Project Size: 1,500 square feet
Slow Built Studio’s first major residential commission, this duplex apartment renovation is located on the top floors of a nine-story co-op loft building in the Ladies Mile Historic District in Manhattan. Just south of the Flatiron Building on 5th Avenue, the landmark Beaux-Arts building was originally home to the Lord & Taylor department store.
The project includes a new stair, floor slab alterations at the top story to create new privacy partitions, closet space, and expanded master bath, as well as a new kitchen, pantry, bar, study, and guest bathroom at entry floor below. New millwork and lighting throughout was designed to be beautifully crafted but recede into the background to focus attention on the existing beauty of the building’s structure and materials.
The intention was to try to make the architectural interventions as minimal as possible, because many parts of the building were already remarkable. The white curvature of the terracotta and iron vaults on the ceiling of the lower floor and the abundant natural light on the upper provided all of the elements required for a phenomenal space.
A muted color and material palette of grey stone, white porcelain, plaster, marble, and darkened oak millwork and flooring was employed to create a simple and lasting aesthetic that will grow richer and more sophisticated with age.
Project Size: 7 buildings on 15 acre site on 320 acre historic district
Since late 2020, Slow Built Studio has been working pro bono for the Saginaw Chippewa in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, a city located at the center of their reservation lands as established by treaties with the US government in 1855 and 1864. Our designs attempt to address the tragic history of the site of the former Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School (MIIBS), a federally run institution that operated there from 1893 to 1934. For forty years the school served as a site of federally sponsored assimilation for Native children taken from families throughout the Midwest, creating a generational loss of language and culture in indigenous communities that continues to be felt. Originally located on eight 40-acre allotments, the school’s 320 acres included several classroom, dormitory, and workshop buildings, set within a rural campus bisected by a creek and a stretch of hardwood forest, with a significant area of farmland which children at the school were expected to work. In 2011 and 2013, the City and State conveyed almost 15 acres of this land back to the Tribe, land which included seven historic buildings, while nearly 300 acres were conveyed to the City of Mount Pleasant for future development. During the past decade, the Tribe’s Boarding School Committee has worked diligently to have the entire 320-acre district added to the National Register of Historic Places. This distinction was granted in 2018, but the future of the site is still uncertain. The city-owned land remains outside of Tribal control, and the buildings are in various states of disrepair after years of deferred maintenance and neglect.
The plan for the Tribe’s reclamation of the site was initially developed through a series of visioning workshops held by the MIIBS Committee starting in 2014. It seeks to invert the school’s legacy, turning it into a multi-purpose site for a new type of education: the revitalization and perpetuation of Anishinaabe arts, culture, and language. This approach was propelled by five programmatic concepts favored in surveys held between 2019 and 2021: language and storytelling, traditional and contemporary arts, healing and treatment for historical trauma, a boarding school museum, and a memorial. Supporters of this vision for the site propose that it could give current and future generations the opportunity to recover elements of their identities that went missing when relatives and ancestors attended the school. Similar Native-led processes of decolonization have been described by Ojibwe authors like Wendy Makoons Geniusz and Patty Krawec as biskaabiiyang, or “returning to ourselves.”
Over the course of our study of the buildings we have developed priorities for preservation and renovation. Out of the seven existing buildings, we've identified three key buildings that are the most likely candidates for reuse. The overall strategy is to change the buildings as little as possible, while stabilizing and repairing them to maintain an architectural state that is close to the gradually declining campus that exists today. This likely means new windows and doors, and repairs to the brick and structural elements, but not new finishes or major changes to the interiors. This light-touch approach seems to be the most appropriate and respectful way to acknowledge the history of the site and honor the children who were here. It preserves the buildings as a testament to their memories, and leaves the structures here as incontestable proof of the school’s existence, without significantly altering their presence. In most cases, the aim will be to let the silence within each building speak for itself.
Project Size: 50 square feet
A collaboration between Slow Built Studio and bags
Rotted two-by-fours, possum skeletons, plywood sheets filled with ant larvae, fist-sized wasp nests, mold. Such pieces of ecological detritus are typically thought to exist outside the sphere of design, conceptualized as separate or threatening to architecture, but elements like these are ever present in buildings, despite the desire to suppress or control them.
The Brook Hill Bothy is a project that seeks a more inclusive inventory. A case study in material salvage and reuse, this design emphasizes human and non-human interdependence through a method called “ecological sistering.” When used in construction, sistering means to strengthen a structural member by fastening a second alongside it. Inherent to this particular act of repair is the structural interdependence of paired parts—a joining that makes each part stronger. We designed this prototype using a broader theory of sistering. Through a focus on the process of deconstruction and radical reuse, as well as on designing and building for multispecies cohabitation, we expand what it means to sister through structural, ecological, and material network interdependencies that blur building boundaries and deep-seated modernist binaries.
The original structure was a simple 6’ x 8’ shed located at the edge of a northern hardwood forest in Hamden, Connecticut. Its weathered wood-frame stood for at least forty years, with gradually diminishing use and worsening deterioration. The floor had been softened by years of seasonal moisture. Its door was missing. Parts of the sheathing were riddled with holes. Lacking in maintenance and care for decades, it had reached a state somewhere between use and end-of-life. Our primary design intent was to rebuild a new version of the structure using as much of the original material as possible. In the year-long process of meticulously deconstructing the shed, we measured, inventoried, de-nailed, sorted, cleaned, treated, digitally modeled, and stored nearly all of the component materials that had made up its structure. Our inventory informed what might be possible in the new design.
However, during the process of deconstruction and material processing, we encountered many other species that called the shed home. From the carpenter bees burrowing in the ridge beam to ant colonies dwelling in studs; from a family of possums nestling between the floor joists, to cardinals perching on the windowsill—there were occupants everywhere. These encounters spurred a separate inventory of cohabitants. We recognized that despite its apparent decline from a human perspective, the shed had been far from an unused structure.
We thus expanded the design brief beyond material reuse, to consider how humans might share the space with the multitude of existing dwellers. In designing for this cohabitation, we came to understand the structure as a “bothy” - akin to the simple dwellings in the Scottish Highlands that are left unlocked for anyone to use. Bothies may have varying ownership structures but are meant for common use, dissolving assumptions about property and redistributing the right of use to all. This particular bothy extends this shared resource beyond the human sphere.
Project With: Daoust Lestage
Project Size: 19.5 km line with 25 stops, 15 of them underground stations
The Eglinton Crosstown Light Rail Transit (ECLRT) is a $6 billion P3 project that aims to bring well-designed public transit infrastructure to Toronto, the largest and fastest-growing city in Canada. As part of Crosslinx, a consortium of nearly 30 companies, Daoust Lestage was charged with managing and directing the Design Excellence requirements of the contract.
A first for a project of this scale in Canada, the agreement with the local authorities required that the entire 20 km, 25-stop metro line be united by an aesthetically elevated design language. As Design Excellence Lead, our team developed the guiding principles, building massing and materials, overarching design narrative, and kit-of-parts approach that helped win the competition. From there the team was tasked with developing the design, including key details in steel, precast concrete and glass, which would be repeated at each of the stops in the system. The role also required coordinating the efforts of the many architectural and engineering firms that were responsible for each individual segment and station. The goal was to ensure the production of a cohesive series of public spaces, and to maintain the highest level of quality throughout all design and construction phases.
Images courtesy of Daoust Lestage / Crosslinx
Project With: Daoust Lestage
Project Size: 8,075 sq m
One of 15 underground stations on the Eglinton Crosstown light rail transit line, Fairbank is a collection of 3 above-ground buildings and associated public spaces that sit atop a multi-level station below. Designed, developed, and documented in Revit, this BIM level 2 project had many of the attributes of a level 3 collaboration. Models from consultants and engineers were referenced and updated in real-time from a centrally shared server, and architectural and engineering components were modeled and coordinated to a near-shop-drawing level of detail, including all electrical conduit to be embedded in concrete.
The three above-ground structures follow the system-wide strategies and signature architectural language developed by the Design Excellence team. Public spaces are expressed as transparent glass boxes that are often paired with opaque masses housing technical equipment. These technical boxes are given rhythm and scale by a textured, white precast concrete cladding.
The main entrance building is designed to handle the greatest number of passengers. It contains a ground-level retail space meant to animate the street, and its glass volume faces out towards the adjacent plaza, which is outfitted with new trees, planters, and illuminated misting pavers that create a unique atmosphere for the public space throughout the day and night.
Across the street, the secondary entrance is a simple, linear glass volume that houses a single stair and announces the entrance to the west side of the station on a narrow sidewalk site. The third structure is located directly to the south, and has no public entrance. This technical building houses one portion of the tunnel ventilation equipment, part of an enormous system that accounts for a significant proportion of the floor space at each station. The street facade of this building was nonetheless carefully studied to fit the scale and cornice line of adjacent buildings, and features a glazed curtain wall with a supergraphic pattern, and a canopy to shelter the bike storage below.
Images courtesy of Daoust Lestage / Crosslinx
This set of maps was commissioned to illustrate a new edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, annotated by Merve Emre and published in 2021 by W.W. Norton.
To create a map of the places and pathways described in Mrs. Dalloway is an exercise in connection. The act of mapping each of the many subtle and specific moments that play out across the book's pages reveals a sophisticated weaving of places, characters, physical monuments, and the collective histories and memories that bind them together. While Woolf may have known the area well enough from years of wandering its streets herself to have orchestrated this complexity solely in her notebooks and the spaces of her mind, there are so many significant details that emerge from examining the urban fabric of Mrs Dalloway's London that one begins to suspect that she must have some version of these maps hanging on her wall as she wrote.
Alternately described as "contrary winds", "tides of the body", "two forces meeting in a swirl", or the "Communication" that Septimus recognizes as the source of both health and happiness, the intertwined lives of others (friends and strangers alike) are clearly traced as they move through the streets of the city over the course of a single day.
"And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread...which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one’s friends were attached to one’s body...by a thin thread, which... became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider’s thread is blotted with raindrops, and, burdened, sags down”.
Project With: Sage and Coombe Architects
Project Size: 14,000 sf
The Buckley School is a 100-year-old independent day school for boys, grades K-9 in the Upper East Side Historic District in Manhattan. In 2012, the school acquired two 5-story townhouses with a shared party wall across the street from their existing facilities. The brick and brownstone facades were meticulously restored as the two buildings were hollowed and combined into 4 levels of full-floor classrooms, an entry level with a lobby, and a cellar level housing auxiliary spaces. New structural and mechanical systems were built within this 19th century shell to provide the school with a state-of-the-art science, music, and art facility while minimizing impact on the neighborhood and preserving the scale and character of the historic street.
This project presented a unique challenge: How could new, cutting-edge spaces be created within a physical and institutional framework that was distinctively “old school”? The answer lay in creating spaces and using materials that reflected the Buckley School’s history and traditions, but in a way that could leave them open to adaptation and change. By compressing required egress, elevator and restroom spaces to a maximally efficient footprint on one side of the building, we avoided the traditional schoolhouse model of corridors with multiple classrooms. Each floor above grade thus emerged as an expansive, loft-like room that could be subdivided into zones to suit the school’s current needs while providing flexibility for changing technologies, curricula, and larger numbers of students. Like the physical and structural endoskeleton that brought new life to the historic buildings themselves, the project introduced new spaces for teaching and learning to a revered institution.
The project integrated green building principles in water management, daylighting, and natural ventilation. The MEP systems and fixtures utilized the latest technology and enhanced commissioning to reduce consumption of energy and water. The building included significant amounts of outdoor space for a Manhattan school, with terraces located on three levels on the building’s southern side. Space for outdoor planting was provided adjacent to the Life Science classroom, and green roofs with adaptive sedums were featured in several locations for water retention and educational demonstration.
Images courtesy of Sage and Coombe Architects and Paul Warchol
Project With: Plan B Architecture and Urbanism
In 2011, Plan B Architecture and Urbanism in New Haven developed the design and construction documents for WorldIndexer, an exhibition at the Chengdu Architecture Biennale that explored the implications of population growth and resource use across the globe. We presented the work at the Eye on Earth Summit, a global conference for resource conservation and GIS data in Abu Dhabi later that year.
In 2015, Plan B drew on WorldIndexer to create "The City of 7 Billion," an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture based on the firm’s 2013 AIA Latrobe Prize-winning proposal. Along with the help of a large team of designers and fabricators, Plan B developed "Construction Documents" for the City of 7 Billion, a series of drawings that served as the conceptual framework for understanding the complexity of global urbanism. The resulting drawings were displayed throughout the Yale School of Architecture gallery along with models during the Fall of 2015.
Images courtesy of Plan B Architecture and Urbanism
Project With: Michael Maltzan Architecture
Project Size: 96,000 square feet
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Administration Building builds on the Lab’s legacy as a world-renowned icon in its NASA field center, located in the hills outside of Pasadena, California. The new design anchors JPL’s public façade both on the federal campus and beyond. The pentagonal form is strategically eroded and crisscrossed by interior and exterior voids that create public and private spaces for formal meetings and informal gatherings. These collaborative spaces are essential to enhancing the cross-disciplinary work done within the building, especially in an institution with a closed-office mentality like JPL.
The design team created programming and planning exercises, precedent studies, drawing sets, and countless massing and study models, as well as several presentation models at multiple scales. In the SD and DD phases of the project, the team coordinated the design of the facade system, which required well over 200 iterations of various window and metal panel patterns, sizes, shapes, and materials. In conversation with the design principal, project architect, facade consultants, structural engineers and fabricators, the team developed a functional and affordable system that could still achieve the desired aesthetic effect.
Images courtesy of Michael Maltzan Architecture
Project With: Sage and Coombe Architects
Project Size: 28,000 sf
Sage and Coombe Architects was selected to prepare a Master Plan for the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue (BHS) in the fall of 2014. Founded in 1960, the BHS has made its home for the past two decades in a large, brownstone building at 131 Remsen Street near Downtown Brooklyn.
Over that time period, BHS's congregation doubled in size, while their use of educational, community and preschool spaces multiplied, leaving many of the synagogue's rooms crowded throughout the day. In 2013, BHS purchased the adjacent townhouse at 127 Remsen Street and started a related capital campaign to explore options for expansion into the newly acquired property. Sage and Coombe conducted interviews with community leaders, building committee members, and teachers, and led an open community workshop to generate ideas about how the synagogue should use the additional space. In 2015 we developed several phased expansion schemes that addressed programmatic, mechanical, structural and cost concerns while exploring the potential for new, welcoming spaces that could better serve all members of the community.
Images courtesy of Sage and Coombe Architects
