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.
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: 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
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
Project With: Michael Maltzan Architecture
Project Size: 53,000 sf
This 6-story project for the Skid Row Housing Trust provided individual apartments and common spaces for seniors living in an area of Los Angeles with one of the country’s largest homeless populations. The building was situated within 100 feet of the busy US-10 freeway, creating significant acoustic and atmospheric pollution. The shield-like, spiraled exterior was designed to mitigate these problems, and much attention therefore centered upon the open-air courtyard in the middle of the building.
We created several studies that examined the shape, layout, and construction of the steel fin system that rings the inner courtyard, and produced corresponding construction documents that were included in the bid set. Six of the final columns were structural members, tied to steel rings at each floor to create a moment frame, while others acted as rain gutters or methane vents to ensure the design is as functional as it is expressive.
Images courtesy of Michael Maltzan Architecture and Iwan Baan
This design for a new gateway to the Venetian Arsenale emerged from an interest in the many mechanisms that accompany every structure in the world's ancient hub of boat building and technical innovation, building upon and preserving a tradition in which the machine is as much a piece of significant architecture as the buildings that surround it.
After countless years of neglect, Venice has started to save what remains of its technical architecture with its accumulated sediment of centuries of experimentation, of technical and theoretic innovations and the labor of generations of shipwrights, blacksmiths, sailors and engineers. The gloomy beauty of the Arsenale, which once so enthralled Dante and Piranesi, today plays host to a number of new activities, thanks to the majesty and the generous proportions of its spaces.
The program for this design included gallery and performance spaces, and also required the design and fabrication of a full scale prototype piece of furniture to accompany the architectural project. The mahogany and steel dining chair that resulted was designed to resonate with the mechanisms and supportive structures that have the power to reinvigorate historic masonry structures. Using only mechanical connections, the steel armature supports and unites the two solid slabs of milled hardwood, balancing their gravity against lighter support, like a preserved artifact in the Arsenale.