Two Hulls House

Between the Sea and the Sky: Evoking maritime images and experiences from the architects' past, a house for a young family reaches out to the water.

Most architects say they start each project with a blank slate. Brian MacKay-Lyons, though, talks about creating a body of work over 27 years; he isn't afraid of describing a new design as “consistent.” “You build on the shoulders of the project before, so you get a little better each time. I haven't gotten tired of that,” says MacKay-Lyons, who practices with partner Talbot Sweetapple in Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

The architects stress “place, craft, and community” in shaping their buildings. In their part of the world that means “it's always going to be a box,” states MacKay-Lyons, explaining that in a climate that shifts from freeze to thaw about 250 times a year, icicles will form on eaves and simple lines work best. 

“Then we cut openings in the box like Matta-Clark going at it with a chain saw.” If you look closely at the firm's projects, you'll notice the subtle evolution. The Two Hulls House, which perches on the rocky coast about two hours south of Halifax, strikes a more dramatic pose than its predecessors, for example.

 “Over the years, we've become more and more clear about how our buildings relate to the ground and how they meet the sky,” says MacKay-Lyons.

The glaciated geology and crashing waves at the site of the house pushed the architects to raise the 3,360-square-foot structure on concrete piers and cantilever its twin pavilions 32 feet out toward the sea. 

The architects, both of whom grew up in the Maritime provinces, remember playing under the hulls of ships in dry docks as kids and tried to capture that experience with this house. So they even wrapped the undersides of the pavilions in wood and left enough space for people to stand (or stoop) underneath. 

“We wanted the house to float,” says Sweetapple, “and to let people inhabit the space between the building and the ground.” The pair of long boxes sliding past one another was also inspired by Glenn Murcutt's Marie Short House in Australia. “Glenn has been a mentor since 1985,” says MacKay-Lyons.

At first, the architects planned to use timber frames for the pavilions and clad them with corrugated metal. But building wood cantilevers would have been expensive, so they switched to steel frames and cedar cladding. To link the two pavilions, they designed a wood-clad block on the landside of the house that pushes through one and just touches the other.

The clients are a couple of doctors originally from Brazil and their two daughters. They have a place in Halifax but plan eventually to use the Two Hulls House as their primary residence. “We fell in love with the coast here,” says the husband, “so finding the right place to build [on the 75-acre site] was really important.” They settled on a hill that affords views to a pair of sandy beaches on either side of a rocky promontory.

One pavilion serves daytime functions such as living and dining, while the other one houses the bedrooms. 
The linking block acts mostly as a spacious foyer with a broad set of wood steps up to the night pavilion, while it also pushes through the day wing to define the kitchen. 

Two studies (one for the kids and one for the adults) anchor the landside of the pavilions, providing cavelike counterpoints to the pair of covered decks that project out to the water. Floor-to-ceiling glazing at the tall end of each pavilion brings in enough daylight to reduce the use of electric lighting, while cross ventilation in the narrow structures eliminates the need for air-conditioning.

“This house is about dwelling in the landscape and knowing where you are in the universe,” says MacKay-Lyons. Sitting on one of the decks, staring out to sea or at the stars at night, you certainly feel connected to the great outdoors, even if you can't quite fathom your place in the cosmos.

Completion Date: November 2011

Size: 3,360 square feet

Total construction cost: withheld

Architect: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects Ltd.

I-House

Masahiko Sato is the name of a Japanese architect who designed the I-House in Nagasaki, Japan. The structure stands atop a small hill, easily recognizable from the street due to its bright white colour and its intriguing shape. Facing the sea on south it benefits of a seemingly ideal location for any project. An important aspect of this design was to minimize the impact on its surroundings, including the hill in which the house is embedded. The house is accessible by a winding path. Inhabitants enter the first floor and can access three more levels – one lower and two higher. The facade oriented towards the street is almost completely windowless in order to guide all of the sight and views towards the sea. Another advantage of this house is a sloped facade enabling an abundance of light to enter the interior.

Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh

Urban revival Carolina style: Located in a restored produce warehouse, an innovative art center links past and present in an emerging historic district with a promising future.

One of the country's “best” and “fastest-growing” cities (according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek and Forbes), Raleigh has a lot going on in and around its 144 square miles: North Carolina state government facilities, major universities, a vibrant tech industry, and a multifaceted cultural scene. Luckily, a quorum of local officials, professionals, and entrepreneurs strives for an urbanscape that both looks to the future of this small, thriving metropolis and retains its Southern charms.

The city's busy downtown is a hybrid collection of buildings dating from the 18th century to a new convention center and Marriott. Just a block away, the Depot Historic District resonates with the vernacular of its heyday (from the 1880s to the 1950s) as a commercial railroad hub. The four blocks of low-rise brick warehouses, factories, and depots appear to be frozen in time. But stretching out among them, the bold, cantilevered canopy of Raleigh's Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) serves as a vivid affirmation that the neighborhood is moving forward.

A non-collecting museum, CAM Raleigh showcases the work of emerging artists. It is affiliated with North Carolina State University, and hosts educational programs for community schools. So while this museum did not require special climate-control systems, the directors did ask the architects to include space for a learning center and for special events. They also wanted the architecture to echo CAM's innovative agenda.

Designed by the Los Angeles–based Brooks + Scarpa, the recently completed CAM is already an icon in the area, which feels a lot like New York City's SoHo in the 1970s. Extant businesses stand alongside a growing number of galleries, design studios, shops, and watering holes in restored spaces, with some thoughtful mixed-use developments at the periphery of the neighborhood. The city is also building a new light-rail terminal here that will guarantee commuter traffic. Design principal Lawrence Scarpa, whose firm had a small office in Charlotte at one time, picked up on this vibe and developed a scheme that exploits the 21,000-square-foot structure's “good bones.”

The two-story masonry warehouse was built for a blacksmith in 1910, then enlarged slightly by Brogden Produce 15 years later. When CAM purchased the property in 1997, its northern elevation was completely covered with metal panels. Scarpa stripped the facade, restoring the brick and glazing the three bays underneath. Then he cleared the interior, leaving the original steel and masonry intact, and integrating mechanicals and insulation so that the place feels like it might have when it was built. In the first of two significant moves, Scarpa sliced through the thick concrete floor, where a large coal chute once divided the slightly raised main volume from the 1925 street-level addition. This allows a new basement gallery to connect with two open, split-level galleries above, via a steel mesh bridge and stairs. A ramp and new elevator (configured within the old cage) provide universal access to the sub-grade gallery, office, and art preparation room.

In a grand gesture, meant to be as much art as functional device, Scarpa added a 900-square-foot glazed entrance pavilion along the east elevation, creating a sculpture garden out front. Taking his cues from the loading dock it was replacing, he played with the shed roof in plan, folding it into an origami-like plane that dips and sails out from the building and flows into the lobby as a ceiling, for a fluid transition from outdoor to indoor space.

This ethereal tour de force is made of steel beams, painted pale blue to mimic a Southern porch ceiling. The beams support a sheer polycarbonate roof on top and an aluminum insect mesh lined with a whimsical array of powder-coated petals underneath.

“The idea is that you have a building from a period that is heavy and permanent,” says Scarpa. “The [canopy] is light and floating, so there is tension between the two—one representing today and the other yesterday.”

Cost: $3,400,000

Completion date: December 2010

Gross square feet: 22,300

Architect: BROOKS SCARPA/CLEARSCAPES

High School #9

Coop Himmelb(l)au’s eclectic design for High School #9 in Los Angeles is ambitious. But does it succeed?

High School #9 commandeers your attention, even as you’re zooming along the Hollywood Freeway in central Los Angeles. Ringed by a roller-coastering ramp, the school’s tower comes into view, a triangle topped by a cantilevered box, like a beach ball balanced on a seal’s nose. Just as Encounter, the futuristic “spaceship” restaurant at the city’s gateway airport, announces the local tone, the school’s dynamic 140-foot-high sentinel has immediate “only in L.A.!” impact. But this landmark’s high visibility and iconic exuberance also make it an unexpectedly complex symbol: a lightning rod for controversy.

The bottom line is HS #9’s final price tag: $232 million for 230,000 square feet (completely fitted out), widely translated as a stunning $1,000 per square foot (though construction and landscaping costs of $171.9 million bring it closer to $745 per square foot). Meanwhile, the project’s most publicly recognized element, the tower, remains an empty shell, pending uncertain completion of its spectacular room at the top. So, for now, this component is purely symbolic, a billboard along the freeway, entangled in a disconnected ramp to nowhere, configured whimsically as an unraveled number 9. And that’s just one piece of an ambitious, unconventional, and eclectically expressive design, making it awfully easy to fault the architecture. But for all its quirks—and the challenge of separating this architecture from the complicated forces behind it—the design has much to commend.

The scheme, by Coop Himmelb(l)au, is often likened to torqued chess pieces—with a tilted, conical, freestanding library, clad in gleaming steel; rhomboid light chimneys projecting from the cafeteria; and blocky classroom buildings, punched with oversize portholes. But the project also bears the thumbprints of unremarkable beginnings.

In 2000, the notoriously overcrowded and under-resourced Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), with unprecedented bond funding, engaged AC Martin Architects to design a traditional high school for the 9.8-acre downtown site, formerly LAUSD headquarters. By 2001, AC Martin’s scheme was, according to Coop Himmelb(l)au, “fully designed and engineered through construction documents.” Yet billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, with other local leaders, convinced the district to switch course and create instead a high school composed of four “academies”: music, theater, dance, and visual arts. The idea was to exploit the educational opportunities of the site, bordering inner city and Grand Avenue’s cultural district, along with Gehry’s Disney Hall, Isozaki’s Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Instrumental to Disney Hall’s realization and the future Grand Avenue Development, Broad wanted an architectural luminary (and later contributed $5 million) for HS #9.

An international competition ensued, won by Coop Himmelb(l)au. The firm’s approach emphasized “the importance of making icons people could identify and take ‘mental ownership’ of,” says principal architect Wolf D. Prix, who faults architectural anonymity for the assault on buildings during Paris’s 1968 student uprisings and L.A.’s Rodney King riots. “We needed to create something exceptional and memorable in the anonymous fabric of the city.” Hence the school’s spiraling, Tatlinesque tower, forming an urban gateway with the cathedral campanile directly across the freeway. Beneath the tower, a 950-seat, state-of-the-art theater—an ambitious piece of the revised program—anchors a corner with a glassy public lobby.

But budgetary guidelines kept certain straightforward AC Martin elements in place: a central rectangular plaza and the boxy massing of classroom buildings, tweaked by Coop Himmelb(l)au with big, round, playful (verging on silly) windows bubbling across the street facades. These blocky volumes, each housing a separate “academy,” have become successful foils to the quirkier structures, much as Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Secretariat plays rectilinearity against a roofscape of similar objects.

Set on a hill, HS #9’s campus rises from wide entry steps, originally envisioned as a community perch. But LAUSD mandates, introduced late in the game, resulted in security gates at the stair’s base (rather than its summit), awkwardly severing it from the public realm. The steps lead to the campus’s protected center, its outdoor meeting ground and crossroads, with access to the library cone, cafeteria (burrowed in the hill), classrooms, and theater—a strikingly surreal landscape of silvery objects amid downtown skylines. Amphitheater steps ascend to the gym and soccer field–cum–open-air arts space.

A secure precinct, locked during classes like any LAUSD school, the campus conveys a remarkable sense of freedom and spatial expanse. “My kids are so excited to study here,” reports one parent (echoed by students across the Internet). “It makes them feel special—they keep saying, ‘Wow, this is like college!’ ”

Despite the gates, HS #9 is not elitist, accepting 70 percent of its 1,700 students from its inner-city neighborhood. And, unlike high-powered arts high schools, it does not base admissions on auditions or portfolios. Yet the facilities and fittings—from cutting-edge theater technologies to music synthesizers—would be the envy of most college and professional arts venues. And that’s where the school’s dazzling cost and architectural expression reenter the discussion.

True, the price owes much to unfortunate timing and unforeseen obstacles: an overheated economy, multiple LAUSD leadership changes, and a site complicated by archaeological findings and a defunct rail tunnel. But even so, in a school system plagued by impoverished facilities, does it ever make sense, vis-à-vis cost and image, to splurge on a flagship? (AC Martin’s more typical, no-frills scheme was estimated at a third of HS #9’s final cost.) Though hardly the architect’s call, this question touches on the choice of designer and matters of perception. LAUSD might have been prudent to select an architect known for inventive yet legible economy of means, even when cost-efficient Coop Himmelb(l)au’s exuberant form-making rarely conveys that message. (And an idiosyncratic, partially cantilevered tower over a theater’s column-free space undeniably boosts the price.)

Some critics have portrayed the project as a showpiece emphasizing exterior public image over student experience. But quiet, minimally distracting spaces have their value here. Though the wide corridors between classrooms are standardized, their simple ingredients shine: good proportions, daylight, and authenticity of materials, including handsomely durable polished-concrete floors and galvanized-aluminum balustrades. And here, straightforward classrooms gain unexpected variety and luminosity through multiple sizes and positions of portholes.

Halfway into HS #9’s first year, the jury is still out on its success. Mirroring student feedback across the Internet, one blogger wrote: “For those who keep asking what the big spiral is for, if that even matters, it’s to show art students we have to reach for success, soar to new heights. This place is great.” “Dayum!” another added.

It’s only a pity the tower-top theater reception room, with dramatic views, remains vacant. The school deferred completion to trim costs, despite its earning potential as a rental event space. But HS #9’s surreal architecture has inspired another revenue stream—as a top movie and TV shooting location. “It’s exciting,” says assistant principal Ken Martinez, “but we only do it if it’s not distracting. Remember: Our first priority is the students.”