Restoring Reason, Beauty, and Trust in Architecture, Part 8: Before the Building

Where does a successful architect find the seeds of their ideas? Join us for a glimpse into the thought processes that fuel the design work of Notre Dame's 2024 Richard H. Driehaus Laureate Peter Pennoyer. For the past quarter of a century, Pennoyer engaged in both the recovery and the renewal of traditional architecture. He and his partners ground their work in a forward-thinking interpretation of history, upholding the belief that architectural practices in the past leave us potent lessons relevant to today's challenges. Based in Manhattan and with an office in Miami, Florida, Pennoyer's firm includes a substantial body of work across the country and abroad with a focus on historic buildings, including the seminal Hudson Rail Yards project and the New York Public Library, among many others.

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Transcript

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Good afternoon. I'm Stephanos Polizoiris, Dean of the School of Architecture. And, today is a very special day in the cycle of annual events in our school. There are two important things happening today. The first is that we're, we're, welcoming, to the school, the, the Laureate of the 2024 Driehaus Prize, Peter Penoyer, and we're deeply honored that he will be delivering the Laureate Lecture today. And, at the same time, today's the day that our advisory council is gathered, in town and on the campus to, to, meet for three days and to, discuss and to listen to and to, and to respond. to essentially the state of the school where we've been, where we're going, what we're doing, and to offer, as they have every year, since, decades now, both their council and their, and their financial support. We're very honored to have both Peter here and particularly privileged to have the members of advisory council with us. And we hope to have a wonderful weekend with them that culminates. in a great wind for Notre Dame on Saturday. We're in this kind of moment that we don't know which way it's going to go, right? There's, there is nervousness in the crowd. Anyway, so, I had the great, honor as well of, of introducing Peter during the awards ceremony in Chicago. So I thought that today would not be a day for me to repeat this introduction. So I've asked Professor Stroik to, to come up to the podium and welcome Peter. Again, welcome all of you here and all of you on the on on the internet, being part of this, day to day. And, let's have a wonderful late afternoon. Duncan, you might want to deal with questions. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Stephanos. If you visit a Peter Penoyer building, whether in the country or the city, you'll find a classic structure that appears to have been there a long time. As you move closer, beautiful materials, a creative use of the Latin of architecture, and up close details to die for. What do I mean? As one approaches the portico of the historic Hudson Valley headquarters, one finds unexpectedly a Greek key motif hiding within the freeze board. Peter's sober exteriors lead to rich interiors. In shape, color, and composition, beautifully furnished with art, decorative arts. And furniture. Peter is the author, both of the largest cubist house in America and the finest cubic house in America, which he designed with his talented interior decorating wife, Katie, for their family. At a time when we thought that the great townhouses of New York were all built. Peter has competed against the best, whether Beaux Arts or neocolonial. He has a number of civic projects, such as the Moynihan train station, the New York Genealogical Society, and at Hotchkiss School. Two major residential towers belie the idea that our time requires metal panels. and brutal entranceways. How has Peter accomplished all this? First, by hiring talented architects, like Gregory Gilmartin, who hides at the Genius Bar in Peter's office. It's a joke. Designing in the old fashioned way. Also, By being a scholar of architecture, which he believes is necessary for creating works of lasting beauty. This, I believe, is the key to his success, and also his financial success. What do I mean? Authoring best selling books on architecture. It's a joke, too. In addition to the two monographs on his stunning work, there are monographs he authored with Ann Walker on Harry T. Lindbergh, Cross and Cross, Grosvenor Atterbury, Warren and Wetmore, The Architects of Grand Central Station and My Favorites, Delano and Aldrich, and books devoted to Rowdy Meadows and Peter's own A little cubic cottage. I do not know why he also republished an early 20th century book on building details. But two, but lo and behold, my staff have been seen perusing it for ideas. Shocking. Where did it all start? New York City, where Peter went to the oldest school of architecture in America, not including the first two. At Columbia, he studied with William Ware and Bob Stern and 20 other famous modernists. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia, which in Latin we call a Duplex cupolar duplex cupolar guys. Come on. he was the driving force behind developing 15 local chapters for the Institute for classical architecture and art. A member of various boards, including his beloved Racklin Murphy museum. I'm sorry, the JP Morgan library in Manhattan by McKim, Mead and white. Peter Pannoyer is the 2024 Laureate of the Richard H. Dreehouse prize at the university of Notre Dame. Please welcome him. thank you, Duncan, you're very kind, and I did get all the jokes. Ahem. since that glorious celebration in Chicago, the glow of the Driehaus Prize is still with me. I have a bond with Notre Dame that grows year by year. What your graduates accomplish in my office is The key to our success and the work I see in your studios is absolutely exceptional. Our newest partner, alum Tim Kelly, who's been with my office for years, is now at his desk tackling an array of projects that few could master. Yet I am not a graduate of Notre Dame. My alma mater, Columbia, drifts further from the humanistic values that underpin our professions. Various probably well intentioned movements clog the studios. The drawings are hard to decipher, but the buzzwords disrupt, interrogate, dismantle, and even, believe it or not, non anthropocentric, which means, I guess, I don't know what it means, I'll talk to Duncan later, tell you that architectural design there has been put somewhat on the back burner. So you and I are lucky to be here. I will talk about the ideas that lead to our designs, but I will give some time to the stories also, and some more prosaic factors that shape the outcomes. I will cover my early days and end with a special project that you will see is not classical. Bear in mind that the credits for these projects are on my website, and I have many people to thank. And more photos are also there. Also, I hope you will ask questions at the end, when I'm done. To start, I admit that one challenge early on was that I was labeled a traditional architect. Labels don't tell the whole story, but if we agree to be called modern traditionalists, we can endorse what Bob Stern said about my firm's work 22 years ago. He wrote that modern traditional work looks back in order to go forward. It seeks to add on to the culture, not to disrupt it. Modern traditionalism embodies the historical sense that T. S. Eliot celebrated, that, quote, sense of the timeless as well as the temporal, that sense that makes writers, or in this case, architects, acutely conscious of their place in time. of their contemporaneity. It's not advanced. Excuse me. No, fine. Try again. Bingo. Thank you. in thinking about how we see history as architects, I often return to this painting and ask what we would see if we looked into the imagination of a 19th century architect. The architect Eiffel Town commissioned Thomas Cole to paint such a world. Town, lunging on a colossal column capital, is a gentleman architect, gazing impassively. at this rich collage of architectural history, presented as a city enclosing a calm harbor. The light shining on the classical temple makes the center of the picture, but the gloom around the gothic church is also appealing. From our vantage point, town's delectation of architectural history is that of a connoisseur. more than that of a practitioner. And yet, what architect would not want to wake up every morning with such a rich and detailed visual library to start the day? From Townes Designs, here we have his Federal Hall on Wall Street. We know that his heart was in the classical world. This is a Greek temple with a Roman rotunda inside, entirely built of stone, without any iron or steel, even the shingles on the roof are stone. But Cole understood that a look into Towne's mind would show the broad and complicated history of architecture, not an edited, inward looking version. Though Cole paints Towne as a passive observer, a visit to Federal Hall, which I recommend, will prove to you that Towne was deeply committed. In fact, I know of no designer who has had a meaningful and fluent knowledge of precedence that was acquired lying down with a bottle of wine. what we do is hard work, and to embrace history is to go against the common attitude that prefers new architecture to look novel. unrelated to anything that came before. This preference for novelty suggests that each architect might be a genius, and believe me, none of us are. We're as bound to our time as we are to the practical exigencies of our craft. As I try to grow as an architect, I see that the challenge is how to remain creative after designing several projects that have succeeded in expressing my First, I've always worked in collaboration, most immediately with my partners, including the brilliant Gregory Gilmartin, who designed his first project for my firm in 1985 and was drawing away when I left the studio two days ago. But then, there are less immediate relationships we all build with our peers, our teachers, and our clients. And each of these relationships, which are the key to moving forward, are based on our appreciation of great design by others. What I mean is that the hardest and most rewarding work comes from stepping outside of yourself and standing in awe of history, engaging with buildings, drawings, and books. Before I show you some projects that are inspired by architecture that I've seen and studied, I'll step back and tell you about my early days when my interests were formed. And for the projects, I will include some stories and some of the people behind the finished work. Because neither thinking nor designing in isolation works in the long term. I was born and raised in New York City, surrounded by the classically inspired buildings, apartments, and townhouses of a cityscape with abundant landmarks by Beaux Arts trained architects. As I absorbed the qualities of these surroundings, my curiosity was piqued by my father's role on the New York City Art Commission, the body responsible for reviewing all public projects in the city. He would often bring home packets of drawings presented by architects who sought approval for a school. A museum addition, or even a simple bus shelter. New York was in deep financial decline in the 1960s and the 70s, and many of the designs were conceived in a barren, mean, modernist spirit. The potential damage to the city became real to me when I was in 7th grade. The tenement houses, they were good tenement houses, at the end of our low scale townhouse block were demolished and replaced by a 25 story concrete apartment tower. I would have called the building Brutalism, but I didn't know the word. Instead, I wrote an essay for our school journal comparing the apartment house, unfavorably, which was oddly called the Phoenix. to Henry Hardenberg's 1907 Plaza Hotel, I loved our street of 19th century townhouses and was drawn to the budding preservation movement. And our then mayor inspired me by endorsing urban planning as yet another avenue to save New York. These interests led me to internship at the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Midtown Satellite Office of the Department of Planning. the mayor loved planning so much he made several satellite offices and plunked planners all over the city. I was as devoted to the city as a whole as I was excited by individual structures. This led me to Columbia. Before I earned my master's degree, I was an architecture major in Bob Stern's undergraduate program. I then apprenticed in Stern's office, which was at the center of postmodernism, that happily short lived movement that took an ironic attitude towards history. I was lucky to work on the architecture section of the 1980 Venice Biennale, the Strada Navissima. Here is the Ramza pavilion designed by associate Gavin McCrae Gibson. It has all the hallmarks of that postmodern attitude. The proportions are cartoonish, and the composition is a collage of references to the Doric order, to rustication, and to Tudor moldings. This movement thus said that you could quote history if you made it clear that you were not susceptible to beauty, proportion, or harmony. This was often no more than history rendered with a knowing wink. But Stern saw that at its best this was more than a reactionary movement which would seek to simply expunge modernism. He saw that postmodernism combined historical architecture, modernism, and the vernacular. He alerted architects who might have mistaken postmodernism as a step towards whole cloth revival of lost styles. of the necessity of weaving history into contemporary practice. But the pushback from the profession was intense. Especially worrisome were architects like Stern who were also historians. As Marcus Wiffen observed, some architects went so far as to regard the historians as necrophiliac disturbers of the graveyards of the past, who might at any moment disinter a corpse whose style was still capable of infecting the living. That was a segway. Well, this wasn't going to stop me and my classmates. Once out of Stern's office, I started working with friends from architecture school. We started way too early, before we graduated. Of course, we were thrilled to have any client at all. And some unexpected opportunities came our way. I was interviewed to design a container to send a painting into the heavens on the space shuttle. New York City had a vibrant scene where architects, musicians, bankers, clerics, poets, and artists could be found at the same party. I was drawn into this world and met Keith Herring, a graffiti artist who never actually defaced buildings. Keith only painted where his work was welcome. He challenged us to make, our work support his art. I was entranced by the free, curving walls in Le Corbusier's villa, so I made a sinuous shape for Herring's pop shop. The store is long gone, but the ceiling was salvaged and now hangs above the admission desk of the New York Historical Society as an artifact of the Lower East Side 1980s art scene. I guess that makes me old, too. In one project, I went too far out on a limb, or maybe it's more accurate to say that my client, the minimalist fashion designer Zoran, yes, single name, started having cachet in the 1980s, led me to a very strange place. We designed his showroom and loft to be ultimately totally minimal. No walls, no doors, even on the toilet. No electric lights, no radiators. And a fully exposed, flush to the floor, drain grid, 10 foot square shower. The water simply sprayed from the ceiling. You can see the head there on the left. Now, that's the segue. When not willingly and even, eagerly being led down blind alleys by clans, detours that included its design for a reliquary for the ancient pugs of the Warhol factory. I know that's blasphemy. I continued to study architecture. This was mostly about continuing my pursuits that were central to my time at university, where my friend Gregory Gilmartin had been working with Bob Stern, researching and writing the seminal architectural histories, New York 1900 and New York 1930. Primary and contemporary sources from journals like the American Architect and Builder News revealed stories about buildings and architects we hadn't learned in class. So instead of only gossip about friends, I was in a world of tales of how, for example, McKim had convinced J. P. Morgan to pay a huge change order in order to have his stone set on his library, in McKim's words, as the Greeks did, without any mortar, and how the great Austrian architect and set designer, Joseph Urban, conceived of a casino for Boss Tweed and his cronies. that included a hidden stair that led to a hidden apartment, both of which existed in reality but not on the building department filed set. I was hooked and knew that research and writing would have to be part of my practice. After graduation, my firm's first house was for the lawyer and writer Louis Auchincloss and his late wife Adele. Louis was a storied New Yorker whose novels, he wrote 52 books while a full time attorney, reflected his scholarship on Edith Wharton. The author of The Age of Innocence and the Decoration of Houses. The central rims of the house reflect the couple's work, writing, and painting. This axis aligns with the top of the distant mountain, a position that Louis pointed out added substantially to the budget. Channeling the austere classicism of Gunnar Asplund's Villa Snellman, I imagine this house as a barn with classical aspirations. Each level of the traditional façade, base, middle, top, was marked by cedar, which I laid to create contrasting textures at the base horizontal reveals for rustication for the middle board and batten giving verticality And at the top, a frieze of dovetailed planks. The pressed copper squags were applied to panels over the French doors on the main level. And lighting the upper level of the working library, I opened an oculus to a dormer window on the roof. Aligned with this two story study, this top lit oculus is a rudimentary vision, version of a feature I continue to develop in other houses, including my own. Adele's studio connected to the back of the house, forming the top of a portcouchere and connecting bridge like to the park above. The house suited our clients, but they had different reactions. Adele gave me a thank you in the form of a drawing by V. L. A. LeDuc. Louis, on the other hand, was unhappy about the cost and claimed, I think unfairly, in his memoir, that he'd had to part with one of his Shakespeare folios to pay the final contractor's bill. Ouch. Having a practice like ours in New York is at least half about making the architecture on the inside of existing buildings. You could even call it interior architectural design. This has made my firm consider the character and details of rooms very closely. This is a narrow brownstone that required complete reconstruction. The façade is new. Most houses in this neighborhood have been so altered that they retained little original material and detail. The challenge here, as in all narrow townhouses, was how to create a special stair and a useful center hall. Our client was a young couple with two children. In a townhouse, children are always running up and down, often from the bedrooms to the kitchen. So we split the stairs. Here, front and back stair runs meet in the middle. While I think I've seen scores of townhouse plans, I haven't seen this approach. Until a designer in my office, Aaron Schultz, came up with a solution. The four steps at the center of the light will actually cross into the middle of the living room floor. Most of the light in the space comes from a skylight. Arrow then imagined a vaulted design inspired by James Wyatt's Havingham Hall. The scheme was overly ambitious in his first drawing, and I had to explain that his central vault would have popped up into the middle of the master bedroom. But he reined it in to create a screen of arches in a vaulted hall that elevates the architecture of a simple, narrow landing. Unlike today, when our moldings and vaults are prefabricated and hung from the structure above, this project was completed by Krausman running wet plaster in place. A very rare practice. Our largest renovation of a New York City mansion is this building on 79th Street near Central Park in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Our client was the Bulgarian born computer genius Aso Tevidian, an early innovator in large data processing, and his wife Arlene, who had been a public school teacher in the Bronx. They were drawn to the grandeur of the Beaux Arts facades by C. P. H. Gilbert. But had acquired a building that had been completely stripped of its interior architecture and reduced to rental apartments and offices. Our mission was to channel the grace and beauty of the interior architecture of the mansions that populated 5th Avenue in the 1910s. Every room and every detail was presented in weekly meetings attended by the architects, many architects. The client, actually on this project I learned that some clients bring a team approach from their businesses to the task of designing a house. Here, we were assigned the role of design architect. A large corporate New York firm was dubbed the executive architect, and a third architect, Théo Pridon, a professor at Columbia, was the designated referee. For the first few months, the executive architects, who neither knew about nor cared for classicism, bridled at having a young firm prevail. But seeing that our designs served the client and the project well, they changed their tune. And in an unexpected meeting, I was alone, tried to swallow, well I should say acquire my firm. The stare like everything in this house is new. This is, the whole thing was just a shallow facade. Here we saw the potential of the bazaar vocabulary in metalwork, in this case executed by a French metal craftsman. who had been sent to New York in 1980 by his government to restore the torch on the Statue of Liberty. The stair rail was designed in freehand sketches by our associate Anton Gleicken. The dome on the right was also sketched by Anton and cast in iron. At the top of the stair, pilasters framed the brim as though they were set on a base of the floors below. Normally, we draw our details from scratch, but in this case, we were bringing a book to life. For many designs, we internalize the form from the buildings we have seen or studied, and then project that form into perspectival space, much the way an artist would observe and lay down the form of a model in a life drawing studio. But in this case, the source was a book. of the French architect interior designers Percier and Fontaine, who helped create the empire style. Since we could find no evidence that this capital had ever been taken from the page and built, We felt the responsibility of a musician who performs a long lost, masterful score. The dining room was also designed as a simplified version of the room that might have been there in 1900. Many of the original Fifth Avenue mansions were designed by New York architects who then turned over the interiors to French firms that would provide the paneling, the finishes, and sometimes even the furniture and art, or even family portraits. a complete atmosphere. But those rooms carried eclecticism too far and were often completely unrelated, sometimes cobbled together with new designs mixed with salvaged elements. We chose to have a more coherent relationship among the rooms. Here, the cornice is related to the molding found in the hall in the living room beyond. And the profiles and the paneling are close to those, from the library on the ground floor. Now I will fast forward to more recent work. We're jumping 25 years from a studio with drafting board, lead clutches, some of you don't know what a lead clutch is, And laboriously assembled working drawing sets to an office where BIM, Revit, Rhino, Lumion, and other software are the tools of our daily work. But we continue to design by hand drawing. Only with a solid base of hand drawings do we move into the digital world. The connection of design ideas to paper maintains our sense of the sculptural potential of classical architecture. And drawing connects us to human scale. There is no other way. To let the software dominate risks suppressing design over production. Revit, as many of you know, is a beast. But our clients now expect 3D renderings, and in the last two years we've been able to show projects in virtual reality. on the screen now is a 3D render of a new project for a club, on 5th Avenue. I miss the time when a simple sketch could convince the client of our vision, but, but the digital has brought us closer to the artisans and builders. Now we can sketch an Anthemion constructed in digital space, 3D printed, and have it serve as a model for the sculptor. In 1990, we learn of a conflict between framing and plumbing. When the framer and the plumber argued, sometimes it came to blows at a construction meeting. Today, an AI program called Clash Detection, it's a horrible name, marks the construction conflicts in the digital model and sends an email to the unfortunate associate assigned to resolve the issue. The digital tools also help us make buildings that use less energy. Gone are the days when a wall assembly was based on common practice, reasoning, and hope. Now we can model the thermal performance and locate the dew point in any wall section. When I say we, I don't mean me. After 25 years of many city projects being limited to interior architecture, and of researching the architecture of Rosario Candela, the master of apartment house design, we have been hired to design apartment buildings. This client came to us because they felt that there was a demand for a traditional building in this neighborhood. Here is the street level of our new 18 story apartment building set in the historic district on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The apartment houses I most admire, most built in the 20s, address the scale and character of the Manhattan Street in a sidewalk. The best never seem overly monumental to a pedestrian. And unlike the ubiquitous towers with sheets of cold glass dipping from above into the sidewalk, the traditional base instills even large buildings with human scale. On 78th street, the neighbors are the landmark gimbal houses, a charming row of diminutive early 19th century brick row houses set behind a line of cast iron fence. This base had to be visually strong, Enough to make sense under the 17 stories of apartments above, while respecting our elderly neighbor, Mr. Steinor Gimbel, who still lives there. The building's massing is as of right, it's very difficult to photograph tall buildings on narrow streets. Especially more so on this street, now that RAMSA has just put up an even taller building directly across the street. The poor neighbors. Everything we build, every design, ends up in digital form, as I said. But for the details developed after we are in digital, we revert to pencil and pen. The ornament on this facade is sparing, but the smallest parts deserve the most attention. On the left is a sketch for the railings and balconies. And on the right, a sketch for the side of the keystone. on the entrance arch. Here are the same details in iron and stone. The drawing helped us persuade our client that it was worth adding these special touches. To get the railings built, our 3D printer saved the day. The metalwork company, working at a price point that was acceptable to a developer, this was a hard sell, had so little experience casting smooth curved elements that they Just ran into a brick wall, literally. So we printed a section of the railing at full scale, actually painted it black, creating the model that they were able to copy. This building reintroduces multi plane wood double hung windows, which hadn't been used in an apartment building in Manhattan since 1952. To convince our developer client that these window panes would improve the building and the apartments, especially the scale of the apartments. We commissioned full scale prints of the living room wall, the size of billboards on vinyl, with and without mullions. We suspended these in our office and had the client sit in a chair and experience what it was like to sit next to mullioned windows and what it was like to sit next to big sheets of glass. It, it worked. incidentally, this developer then went on to hire, Ramza. for their next hour and told me that, they said, Bob, why don't you do mullions? Peter does mullions. And Bob said, okay, we'll do mullions. Even though the building facade is traditional on the street, we designed and furnished the lobby to look. Like, it might have been a renovation, perhaps from the 1970s. We made the walls entirely in leather with a grid of bronze upholstery tacks, inspired by an entire leather room by McKim, Mead White. You probably didn't know there was such a thing, in the Payne Whitney house on nearby Fifth Avenue. Our latest building at 1045 Madison Avenue called the Benson replaced four row houses that have been altered over the decades. Stoops had been removed, ornaments shorn, walls added, and large windows punched in for stores. No one mourned their passing, except that one store was the highly profitable branch of a Milanese men's boutique. One that I couldn't afford. This merchant wouldn't budge, so he became a partner in the venture. And we were then faced with the novel challenge of recreating a modernist, svelte Milanese boutique in the base of our completed building. The building has a limestone facade, and the metal details, including the railings, grills, and entry doors, were designed specifically for this structure. We used balconies again here to add scale at the streetscape and make a larger composition of the entrance. Candela's apartment houses show that setbacks can be an asset when composing a building over 200 feet tall. The building steps away from Madison Avenue at the south, allowing us to make a vertical band of bay windows centered on each of the main bedrooms. interestingly, it turned out that the, one of the planning commissioners of the city of New York's window was directly south of this, and, she was very happy that we did the setback and very frustrated that I wouldn't tell her which room she was going to be facing into. so before the hearing, she showed me a picture of the room that we would look into. and it was her, her bathroom, her toilet, and this is an awkward moment with the city official when you step into their bathroom. The terraces are capped by railings and the corners of the facade are chamfered or carved away to reveal in angled steps the depth of the stone. and they support these. These urns, which don't look large in the photograph, but they're quite heavy. The carved corner is a costly commitment for a commercial venture. Of the block of quarried limestone, 80 percent is waste, but it makes all the difference. Candela also shows us how to make the mechanical tower at the top, which in many newer buildings is nothing more than a windowless box, into a sort of temple in the sky. Here we chose a blind Palladian motif. it maybe looks a little odd and rudimentary here, but you remember you're seeing it from a sidewalk 200 feet below. Inside, the arch window at the center of the terrace of the center apartment aligns with the opening into the living room. And in turn, a larger window in the stair facing east. The connection and placement of the windows within these apartments is crucial, and it's intended to make each apartment, and each room with each apartment, feel like it was designed from the inside out. That's the trick with these buildings. The building was launched during the first, sorry, the third quarter of 2020, at a time when no one expected sales. But we were surprised when all the apartments sold out in a matter of weeks. So there is an appetite for traditional architecture. In some, in some projects, the historical inspirations are hard to discern. Here is a house in the country that has features of a Georgian architecture, but I would say is more severe. The classical details appear only at the front door and at the end of each leg. The L shaped plan gives all the rooms light, many on both sides. The house is anchored into the landscape by this beautiful new brick walled garden designed by Miranda Brooks. From the south side, the house faces a narrow private lane. The scale of the main door is set by the massive stone frame. If you actually look at the blue door, you realize it's not so large. It's maybe seven, eight feet, seven and a half, eight feet tall. But the surround and the door frame and the window above expand the scale to the scale of the facade. we had fun designing this. the stone picks up, the, the light in an interesting way, which is achieved by narrow bands of parallel lines carved into every single stone, vertical, horizontal, and in, in both directions. So this is done to create a sort of texture and, we, and in a random, in a random pattern. At the narrow end of the west facing side, the stone is molded into a suggested frame of pilasters. One of the challenges, I think, of huge openings in a stone house is how to transition from the mural architecture of punched openings to an architecture that expresses a frame. Miranda's pleated tree alley frames two screened rooms, a sitting porch below and a sleeping porch above. In some of the houses I most admire, restraint and rectangular geometry on the outside are alleviated by curved and more delicate detailing on the interiors. On the left, we curved the end wall of an otherwise conventional straight run stair, and on the right, arches align from the stair through the entry hall to the front door you saw in last view. The moldings set the scale of the main rooms. On the left, the cornice in the dining room has a cove that is lined with delicate plaster leaves. Because we design all our own moldings and work with talented sculptors, we're able to have the leaves lap up over the cove, an unconventional detail that makes the room more interesting. On the other hand, the living room crown is robust and scaled to the larger space. 12 foot ceilings, also allow us the space to create, vaults in smaller rooms. At a meeting on the site before the house was built, our clients told me they wanted this exact spot for the breakfast table. Because it has a lovely view of the neighbor's pasture and their cattle. This vaulted room is exactly on that spot and the window faces over the small garden to the pasture beyond. The small bedroom on the right is set behind the oval window you saw on the prior slide. above the front door. this is an example of paneling used to help organize an asymmetrical room. that window is, is eccentric to say the least in its presence in the room and also not centered on that wall. and, and as I said, paneling helps us resolve these, these geometries. This house is set on a private island off the coast of Maine. Access was a challenge. Schedule was going to be a challenge. So we had all the framing assembled in panels on the mainland, shop drawings for every wall, which were then delivered by truck, and the client purchased an LC 45 landing craft. he was very brave. the landing craft sounds extreme, but they understood that they, if they wanted to sleep in their house a year sooner, we needed to have a method. for, for building this faster and the panels were, you know, all put together with a smaller crew. Some people weren't willing to go out to this island every day and risk not being able to get home. So it was a good solution. Our best projects are sometimes inspired by the ideas that clients bring, especially when those ideas stimulate our own research and especially when those clients are artists or designers. This client was the interior designer Alexia Lucian, who imagined that the house was built to reflect ideas and influences from a grand tour and architects like McKim, Mead, and White. And some of her ideas were a little unusual. The dark shingles were to be the color of, in her words, a rock concert t shirt to blend the house into the trees and make it feel like an organic part of the island coast. by the way, this is the third house on this exact spot. The other two, burned down, one in 1924, one in 1968, so it is the first house that actually blends into the coast, we have pictures. the pepper pot dome encloses the main stair and the clear white light at the front door is coming from the ocean side of the house. the Sgraffita panels above the front door are modeled on and inspired by the panels of Oaker Point, Stanford White's, design in Newport, which is actually built for the great grandparents of a current client. Alexia brought her unusual sense of color and material to every room. the carpenters were rather surprised that their oak stair, turned into, pistachio. The terrazzo floor was composed, on a site decision. We agreed to smash up some extra slabs that were lying around and have them laid down and made part of the terrazzo. the arches on the left mark a hall and other vestibules that then all connect as an axis behind the rooms that face the water. The dining room ceiling was prefabricated in four large sections and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. Also, to get the quality we needed and the tolerances and in support of our The notion of doing more prefabrication being on an island, the metal piece had not arrived when we took this picture. The living room walls, were a bamboo mat inspired by Stanford White's house, Box Hill. This place is called Browdy Meadow, words from an Emily Dickinson poem. It may not be classical, but it summons all of the discipline and compositional skills that only classicism can prepare you to deploy. This is an important point. This isn't anti classical. You have to go through the training we went through, I think, to be able to do this. Every project has challenges, but few have been as absorbing and transformative as creating this house. Which is set on 146 acres near Cleveland, Ohio, that encompasses collections of art, furniture, decorative art, and site sculpture. Gregory Gilmartin was the designer of the house, and our client, Scott Mueller, had the vision to lead his architects, landscape architects, interior designers, builders, and artists to create an estate that one day will be an endowed, satellite of the Cleveland Art Museum. The house was made for a family, but with an eye to creating a public place. So on to Czech Cubism. For my firm, the story starts in Prague in 1985, the first year of my independent practice. On an architectural tour with friends, we noticed that Prague presented us with many examples of architecture that defied stylistic labels. kinds of buildings that they wouldn't have shown you in class because it would have been too confusing. Here, for example, is Gothic architecture not behaving as it should. This is the writer's hall stair in the castle, a late 15th century concoction where the ribs aren't doing what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to, I think, follow the folds and the vaults and sort of reinforce the idea of rational structure. Instead, these simply fly off and spill out in all. Directions. We also saw buildings like this 1913 villa by Josef Szosol that were based on folded planes and angles. These were not Art Deco and in fact preceded that style, but intriguing examples of an imaginative expression of geometry completely divorced from any storyline we had learned in our architecture school. I was astonished to see this style which we learned later was Czech Cubism. Not only in private houses, but in commercial buildings and even this apartment house. The entire building is bursting with angular planes that sweep up towards these crystal like outcroppings. Clearly not a cornice. Another unexpected inspiration for the Kibbis was the work of the bohemian mason turned architect Jan Santini et al. This ceiling in his 18th century church at Zemlina Hora is formed of folded planes that energize the mass of the structure and culminate in a star shaped ceiling. The Czech Cubists essentially abstracted and systematized the central form of Gothic and Baroque. How we were going to get our heads around this architecture and bring it to Ohio is a mystery. This amounted to learning a new language. What made this challenge particular was that our client's inspiration came after we had already laid out an arts and crafts house with an A shaped form of the plan. So what you see here was close to the initial iteration of the design, except notice the radiating spikes of the breakfast room at one end, and the folded planes of the entrance at the other, left and right. These were massive buttress like forms. that frame the front door. These are all expressions of both ends of the enfalade, the central axis of the house, that hint at the complexity of the geometry of this style. The plan seems quite, simple compared to this reflective ceiling plan. Of course, as in any building, the relationship of the ceilings to the room is critical, and in Browdy Meadow, the ceilings, especially where they grow out of the walls, are to my mind the star of the show. Before I show you the photographs, I'll share renderings by Tim Kelly because they show the design without trees and other artwork in, in, in the way of obscuring them. By placing the garage under the house and the art gallery, which is approached by a ramp discreetly tucked into the surrounding land, we had the opportunity to have full, full, completely symmetrical facades that were different but related. Here is the south facade, which at first seems to be a relatively conventional arts and crafts design, even if its proportions are more vertical and its massing more symmetrical than anything you would see in Voisey's work. The west elevation is the entrance to the house. Low wings and solid stucco extend north and south. But at the center, the stucco forms into folds and prismatic facets. This side of the house and the east are where the expressionist and cubic forms emerge. Now we go from drawings to actual views. And you can be the judge of how successfully or not our design intentions work. The library's double height window bay and the soaring chimneys respond to the scale of the open land. The chimney's faceted forms are a clue that this is not just an arts and crafts house. As in other views, the sculpture part surrounds the house. The assemblage of ancient tree trunks is a work by Ai Weiwei. I don't have time to share all of the details, but I think it's worth. showing you the decorative spandrels at the bay. This metal unifies the upper and lower windows and the chevrons and gears add to the texture and relate the bay to the metal work that appears in other places. And of course spandrels are a key element in high rise design in New York, so we knew spandrels. Most cars are stored underneath the house, but the forecourt has four car bays. The low wings of the house extend north and south, obscured by parallel rows of boxwood and hornbeam. What isn't clear, as clear in our drawings, is how the two and a half story frontispiece protrudes in front of the black slate pyramidal roof like some white expressionist iceberg that descends in prismatic facets. And finally, at the east end of the house, the land falls away, revealing the grotto like entrance that leads to the underground art gallery. The east frontispiece has massive crenellations that soar above the second floor and conveniently hold flues for the fireplace and the pizza oven. As on the east side, here the black slate roof slides behind and defers to the frontispiece. There is much more about the house that I can show you this evening, but I'll show you a few of the major rooms. We start at the entrance on the west of the long envelope. The form of the room and its mosaics are inspired by a room that I've long admired. By artist Hildreth Meir, her banking hall in Ralph Walker's masterpiece Art Deco, 1929 Irving Trust building at 1 Wall Street. Like Meir's hall, the walls are clad in smallty, hand blown glass tesserae from Venice. The mosaic entry opens to a larger, loftier octagon, essentially a white lacquered gallery where space expands upward and outward. Overhead, a circular oculus opens to the second floor tribune. We were thrilled to be involved with the furnishings of the house, much of this working with our client's ever expanding collections. Here, Bernard Boutet Montvel's mirrored octagonal table reflects the geometry of the architecture. The office is a counterpoint to the living, to the other room's muted palette. This room was set in our plans when our client commissioned the French Swedish sculptor and furniture designer Ingrid Donat To create a total environment. Our firm then supported Donat's art. The walls are orange parchment and all the trim and casework are bronze etched in organic patterns that are both art deco and reflect tribal art. This was a rewarding collaboration. Display in our black marble mantel compliments The organic quality of Donat's surfaces. Though it is a double height room, the library feels unintimidating. The warm oak paneling that wraps the room brings the scale down. The ridges and folds of the ceiling seem to transform in different light from different viewpoints. At times, they have a prickly, spine like quality. At other times, they appear to float softly overhead. The center panel was designed to accommodate Michael Bormann's The Horse. Luckily, we realized the painting had to be brought in before the room was enclosed. A still picture can't capture the Connecticut elements in the room. Martin Basse's Grandfather Clock features a 24 hour video of the artist drawing a new minute, well, every minute. And Studio Drift's parachute like skylight installation extends and retracts alive and moving against the angular plastic ceiling in a fascinating way. which incidentally terrifies the dog. the folds in the ceiling recall the patterns of the church of Beijing, an abstraction of Gothic that we think the Czech Cubist would have approved of. Further east, the procession through the house leads to the dining room. Here we chose a palette of bright color to contrast with the white of the interstitial vestibules and halls. We reflected the shape at the pearwood dining table designed by Jean Michel Franck in curved piers. We clad the walls in hand painted silk wallpaper and the doors in earthy copper toned leather. Clay covered tree limb is taken from Andy Goldsworthy's Torn Tree Shelter, one of the six works he built in the sculpture park. The screen porch is beyond the dining room, facing south of the fields and orchard. We think of this as a Viennese take on Morocco. Since the walls are clad in a mixture of green, burgundy, gray, and purple zelich mosaic tile, inspired by patterns of the work of Koloman Moser and Joseph Urban. Just as I never imagined buildings I saw on the 1985 trip to Prague would inspire house design, I also couldn't have realized how important the zelich workshop I visited in 1994 with my wife Katie would be to my firm's mosaic designs in this house and others. Above the octagonal gallery at the entrance of the house is what we call the tribune. Each ceiling in the house is different, and I like to see how the crisp radiating facets of the vault are echoed by this cast glass chandelier by Thaddeus Wolf. The spiky railing was inspired by the metalwork of the apartment house I showed you earlier. The drawings are sketches for Josef Engelhardt's Frieze Commission for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Browdy Meadow Sculpture Park includes 38 works by Andrew, Andy Gulsworthy, Saul LeWitt, Ai Weiwei, Richard Serra, Anish Kapoor, Virginia Overton, and others. We work with the artist Sainte Claire Semaine. On his pavilion to shelter his sculptor, which takes the form of a canoe called Psyche, we helped with the shape of the primordial columns and the form of the roof, which Sinclair suggested follow a specific proportion. Finally, the clock we designed in the new Moynihan Train Hall, which serves Amtrak in the heart of New York City. This is a small example of a trend to include more institutional and public commissions in our studio. We recently completed the renovation and restoration of Gilt Hall, the cultural center that includes a theater and galleries in East Hampton, and are starting the adaptive reuse of the last great Italianate mansion in Savannah, Georgia, for Ralston College. Finally, I realize that the structure and basics of the apartment towers we designed are not that different from the construction fundamentals of what's called affordable housing. I don't like that word. So we have formed a working group to design an apartment building just north of the city that will provide housing for lower income tenants. Our goal is to make it a building anyone would be proud to live in. And yes, this will mean ornament, which until now has been anathema to most designers of public housing. So thank you for listening and please, please ask questions. thank you, Peter, for a, really inspiring, presentation. I was struck by the, amount of craft. That goes into your work and I was hoping you could speak a little bit more about how you select the various craftspeople that you work with, whether you know, they come through the general contractors of the builders that you work with or. They're brought by you or kind of that process in general. So for some, in some crafts, there are known, experts who are masters of the craft. in metal work, that would be Jean, we are an LMC, but then there are other companies that descended from, this, this firm and their absolute, masters. And they, they come from the tradition of the company, which is the French system of, artisanal training. but we're always looking for new ways of doing things. there are some artists whose work cannot be replicated by anyone else. Miriam Elner for Ferret le Musee, but we completely endorse switching to digital, production. When possible, in order to provide, for instance, balconies on a building that where they otherwise would be unaffordable. and, and so this is a rapidly changing area for hardware. We sketch hardware, model it, then we 3D print it. And if the client accepts it, then we send an email to Rockland, Maine, where our friends make it using a CNC process, not, not casting. So. I'm very interested in breaking down the wall between design and production, and if digital helps us do that, you know, so be it, but we still love to see the, the hands on craft, and there, and there's so many wonderful people to work with for all, all over the world, we have carvers in Kabul, Afghanistan, who even under the Taliban are allowed to export, panels. that are carved in, those patterns that are completely, again, foreign to the classical view because they are, well, you know, Islamic geometry, but they do a beautiful job. and the table in one of the rooms I just showed you was made in Kabul. so, and then there are people here and there are people in France and all over the world. that's a rambling answer, but they're, you know, and it's getting better and better, I have to say. okay, I just was really struck by, again, kind of the detail aspect of this, and, I was particularly wondering how that affects how you design in general, because I think especially now in school, we design kind of bigger picture to smaller, and the details kind of come after, but it almost seems like some of the spaces were specifically designed. Based on certain details or certain, or certain artworks, for instance, so I was kind of curious how that affects the design process. How frequently does it happen that you design a room based on an artwork or does that happen? I'm kind of curious about that relationship. Yeah, so, so in the Rowdy Meadow, the living room proportion and size of the center wall panel had to accommodate the first painting we thought was going to hang there. which was even bigger, which was Walton Ford's King Kong. So, and that telegraphed the system of proportions and then into the whole house. and, and so sometimes the art does drive. what we do, but often we are just thinking about how we can bring the ornament and the motifs from the house down to a human scale, and that requires doing things that are quite small. On the townhouse I showed you, we, the landmarks made us reproduce what we knew to be the original ironwork, but I insisted that every other picket have this sort of mean looking bulldog that the Metalworker made put on and they let me do it. so it's, it's, and then sometimes it's to do with the client's history. the stone house you're looking at here. All the hardware is made with copper. because that's where our client, made the money to pay for the house. So these references can be good, and then you have to prepare for the art, so when we designed a house for Jeff Coombs, the artist, he let us know too late that he was putting Popeye, in the front hall, and Popeye was made of solid granite and is 12 feet tall, so we had to add steel. And I told them that at least Popeye has size 28, feet, so. I had a quick question about your design of skyscrapers. With our current, education, we haven't really touched base on approaching the design and construction of a skyscraper. In terms of its scale, it's much larger than any of the classical precedents we've begun to look at. So I was wondering if you could speak on that a little bit. I, I, I mean, I think it's within your grasp to think about it because you are already thinking about columns, which have a base and a shaft and a capital. And if you know the orders, you have, you have the tools to think about something tall. it, it is. it's complicated because we're seeing more, by the way, those buildings aren't really considered tall in New York, we're, we're, we're considering, now we're, we're seeing buildings that were not designed, with the viewpoints in mind, like how, how you actually see there's a new, JP Morgan, tower that Lori Foster designed on Madison Avenue and it's tall and you can't tell. Where the windows are, because you, so you have to think about vantage points, you have to think about viewpoints, you have to resist the architect's temptation to make a perfect perspective is something that will never be seen that way. And then you have to enjoy the absolute delight of being able to make a little temple in the sky because every one of these buildings has a mechanical tower and it's a box. And they realize that if you do something lovely with it, it will become the identity of the building for people who live there. but the base, I think, should be quiet and I, I think it's all within your tool parts. When I take interns to the Morgan Library and I look at the bookcases there, the McKim design, I, I show them that all the elements of the classical orders are in one bookcase, you know, that you could. Extrapolate that at a different scale and make a really lovely facade. You just don't tell your client that you cribbed it from a bookcase. When you're looking to add new team members, what attributes are you looking for? Because an awful lot of the architectural schools today haven't taught anyone how to draw and to think with a pencil. There's no template, there's no checklist of qualities. we're willing to hire people who don't immediately present as being promising or productive members of the team initially because they have some special talent, be it drawing computers or their passion or understanding of architecture. So there is no talent, but not having drawing is a problem, right? having curiosity and passion about history is important. and, and I think being able to step outside yourself as a student. And, you know, avoid the danger of oralists internalizing your inspiration. so, the answer is, if you don't draw at all, that's unusual. it's, it's, that's a problem because it suggests perhaps a lack of curiosity about the world. Nothing else, no one's going to ask me how I feel about Corian for Kitchen Counters. I don't know, but we do design our kitchens, by the way, we, we, we design all those things and we lead clients through checklists of everything that happens from the start of the day to the evening. And then we, we play the playback the other way and we ask them where their children do their homework. And we asked them where their, where, where mother in law stays when she comes and all those good questions. Peter, thank you. Thank you. At the end of your talk, you gave a little hint about a new project for social housing in near New York or north of New York. I think you said, could you just give us a little more of a sense of how you would approach that? Assuming that's Kind of a new, a new sort of line for you to follow, how, how, how will doing that be different from the other things you've heard? Well, so this is very much in line with our, involvement with public advocacy, which we do because we're not invited to do it. So when the New York Public Library was going to ruin their building by breaking a door in the back of the ground floor and disrupting the whole flow that I spoke about at the Driehaus Prize, we just decided to design something wonderful that didn't do that but met their program. We weren't invited. We're not invited to do this building. This is what's called the loss leader. However, we have a client who just retired with a fortune and has always wanted to do affordable housing, so we think there's a way of getting it done. But our approach is to engage. a group in the office to think about different kinds of sites. One is in right in a downtown, one is on the edge of a village, one near a train station, and we wanted to become, in a way, an open seminar that will lead us to consensus, and a project that we think can happen and we think it will happen, but we're doing something very odd, which is we're creating an opportunity and I think it will, I think it will get built, but if it doesn't, we will have drawn something that we think will. Be, an example of making attractive housing that isn't cheap, and there's some shocking I'll show you after an example of a recent building in New York that was built, and it's in a long tradition of buildings that remind people live there that they are not part of the community the way everyone else is. This has been going on for 100 years. Thank you so much for a fascinating talk and beautiful images. the stylistic variety and depth of your work is really impressive, and it's obvious that you do a lot of precedent study and a lot of travel. do you have one specific architect that might not be incredibly well known that everyone should know about who you've discovered it through your studies, and also a specific place that you think people should visit? Well, I mean, you all know Rome, so Rome is the Rome is the font of all wisdom. and I think that we're, we're just starting a new book on Charles Platt. and I think Platt is interesting because. you know, it's a little bit like the houses that came out of pattern books by carpenters that we love more than some of what our fellow trained architects are doing today. Platt had no training whatever, and he was an artist, so I think he's interesting. Of course, I'm absolutely, connected to, I feel aesthetically to Delano. more than his partner Aldrich, but that's another story. and, and, you know, it's, I'm glad you appreciate the work. I should say that it's really hard to find clients who are willing to compensate us for the time that this takes. Thank you.