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Letter from the Chair
By Marika Snider, AIA, SPP Advisory Group Chair, 2015
Congratulations to the 2015 SPP Awards winners who responded creatively to the AIA Awards theme, “Pleasure.” The projects, ranging from modern houses to innovative installations, all showcase the idea of creating pleasure through the built environment. The project with the simplest program, Centennial Chromagraph, by Adam Marcus, uses the ubiquitous number 2 pencil, in 11 colors, to create a complex and beautiful sculpture to honor the graduates of the school of architecture.
This year’s winners include four urban interventions, each of which expresses playfulness differently and at different levels of complexity. Doris K. Sung uses materials that literally change form with the temperature in Bloom. The Levitt Pavilion at SteelStacks, by Antionio Javier Fiol-Silva, helps transform the former steel mill into an entertainment venue by providing a dynamic stage shelter. The Principal Riverwalk Pavilion by Paul Mankins not only creates a protected interior space and public services but also helps to define the urban landscape and provide a venue for public art. The fourth urban intervention, The Lawn on D, by Bryan Irwin, is even less of a building than the previous pavilions. Yet, the architect has designed a wonderful outdoor space, animating this formerly bleak site.
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Letter from the Editor: SPP Activities and Events
By Carolyn Adams, AIA
This issue of the Small Project Practitioners Journal celebrates the accomplishments of the 2015 SPP Awards recipients. Their inspiring projects prove that small project design is alive and thriving at a variety of scales and building types, from portable shelters, to ingenious installations, to noteworthy civic structures. Small projects can, indeed, have a large presence.
About the 2015 AIA Small Project Awards
The Small Project Practitioners (SPP) Knowledge Community presents the eleventh annual Small Project Award Program to recognize the work of small project practitioners and to promote excellence in small project design. This Award Program strives to raise public awareness of the value and design excellence that architects bring to all project types, including renovations and additions, no matter the limits of size and budget.
This year’s Small Project Award theme, PLEASURE, intends to recognize projects that express joy and pleasure through architecture. After the lessons learned through the recent difficult economic years, it's time to embrace pleasure in architecture. This may include powerfully joyous spaces or subtle pleasure in materials, color, or light. Please view all recipients on the 2015 AIA Small Project Awards page.
Category 1
A small project construction, object, work of environmental art or architectural design element up to $150,000 in construction cost.
Bloom: An Environmentally Responsive and Zero-Energy Surface System
Doris K. Sung
Los Angeles, CA
USC School of Architecture
Challenging the traditional presumption that building skins are static and inanimate, this temporary project examines the replacement of this convention with one that posits the prosthetic layer between man and his environment as a responsive, active and biomimetic skin. Using sheet thermobimetal, an inexpensive “smart” material that automatically curls when heated, building skins can self-ventilate and sun-shade, while reducing dependency on mechanical air conditioning as well as indirectly decreasing a city’s “heat island” effect.
Centennial Chromagraph
Adam Marcus
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Variable Projects
Centennial Chromagraph is an architectural installation constructed in the interior central Courtyard of Ralph Rapson Hall on occasion of the centennial anniversary of the University of Minnesota School ofArchitecture. The project is an experiment in “data spatialization”- using computational design and digital fabrication tools to generate formal and spatial constructions with large quantities of data - in this case, information sampled from the School’s 100-year history.
Category 2
A small project construction, up to $1,500,000 in construction cost.
Pleated House
Sebastian Schmaling
Door County, Wisconsin
Johnsen Schmaling Architects
This small house for a graphic designer and her husband sits on the heavily wooded eastern shore of Wisconsin’s Door County, a narrow peninsula on Lake Michigan. Embedded in a dense forest of deciduous and coniferous trees, the building’s unassuming volume is quietly nestled in a small clearing at the western edge of the gently sloping site, its low-slung silhouette virtually disappearing in the surrounding vegetation.
Principal Riverwalk Pavilion
Paul Mankins
Des Moines, Iowa
Substance Architecture
This 2,200 square foot pavilion and plaza occupy a prominent site along the Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. The building is a key part of the new Principal Riverwalk - a $50 million public/private partnership which will revitalize the riverfront and draw Des Moines’ residents back to the river. The building sits adjacent to a new recreational trail, street level promenade and riverfront promenade anchoring the west end of the historic Court Avenue Bridge.
The Lawn on D
Bryan J. Irwin
Boston, MA
Sasaki Associates
The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA) is gearing up for a major expansion of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCEC), beginning in 2016. This expansion - which will allow Boston to compete for top tier conventions - will require additional hotel rooms, parking garages, supporting retail, and, critically, a vision and identity for D Street. D Street was - until the construction of the Lawn on D this past summer - a bleak and under-used landscape composed mostly of vacant lots, aged industrial buildings, and surface parking.
Category 3
A small project construction, object, work of environmental art, or architectural design under 5,000 SF
Quonochontaug House
Maxwell R. Worrell
Charlestown, RI
Bernheimer Architecture PLLC
A weekend retreat for a family in coastal Rhode Island, Quonochontaug House is organized around an open-plan ground floor punctuated by a series of double-height skylit spaces that progress from entry to bay view. The skylight volumes, which alternate around an east-west axis defined by the pool terrace (to the east) and the ocean (to the west), taper at their apex to the dimension of standard skylights, which provide shifting and ephemeral natural light patterns throughout the day, varying across seasons and changes in the sky and weather.
The Levitt Pavilion at SteelStacks
Antonio Javier Fiol-Silva
Bethlehem, PA
Wallace Roberts & Todd (WRT)
The Levitt Pavilion is the focal point of the 9.5-acre SteelStacks Arts and Cultural Campus, part of the larger re-development of the former Bethlehem Steel mill, source of steel for many iconic structures like the Golden Gate Bridge and Chrysler building. By design, the mill’s five 20-story blast furnaces, iconic in their own right, form a dramatic backdrop the newly created 21st Century Town Square project. Knitted together in its repurposed industrial landscape are four plazas, a playground, a picnic area, and at the heart of it stands the Levitt Pavilion.
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