALL PANELS. EGE CARPETS: CARPETING. MUUTO: LARGE TABLE, SIDE CHAIRS (CANTEEN), MODULAR SOFA (WORKPLACE). ARPER: ARMCHAIR (RECEPTION). ARNOLD CONTRACT: CUSTOM RECEPTION COUNTER. KNOLL: WIRE SIDE TABLE (RECEPTION), LARGE TABLE, OTTOMANS (WORKPLACE). ENCORE SEATING: LOUNGE CHAIRS (WORKPLACE). AXIS LIGHTING: LINEAR PENDANT FIXTURES. MURAFLEX: GLASS PARTITIONING. INTERFACE: CARPET TILES. TEXAA: MESH CEILING (ROOF-DECK STAIR). TECHNICAL GLASS PRODUCTS: CHANNEL GLASS. THROUGHOUT LUKAS LIGHTING: CUSTOM COFFER FIXTURES. DINOFLEX: STAIR RUBBER FLOORING. MCNICHOLS: PERFORATED METAL PANELS. BENJAMIN MOORE & CO.: PAINT.

Pricefx’s Prague Offices by CollColl Draws Inspo from Pixels

For the Prague office of Pricefx, the standard workplace cubicle just wouldn’t do. The MO of the global software company, its products helping businesses price goods and services, is predicated on flux: The number and type of clients, which range from newly hatched start-ups to long-established corporations, shifts by the day and even the hour, requiring different spatial configurations intended to stimulate creative dialogue. It wanted smart, performative flex space that acts as a physical corollary to the dynamic digital environment in which its clients work and think on-screen.

In 2016, Pricefx hired CollColl—the interdisciplinary firm, its name a portmanteau of “collaborative collective,” founded by partner Krištof Hanzlík—to design an easily adaptable workplace on a half-floor of an open-plan office building. Hanzlík and his team mixed hot desks, coworking spaces, lounges, and open areas with phone-booth enclosures, offices, and small and large meeting rooms. Two years later, the architects expanded the footprint to occupy the full 9,000-square-foot floor. Then in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when the very concept of office space was in free fall, in a leap of optimism the company re-engaged CollColl to expand to the floor below. But with COVID putting the fundamental viability of such facilities into question, the mandate for flexibility was greater than ever.

CollColl Designs Pricefx’s Prague Offices for Flexibility

CollColl is a small, avant-garde group with a portfolio of both experimental and commercial projects. The success of the two previous efforts in shaping a flexible office landscape suggested the firm’s approach to the new lower level. “We wanted to create a fluid space in which there would be some separation but without distinct rooms,” says Hanzlík, who lead the team along with partner Šimon Kos. “Pricefx throws events for 30, 40, 50 attendees, and there’s a constant flow of people.”

A stainless-steel tubular slide linking the two floors spills into the new main entry, setting a tone that signals the importance of play in a workplace intended to stimulate creative ideas. The playfulness is reinforced by the reception desk, which not only doubles as a coffee bar but, thanks to a grid of LEDs behind its translucent solid-surfacing face, also functions as an interactive billboard on which pixelated images, including the company logo, appear. Nearby, a “gym” area equipped with a billiard table and a punching bag offers actual fun and games, further encouragement for informality and interplay.

The Office Includes an Expansive, Multi-Purpose Conference Room  

Perhaps the most challenging request on the client’s wish list was for a conference table that could seat 50 people during workshops—about twice the number possible previously. Rather than designing a single-purpose room, however, CollColl used seven pairs of glass double doors to partition off one end of the roughly rectangular floor, creating a building-spanning flex space with windows at both ends. This large light-filled area easily accommodates a row of six separate desks—each seating six—that extension leaves quickly turn into a continuous 50-person table: Close the doors and, voilà, an instant conference room. Folding wall panels allow the long space to be divided in half for smaller meetings.

CollColl Takes Inspiration from Video Games

The architects repeat the blocky landscape trope on the other side of the floor, next to the 50-person conference room, where the floor-to-ceiling geometric pile offers a welcome perch during meeting breaks or to people just wandering around with their laptops. And that points to yet another of the unique structures’ multiple functions, as reassuringly fixed landmarks in the floating world that constitutes Pricefx’s mutable workspace.

Walk Through the Pricefx Offices in Prague 

collcoll: adam kössler; libor mládek; mark kelly

sysloop: lighting consultant

av24: audiovisual consultant

olbert tomáš: woodwork

bauhanz: general engineer

capexus: general contractor

alfeko: custom slide (entrance)

molteni&c: armchairs (café)

Dupont: bar solid-surfacing

studio vono: chairs, barstools

Bosch: oven

XAL: pendant fixtures (meeting room)

lintex: whiteboard

vitra: tables, chairs (meeting room, conference room, av studio)

3deco: wall finishes (meeting room, conference room)

verti: glass partitions (meeting room, conference room)

av24: av equipment (av studio)

barrisol: concealed lighting (grotto)

common seating: ottomans (conference room)

freifrau manufaktur: swing seat

Interface: hard flooring, carpet tile

farrow & ball: paint

Loyola Marymount University Gets a Theatrical Addition

The word design may derive from the Italian verb segnare, meaning to sign, but Skidmore, Owings & Merrill senior associate principal Carlos Madrid III eschewed a splashy signature in favor of cultivating a sense of community in two recent projects at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The School of Film and Television Undergraduate Building, a four-story slab of teaching spaces with an attached theater—24,000-square-foot in all—and the Drollinger Family Stage, an outdoor performance pavilion, both serve as student magnets that foster and sustain campus life. “The main driver was creating and activating people-oriented buildings,” says Madrid, who led both projects.

The main SFTV building is straightforward, a no-nonsense block of concrete finished in troweled stucco. Its upper levels host flexible multipurpose classrooms while staff offices, post-production classrooms, and a camera directing studio occupy the ground floor, which is pierced by a wide breezeway leading to a landscaped courtyard and the existing SFTV graduate building in back. The 86-seat theater, housed in a separate yet adjoining volume clad in matte silver aluminum panels, sits in front.

SOM Designs The School of Film and Television Undergraduate Building

For Madrid, form did not mean shape—or at least, not unusual shape. Rather, the architect used it to organize patterns of movement and rest around the simple slab, to create an armature for all the in-between moments of student life: getting to and leaving from class; hanging out; sitting down to chat, read, check phone messages. Some interiors have windows but most do not, so Madrid extroverted the introverted program. “We started thinking about how to activate the building’s exterior, putting all the circulation outside,” he says, “so we would see people moving up and down the stairs, like an ant farm.” L.A.’s mild climate allowed him and his team to service the classrooms with outdoor corridors—a stack of cantilevered aerial sidewalks, wide enough to accommodate tables, chairs, and casual encounters alongside bustling foot traffic—with staircases at each end. The whole east facade is populated and alive, a human terrarium, not simply a designed composition.

Madrid veiled the vertical streetscape with a gauzy brise-soleil. Made from pleated sheets of perforated powder-coated aluminum, the semitransparent screen lets breezes flow through the corridors while shielding them from the direct morning sun. The space between the veil and the facade acts as a passive buffer, a naturally regulated microclimate that augments building energy efficiency, exemplifying why SOM is ranked not only 19th among our Sustainability Giants but also 49th amid the 100 Giants.

The firm put additional outdoor square footage to use by turning the adjoining theater rooftop into a planted terrace, which Madrid calls a “meditative space,” while the plaza next to the theater, outfitted with bright yellow umbrellas and café furniture, serves as a shaded patio. All the outdoor zones overlook a wide, landscaped pedestrian mall—the spine of the university complex—which has a pleasingly symbiotic relationship with the SFTV building. “The patio has become one of the most popular places on campus,” Madrid reports. “It’s always active, with people hanging out and classes being taught there.”

Building Interiors Feature Mobile Furnishings

In what was a soup-to-nuts project, Madrid and the SOM team designed and furnished the school’s interiors, addressing requirements for a high-tech electronic infrastructure and highly mobile furniture that’s easily moved or stored for multipurpose classroom flexibility.

Loyola Marymount is a repeat client for which SOM has helmed eight projects over the last decade. The architects have taken contextual clues from the existing modernist buildings, conceiving structures with a simplicity and clarity that fit into the larger ensemble, seeking agreement rather than disruption—a strategy Madrid continued with the Drollinger Family Stage. Asked to design an outdoor theater to support film, dance, and drama, he was able to take the program further, in part because the pandemic proved the relative safety of gathering outside. “The building could be more,” he explains, “a classroom for everyday use, plus a facility for health, wellness, movement, and meditation—not just a place for a performance several nights a week.”

An Innovative Outdoor Theater Designed by SOM 

In devising the 3,200-square-foot open pavilion, Madrid took the formal restraint of the SFTV building to the point of minimalism. Located on a central grassy plaza, the stage comprises a low concrete podium with a row of eight slender columns on each side supporting a canted roof that seems to hover weightlessly 24 feet above the ground. In fact, the canopy incorporates a hefty grid of 2-foot-deep perforated steel beams, its coffered underside packed with lighting and audiovisual systems. Thanks to its anodized aluminum–clad perimeter soffit, which extends some 10 feet beyond the columns while tapering to a razor-thin edge, the roof appears to have no mass. Slimmer than the trunks of the surrounding palm trees, the steel pillars have no visible lateral bracing to break the structure’s floating spell or block audience sightlines and yet are sturdy enough to accom­modate conduits running up to the ceiling apparatus.

This futuristic bandshell is more than a feat of sophisticated engineering, however. In its purity and symmetry, the pavilion is like a modern take on a garden folly or a cyber-age version of a classical tempietto. Full-length curtains hang ready to encircle the performance area if required. Stirred by breezes from the nearby ocean, the billowing drapes turn the stage into a sailing vessel—a poetic moment singular on campus.

Inside Loyola Marymount University’s New Film and Television Building

skidmore, owings & merrill: paul danna; tannar whitney; karl gleason; brandon horn; wooil kim; abel diaz; john gordon; yanhong liu; lonny israel; kacey bills; nour mourad

mig: landscape consultant

hlb lighting design: lighting consultant

ama group: mep

KPFF: civil engineer

w.e. o’neil: general contractor

fermob: tables, chairs (hall, patio)

ki: tables (classroom), seating (theater)

luum textiles: acoustic panels (classroom, theater), curtains (theater)

Tuuci: umbrellas (patio)

sunbrella: curtains (stage)

alphabet: handrail lighting

chauvet: theater lighting

valmont structure: custom brise-soleil

axis lighting; targetti: light fixtures

alucobond: exterior cladding

automatic devices company: curtain tracks

A Destination-Worthy Addition to a Cape Verde Museum

At about $3 per piece, lids from the steel barrels in which many products are shipped to Cape Verde, an archipelago of 10 volcanic islands off West Africa, were the mother of invention for an addition to the National Center for Handcraft, Art and Design (CNAD). Scores of the multicolored lids, configured into a brise-soleil, populate three sides of the addition, which is in Mindelo, the largest town on the island of São Vicente. The adjustable screen blocks the tropical sun while admitting cooling ocean breezes inside.

More than a functional sunshade, the polka-dot carapace has become a national icon. It also displays, almost like a billboard, the ingenuity, cultural relevance, and ecological thrift regularly practiced by Ramos Castellano Arquitectos. “Everything that comes onto the island arrives in a container or a barrel,” co-principal Moreno Castellano says. “So we made the addition a container for culture, art, and craft by using a material that’s important for our country.”

A sustainable approach to the National Center for Handcraft, Art and Design

Working with local labor, Castellano and co-principal Eloisa Ramos produce homegrown designs that are no less sophisticated for often being built from recycled materials, even scrap. At the modest end of the architectural food chain, the firm punches way beyond its weight, achieving a grass-roots architecture of international stature remarkable for its authenticity, invention, and can-do spirit. Castellano, who is also an artist, professes to use architecture and art “as a social revolutionary tool.”

Trained in Portugal, where Ramos, a native of Mindelo, and Castellano, a native of Sardinia, met in architecture school, the young architects focus their design literacy on solutions as simple as cross ventilation. Their budgets for eco hotels and walk-up apartments built on in-fill urban lots are, characteristically, slim to meager. But they make the most out of the least as a matter of conviction, and practice financial ecology by avoiding a dependency on imported technologies and materials, preferring, for instance, not to order HVAC systems from Europe, which would rely on parts bought at punishing exchange rates.

Ramos Castellano Arquitectos draws inspiration from local materials 

The architects employed local workshops, most within walking or biking distance of their office, to sand, polish, and spray-paint the lids and fabricate the steel armature for the brise-soleil, which opens and closes like a louver. Speaking of their simple, “common sense” building strategies in an island culture, Ramos says, “Materials are our helpers. They allow us to do what we do where we practice.” What is considered “precious” is a matter of judgment, she continues, and lowly materials like the barrels are treasurable since they enabled a practical, affordable, visually effective solution transformed into a cultural symbol.

The CNAD commission involved remodeling and restoring a gracious, 5,000-square-foot colonial-era house located on a prominent square. For the addition, Ramos and Castellano conceived a narrow, five-story building that sits on the footprint of a demolished shed in the adjoining backyard lot. Comprising basement archives, two floors of tall galleries, a third-floor library, a workshop and artist’s residence on the fourth level, and offices on the top, the 11,500-square-foot structure is only one-room deep—a mere 22 feet wide, including the brise-soleil, down its entire 109-foot length. The architects recast the backyard as a patiolike public square linking the old and new buildings and functioning as the museum entry.

Transforming a Cape Verde museum into a cultural icon 

Could this little museum’s joyous architectural music prove to be Cape Verde’s siren song? “We wanted to achieve a Bilbao Effect,” Castellano acknowledges, “to demonstrate that even on this small island in the middle of the Atlantic, you can build things that spread around the world, to counter the feeling that only the most developed countries with the most developed economies can generate amazing architecture.” Francis Kéré did it with his Gando primary school in Burkina Faso, at the very heart of Africa; Ramos and Castellano’s CNAD addition may well do the same for this tiny nation some 400 miles off the great continent’s coast.

Ramos Castellano Arquitectos: zico lopes; bruno kenny; edoardo meneghin; marvin delgado; danil silva; marco dos anjos

los project: lighting consultant

ilidio alexandre: structural engineer

linea light: track lighting

sita: lid paint

Foster + Partners Translates Architectural Classicism into Modernism at the Narbo Via Museum in France

Some commissions might tempt an architect to dial back time. But for the Narbo Via Museum in Narbonne, France, which displays Roman antiquities, Foster + Partners eschewed pediments, columns, capitals, or other elements of literal historicism. Rather the firm worked in a completely contemporary architectural language, combining state-of-the-art concrete construction, prefabricated building components, and simple notions of mass and spatial gravitas to evoke ancient building traditions.

Present-day Narbonne was once Narbo, the first capital of Roman Gaul, and an important Mediterranean riverine port. In the Middle Ages, the city’s Roman buildings and funerary monuments became quarries for constructing fortified walls. Centuries later, in the 1860’s, when the walls were dismantled for a modern, expanding city, antiquarians retrieved stone blocks carved with figures and texts, and stored them in stacks in a Romanesque church. In 2012, Narbonne held an invited competition to build a regional museum and study center for the reliefs, one that would also serve, more broadly, as an introduction to all of Rome in the south of France. The blocks needed a controlled, protective environment, a more effective method of display, and facilities for conservation and research. The ruins of a Roman villa had also been discovered 20 years before, and they needed special accommodation, too.

With their mastery of concrete and masonry, Romans were inspired engineers and builders. But they were, in their way, proto-modernists, producing construction components in a handcrafted “industrial” process for what we would now call systems design. Just down the road in Nîmes, a 24,000-seat amphitheater offers an early example of a systems building, with stones—modular, fitted, and carved, some in distorted, non-Euclidean geometries—that were all sized and shaped for designated positions in the oval structure.

That Roman savoir faire established a precedent for the Foster team, which approached the project with comparable respect, skill, and efficiency, but in an industrialized systems design. Founder and executive chairman Norman Foster himself Romanized the agenda: “Norman was very insistent that if we were expressing the design as massive, it should be massive, to refer to the language of Roman architecture, instead of covering a frame with finishes, as we normally do,” partner and project architect Hugh Stewart notes.

Like a Roman military formation going into battle, the 104,300-square-foot building is square in plan, with walls of dry-packed, pigmented concrete manually tamped in layers—rosy striations that recall the sedimentary rock canyons of Petra, Jordan, carved with Hellenistic funerary temples. Organized in strict rectilinear geometries, the weighty, 32-inch-thick walls convey a monumentality whose traditions reach beyond Rome back to ancient Egypt’s Karnak.

A tall, cathedral-like hall divides the building into two rec­tangular sections. The soaring space houses more than 800 funerary stones, which are stacked in a clifflike grid of galvanized-steel racks. This is the public-facing side of an industrial storage system with a factory-style gantry that allows museum staff on the other side to retrieve any artifact needed for study or conservation. Otherwise, the stones remain in full view of museumgoers, who can access information about them on interactive touchscreens. Dubbed the lapidary wall, the enormous structure turns what would normally be a back-of-house area into an exhibition hall.

The prefabricated concrete roof extends beyond the load-bearing perimeter walls, providing shade from the meridional sun. Since the museum sits on a plinth, all HVAC ducts and the like run under the floor—another very Roman idea—leaving the underside of the roof as an unadorned ceiling. The interior spaces are modular, “to allow a large degree of flexibility and also an interpenetration of public and professional zones,” Stewart says. “The modular approach to planning gives you all sorts of visual axes penetrating the plan.”

The public entry is like the atrium of a Roman house, a lofty courtyard centered on a shallow reflecting pool with a roof opening above. It leads into the larger of the museum’s two constituent sections, which houses galleries for temporary and permanent exhibitions (including appropriately scaled spaces for frescoes and other artifacts from the ruined villa) along with a restaurant, shop, and small auditorium. Meeting rooms, administrative offices, workshops, and research areas occupy the smaller of the two sections, on the other side of the lapidary wall.

With its dry-packed walls, precast-concrete roof, galvanized-steel storage racks and fittings, and polished concrete flooring, the museum is “a true brutalist building: no finishes on anything,” Stewart acknowledges. “The project harks back to the early days of Foster Associates as a kind of modular, lightweight structural building but with a single big difference: much heavier construction.” For a museum about classical architecture, the firm has a produced a classic of modernism that in its clarity, purity, and spare monumentality achieves, without historical pastiche, the authenticity of a Roman build­ing. The two traditions coincide in a regular, repetitive, engineered structure—the language of both.

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foster + partners: norman foster; spencer de grey; david nelson; grant brooker; andy bow; françois curato; angelika kovacic; piers heath; roger ridsdill-smith; fillipo bari; trevor barrett; ariadna barthe cuatrecasas; peter donegan; carole frising; ed garrod; vagelis giouvanos; ricardo candel gurrea; andres harris; helene huang; raphael keane; amanda lyon; berenice del valle moran; adeline morin; raffaella panella; raj patel; alex (zhen) qian; camilla sand; daniel skidmore; thang vu

jean capia: collaborating architect

studio adrien gardère: museum consultant

george sexton associates: lighting consultant

peutz: acoustic consultant

onsitu: audiovisual consultant

oger international: concept engineer

secim: structural engineer

technisphere: environmental engineer; mep

urbalab: civil engineer; landscape consultant

fondeville: general contractor

bourdoncle: custom galvanized steel

sirewall: external walls

velux: skylights

mecalux: custom shelving system

goppion: display cases

Erco: track lighting

planas: gray concrete

OMA and Gruen Associates Design Audrey Irmas Pavilion, Los Angeles

2022 IIDA Winner for Public Space and Commercial Lobbies

Designed by architect Abram M. Edelman and built by Hollywood moguls in 1929, Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple is pure Cecil B. DeMille, a camera-ready, domed architectural extravaganza waiting for a cast of 1,000 congregants. But by the second decade of the new millennium, the synagogue was looking to present a more appealing and open public face for a more inclusive mission.

In 2015, the congregation held a competition for an ecumenical “gathering space” to be built on the temple’s parking lot. The brief was simple: rooms—small, medium, large. The architectural issue was how to design a building that neither cowered from nor competed with the synagogue next door.

Led by partner Shohei Shigematsu with associate Jake Forster, OMA won the competition. The architects basically created a five-story, 54,600-square-foot object-building that, from some angles, looks like a truncated pyramid warped in a distortional field.

The interior organization is straightforward to the point of being diagrammatic. Lobbies, conference rooms, reception spaces, and service facilities flank either side of the hall and chapel in simple, orthogonal layouts. On the roof, OMA cut a circle that opens to a glass-enclosed sunken garden one floor below. A symmetrical set of stairs zigzags through an airy atrium, connecting the plaza entry to the chapel and the planted rooftop above.

Including terrace furniture by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the new pavilion is fresh, spirited, and brash­ly colorful. With a jolting change in visual mode, the contrast in eras jumpstarts the campus into the new millennium.

OMA: SHOHEI SHIGEMATSU; jAKE FORSTER; Jesse catalano; david chacon; caroline corbett; nils sanderson; andrea zalewski; natasha trice; marie claude fares; wesley leforce; sandy yum; jade kwong; shary tawil; joanne chen

Gruen Associates: Debra Gerod

Sou Fujimoto Architects Draws on the Local Landscape for House of Music, Hungary

Beethoven would be pleased. The famously outdoorsy composer of the Pastoral Symphony translated nature into sound, so—were he in Budapest today, encountering the House of Music, Hungary—he would understand its translation into architecture. Just completed, the three-story, 97,000-square-foot cultural facility stands amid woodlands in the capital’s 200-hundred-year-old, 300-acre City Park. Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has designed the building like a forest canopy, with more than 30,000 abstract metallic leaves decorating the ceiling of a shallow, organically shaped dome hovering above a 320-seat glass-enclosed concert hall, a smaller auditorium, and an open-air stage. The striking design bested 170 entries in a competition.

The roof, its underside an airy filigree of gold foliage on a black background, matches the height of the arboreal canopy of the surrounding park, establishing a continuum from real nature outside to built nature inside. “My interest in architecture is how to integrate natural things and architecture,” Fujimoto notes, “not to mix them, but to translate architecture into nature and nature into architecture.” For centuries, composers have responded to the acoustic properties of concert halls, cathedrals, and other performance spaces. Fujimoto adds nature to the equation: The architecture of music and the music of architecture triangulate off his interpretation of trees in a wood.

What makes this metaphor of built nature possible is glass, which distinguishes the House of Music from the type of building that has long hosted Beethoven symphonies. Fujimoto eliminated the opaque walls that have always introverted symphony halls, dematerializing the entire perimeter of the structure with floor-to-ceiling glazing—94 custom panels in all, some almost 39 feet tall. Flat glass provides an acoustically unfriendly surface, but Japanese firm Nagata Acoustics, veterans of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, have ensured warm, blended sound by zigzagging the panels. Performers and audiences make and hear music while seeing the enveloping park, the architecture establishing a synesthetic continuum between notes and nature.

“We were enchanted by the multitude of trees in the City Park and inspired by the space created by them,” says Fujimoto, who is best known in the West for 2013’s miragelike Serpentine pavilion in London and a 2019 apartment building in Montpellier, France, a treelike structure bristling with white, cantilevered terraces and awnings. “I envisaged the open floor plan, where boundaries between inside and outside blur, as a continuation of the park.”

Given the transparency of the ground floor, park visitors can see through the building to the other side. Even inside, they experience the effect of light filtering through a forest canopy and dappling the ground, thanks to nearly 100 apertures that puncture the roof to serve as light wells. Sound waves inspired the undulating roof, which changes in depth, though always remaining lower than the tree line.

The simplicity of a canopy floating over an open interior landscape, however, is only apparent. Comprising three levels, the structure is both an iceberg and a tree house: A permanent exhibition on the history of music, galleries for temporary shows, and a hemispherical dome for audio projections occupy the basement; the ground floor houses the performance venues; and, above the leafy ceiling, attic space in the roof accommodates a library, classrooms, archives of Hungarian pop music, and offices. An irresistible, dramatically sculpted spiral staircase connects all floors. In fine weather, performers on the open-air stage play to an audience on bleachers embedded in the adjoining landscape.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous glass-and-black-steel National Gallery in Berlin established the precedent for a roof hovering over a vast open space with a basement for public functions. Here Mies’s square canopy has been replaced by an organically shaped, decorated form shot through with light. The paradigm has shifted: Nature has replaced the machine, and decoration, the idea of structure. There’s a social shift, too: Transparency allows the public visual access to the inner sanctum, erasing the elitist overtones of a building intended for ticketholders only. Glass helps actualize the goal of a facility invitingly named a “house,” which is to appeal to a wide spectrum of musical tastes, from pop and folk to jazz and classical. The permanent exhibition downstairs uses interactive technology to tell the story of two millennia of European music. The program is educational and embracing rather than exclusionary, its architecture a teaching instrument. Invoking nature through design ingratiates the institution to a broad audience.

The building is the first of several planned for Liget Budapest, a controversial project by the government of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s far-right prime minister, to transform the historic park into a museum district. For all the House of Music’s formal originality, the architect and his team’s design process was conventional: They researched the site, the project’s cultural background, and the whole brief, and then sketched and chatted, eventually arriving at the key concept. “Understanding the fundamental relationship between people and people, and people and nature is the core of architecture,” Fujimoto says, concluding on a musical metaphor: “Sticking to the budget, sticking to the surroundings, reacting to the requirements—everything is harmonized.”

Joseph Giovannini Unveils New Book ‘Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde’

This led to a Mardi Gras of formal invention on four continents during the last two decades. Fractured forms, billowing shapes, and delirious spaces in convention centers, museums, and office towers captured headlines, illustrated stamps, and populated the Internet. Architecture Unbound provides a critical voice for an avant-garde little understood as a group, explaining the “why” of all the agita. In a narrative arc suggested by the book’s subtitle, Transgressive, Oblique, Aberrant, Deconstructed, Digital, Giovannini puts into perspective the renegade buildings that bent the right angle, broke the box, and escaped Euclid. Simultaneously a history, critique, and biography of a period, the 832-page book fills a critical void, landing in the field like an event. The cumulative story, based on in-person interviews with architects and visits to buildings as they opened over 35 years, is unusually up close and personal, a living history written intimately from the inside. It cannot now be duplicated: an In Memoriam lists 40 people who died since he started the work.

Giovannini embeds the architecture in a larger cultural history in which artists, musicians, and writers like Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, and Virginia Woolf mingle across time and disciplines with architects. The shift in architecture from static to dynamic mirrors similar shifts in philosophy and science. First Nietzsche and then Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault lifted the philosophical anchor on reason, releasing certainty into drifts of interpretation. Scientists including Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg introduced relativity, probability, and principled uncertainty into a world that no longer seemed so solid. Cubism, futurism, suprematism, surrealism, and dada overthrew art’s tradition of perspective and dissolved pictorial realism. Historically, two world wars, the Depression, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust broke the idea of history as a smooth continuum through time.

But modernists continued to maintain a belief in functionalism, that architecture was a machine for living in. By the 1960’s, however, a few visionaries questioned such certainty: French architect Claude Parent and his philosophical partner, Paul Virilio, set buildings on the oblique, loosening the grip of geometry, emphasizing the physical experience of moving through spaces that pushed and tugged the body. Architects began to break up the whole into parts, exploit curves, and abandon geometrical unities. They joined forces with the computer to build extreme architecture of bewildering complexity and even wonders.

That the avant-garde came in from the margins to radicalize architecture and occupy a central role in the profession is the basis of this unlikely story. But over 700 illustrations show how liberated architects initiated a new and growing branch of architectural history. Walking a thin line between order and disorder, equi­librium and disequilibrium, plumbing the mysteries of the irrational, architects invented fresh astonishments whose function was not only to disrupt but also to fascinate.

OMA Turns to Angular Forms for the Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles

Designed by architect Abram M. Edelman and built by Hollywood moguls in 1929, Los Angeles’s Wilshire Boulevard Temple—a monumental composite of Roman, Romanesque, and Byzantine styles—is pure Cecil B. DeMille, a camera-ready, domed architectural extravaganza waiting for a cast of 1,000 congregants. Still impressive today, the historic structure expresses a time, place, and attitude nearly a century old. But by the second decade of the new millennium, the synagogue was looking to present a more appealing and open public face for a more inclusive mission. Korean and Latino residents now occupy the neighborhoods surrounding the full-block campus, and the starched architectural formality of the 1920’s no longer suited today’s more casual L.A.

In 2015, the congregation held a competition for an ecumenical “gathering space” to be built on the temple’s parking lot. Called the Audrey Irmas Pavilion after the Angeleno philanthropist and art collector who donated $30 million to the campaign, the facility would not only serve the synagogue but also welcome events held by members of other communities. The brief was simple: rooms—small, medium, large.

OMA was one of four finalists, and the project was right up the firm’s alley. In the 1970’s, cofounder Rem Koolhaas had helped rediscover the Russian construc­tivists, whose postrevolutionary buildings incorporated “social condensers,” shared spaces that precipitated collective activities and fostered a sense of community. Such programmatic thinking was in OMA’s DNA. The architectural issue was how to design a building that neither cowered from nor competed with the synagogue next door.

Led by partner Shohei Shigematsu with associate Jake Forster, OMA won the competition. As though signing a noncompete clause with the domed temple, Shigematsu changed the architectural subject, abandoning a historicist narrative in favor of an abstract language of geometric form and chaotic pattern. “It couldn’t be too pretentious,” he says, “so we started from an efficient box.” With three tilted sides, this box was not, however, simple. Two of the facades—one facing the temple, the other the synagogue school—slope backward, providing light and openness for a new plaza and an existing courtyard, respectively; the Wilshire facade slopes forward, reaching out to the urban corridor while sheltering a planted terrace at its foot.

The architects basically created a five-story, 54,600-square-foot object-building that, from some angles, looks like a truncated pyramid warped in a distortional field. “We were aware of the temple as an icon, and didn’t want to interfere with its landmark quality,” Forster notes. “So we imagined something contemporary.” Inspired by ceiling coffers lining the temple’s dome, they wrapped the volume in a grid of hexagonal GFRC panels, most of them inset with variously angled rectangular windows that create a jitterbug pattern on all sides. The oblique facades set off the pavilion against the otherwise orthogonal context of the surrounding buildings, giving the structure a sculptural identity.

Each facade centers on a monumental aperture looking into one of the two main congregational spaces. On the Wilshire elevation, a wide arch offers a telescoping view down a long barrel-vault event hall all the way to the adjacent school. Directly opposite the temple, an enormous trapezoidal opening on the second floor accommodates a covered terrace fronting a chapel that, like the hall, extends to the far facade. The laminated-glass walls wrapping the terrace and chapel are green, harmonizing with the blues of the stained-glass windows in the adjoining synagogue. “Our goal was to create a contextual and targeted porosity to the building, so we punctured the facades from different directions,” Shigematsu explains. “The pavilion opens to the wider community, while complementing and engaging the existing temple,” Forster adds.

The interior organization is straightforward to the point of being diagrammatic. In a biaxial plan, the ground-floor hall and second-floor chapel are stacked perpendicular to each other. Lobbies, conference rooms, bar areas, reception spaces, and service facilities flank either side of the hall and chapel in simple, orthogonal layouts. On the roof, the architects cut a circle that opens to a glass-enclosed sunken garden one floor below, alluding to the temple’s Byzantine dome and establishing a vertical z-axis to the sky. A symmetrical set of stairs zigzags through an airy atrium, connecting the plaza entry to the chapel and the planted rooftop above, “like an Indian stepwell that climbs up,” Forster suggests. “We aimed to build a gathering machine, both formal and informal, at different scales,” Shigematsu says in conclusion, “not just a commercial or conventional event space.”

For all its helter-skelter window patterns and leaning facades, the complexity of the Audrey Irmas Pavilion is more apparent than real. Basically, it’s a box pierced on two levels by double-height voids with ancillary functions fitted between them and the perimeter walls. OMA achieves the maximum impact with a few big moves. The building distinguishes itself from its neighbor both by geometry and attitude: The temple is serious and institutional, bound by tradition and anchored by gravitas; the pavilion is fresh, spirited, and brashly colorful. With a jolting change in visual mode, the contrast in eras jumpstarts the campus into the new millennium. Architectural grandeur and sobriety meets contemporary cool, bringing this stretch of Wilshire into the hip and now.

OMA: jesse catalano; david chacon; caroline corbett; nils sanderson; andrea zalewski; natasha trice; marie claude fares; wesley leforce; sandy yum; jade kwong; shary tawil; joanne chen

Gruen Associates: architect of record

Studio-MLA: landscaping con­sul­tant

Spaceagency: graphics consultant

L’Observatoire International: Lighting consultant

Arup: structural engineer; mep

Rhyton Engineering: civil engineer

Millworks by Design: woodwork

Matt Construction: general contractor

SDC Lab: furniture (terrace)

Lindner: metal-mesh ceiling (terrace, chapel)

Navy Island: acoustic paneling (hall)

Eurocraft Architectural Metal: custom fence (exterior)

west coast industries: custom benches (atrium)

vitra: chairs (conference room)

American Standard: sinks, sink fittings (restroom)

Cepac Tile: penny tile

Figueras: chairs (chapel)

Durodesign: flooring

Stromberg: facade panels

QCP: concrete pavers, planters

Steel City Glass: curtain-wall fabrication

Oldcastle: glass

Goldray: glass lamination

Sefar: mesh interlayers

Vanceva: color interlayers

Corradini Corp.: terrazzo flooring

Trademark Concrete Systems: concrete flooring

Johnson Favaro and Diane Lam Design Eschew the Expected for the Riverside Main Library in California

America’s postwar suburbanization has not been kind to its downtowns. But some U.S. city centers are staging a quiet comeback. In a certain Southern California city with a population of 326,000, the new Riverside Main Library by Johnson Favaro is catalyzing the turnaround of a downtown now aimed at more business, greater walkability, and increasing residents in more sustainably designed buildings.

The handsome, sculptural library, its squared mass raised two stories over a public plaza, is the first part of a 2½-acre, mixed-use development with high-rise housing and retail stores, all of which the firm master planned after winning a 2017 competition. At the turn of the last century, the City Beautiful movement used beaux arts buildings to shape dignified public spaces; now Johnson Favaro is using modernist design to create comparably grand structures to dignify the civic environment.

Just down the street, Riverside already boasted the sprawling Mission Inn, an extravaganza of Spanish revival styles built over several decades in the early 20th century. The imaginative building, a designated national historic landmark, elevated expectations for the 38,670-square-foot library. “But the city had seen enough knock-offs, so we emphasized the need for something authentic that would contribute a statement of our time and could match the stature of the buildings they love,” notes principal Steve Johnson, who met co-principal Jim Favaro when they were both students at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The full-block site, occupied by an old police station and parking lots, had deteriorated. “There was no there there,” Johnson observes. “We sought to make a downtown neighborhood.” To integrate the library and mixed-use buildings into the adjacent business and Mission Inn areas, Johnson Favaro proposed a paseo running down the middle of the development, connecting the avenues on either side. A shaded plaza under the elevated library would serve as a general event space for a farmer’s market, book and food fairs, and festivals. The ensemble would become a destination for the entire town.

The architects maximized the library’s presence by designing the front facade as a bold, declarative block surfaced in porcelain tile printed like marble, all lifted on blocklike concrete cores housing the building systems. They wrapped the blocks with smaller structures—aluminum-and-glass boxes or red metal–clad rectangular prisms containing a friends-of-the-library bookstore, the city archives, a community room, and other complementary facilities.

The 50-foot-high, 200-foot-long facade acts like an Old West storefront behind which the building transforms into arching prows that scoop out a wide, landscaped terrace and a long balcony overlooking the future paseo. The squared, straight-edged facade, centered on a distorted, parabolic view window, is a foil and datum for the scalloped rear facade, which reads as a monumental piece of public art pedestalized on its base like an elevated Henry Moore sculpture.

A glass-enclosed elevator takes visitors from the plaza to the library entrance on the balcony. The adult reading section occupies the upper floor of the lifted volume, and the children’s and young adult section, the lower. A generous, open interior staircase connects the levels, domesticating the interior as if it were a two-story house. Traditionally, libraries are organized around a large reading room, but Johnson Favaro turned the interior inside out, like a sock, placing seating and study carrels in the double-height perimeter for viewing the spectacular San Gabriel, San Bernardino, and Box Spring mountains to the north, and Mt. Rubidoux to the west.

Because libraries no longer simply warehouse books but also act as community centers, the firm broke up the stacks into a landscape of neighborhoods devoted to different activities for various age groups. That suggested different approaches for each of the spaces to Diane Lam, principal of her eponymous studio specializing in library design, a frequent collaborator who led the interiors team. “I looked at each room individually,” Lam says. “I placed tangerine Panton chairs at the end of the visual corridor in the children’s area to complement the explosion of orange, yellow, blue, and green in that whimsical space. In the entrance ‘marketplace,’ the white shells of the lounge chairs echo the soft curves of the window and the white exterior. Furnishings that picked out architectural details made the spaces feel more complete.”

The handsomely designed stacks are generously scaled with wide corridors, some furnished. The clean detailing of the white, gently vaulted upper-floor ceiling sails over the space, unifying sections. The lower-floor ceiling is painted with rectangles of bright colors that refer to the different cultures of Riverside’s diverse constituencies. The architects and the designer have fused form and program inside and out to coalesce a sense of community and urbanize the library with activity. The programming and physical placement on the site help create a connective social and urban tissue with nearby Market Street and the Mission Inn.

“The challenge was to design a building of stature that still adheres to a public budget—to defend things like double-height spaces and porcelain tiles against value engineering,” Favaro observes. “Our goal was to accomplish something as good as those old beaux arts buildings, but in a modern vocabulary.”

To see more about the design process from planning to opening, watch the full video.

Johnson Favaro: brian davis; kevin geraghty; dexter walcott; hongjie li

linda demmers: library consultant

EPT Design: landscape consultant

Randy Walker: graphics consultant

darkhorse light­works: lighting consultant

Antonio Acoustics: acoustic consultant

Englekirk Institutional: structural engineer

interface engineer­ing: mep

sherwood design engineers: civil engineer

cima west: woodwork

yamada enterprises: furniture supplier

MGAC: construc­tion manager

icon-west: general contractor

davis: sofa, chairs, low tables (entry), black chairs (innovation)

arper: white task chairs (entry)

naughtone: GRAY lounge chairs (ENTRY, children’s)

Steelcase: white side tables (ENTRY, children’s), furniture (terrace), tables (children’s)

bloom lighting: custom ceiling fixture (children’s)

Arcadia: modular bench

TMC: gray ottomans

Bentley Mills: rug

urban accessories: tree grates (terrace)

Bega: sconces, in-ground floodlights

vitra: side chairs (chil­dren’s)

delray lighting: pendant fixtures

ocl architectural lighting: pendant fixtures (innovation)

designtex: wallcovering

Mannington Commercial: floor tile

bernhardt design: lounge chairs

momentum textiles: chair upholstery

herman miller: table

stonepeak ceramics: exterior tile

sto corp.: exterior limestone finish

kawneer: curtain wall

alpolic: exterior panels

pyrok: acoustical ceiling plaster

estey shelving: custom book­shelves

worden casegoods: custom carrels

umenwerx; philips light­ing: lighting

vista paint: paint