Renovation, Restoration, Adaptive Reuse  

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This month's Building Type Study, which doubles as a CE course, examines different approaches to building reuse at a variety of scales, including a nearly invisible insertion within a museum in Belgium and the complete metamorphosis of an office tower in Sydney.

Upscaled & Upcycled

In reinventing an aging Sydney office tower, Danish Firm 3XN offers an innovative alternative to demolition

BY JOANN GONCHAR, FAIA

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

The 50-Story Quay Quarter Tower (QQT) overlooking Sydney’s world-famous harbor is clearly contemporary. With its twisting geometry, its cantilevering blocks that appear to reach toward the water, and its jazzy gridded facade, the 676-foot-tall office building stands out as a distinctly recent addition to the city’s quickly changing skyline.

However, despite this aura of newness, QQT is not new, or not entirely so. The skyscraper is the product of the adaptation and expansion of a 46-story tower completed on the prime Central Business District (CBD) site in 1976 and no longer considered attractive to tenants, due to its too-small floor plates. The recent $600 million transformation—designed by Danish firm 3XN—retains nearly all the existing tower’s structure, reusing 95 percent of its core and 65 percent of its beams, columns, and slabs. The scheme, developed in partnership with architect of record BVN, more than doubles usable floor area, to 1.1 million square feet. But, most notably, at least from a climate perspective, the upcycling strategy saved 12,000 metric tons of embodied carbon—greenhouse-gas emissions equal to those produced, the architects say, by 8,800 flights between Sydney and Copenhagen.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

Quay Quarter Tower rises from a prime harborside Central Business District site (above and top of page).

For AMP Capital, 3XN’s client and QQT’s owner and anchor tenant, retaining as much of the older structure as possible was a requirement, one outlined in its 2014 design competition brief. However, AMP’s interest in building reuse was not prompted by the potential environmental benefits, but instead by economics. The approach shaved nine to 12 months off the construction schedule and saved about $100 million, estimates Fred Holt, a 3XN partner based in Sydney. “Circular economy is about economy,” he says. No small factor, of course, were planning restrictions that limited the height of a new tower, had the existing one been demolished.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

The now-expanded building rises from a new mixed-use podium clad in Sydney sandstone, the material of many of the neighboring historic buildings. The platform establishes a level ground plane on the steep site as it slopes sharply from the primary entrance on Bridge Street northward, toward the harbor. The podium houses a spatially dynamic, loftlike multilevel lobby and offers dining and retail options, aimed not only at QQT tenants but at the surrounding blocks of the CBD. And on the podium’s roof, a publicly accessible park is sheltered under a trellis by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

The Tower’s site slopes up from the harbor to the main entry on Bridge Street, allowing for a multilevel lobby. (Above and below)

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

From this base, QQT’s office levels are stacked in five blocks, each twisting to take full advantage of the maximum allowed envelope while making the most of views of the trusses of the Harbour Bridge, the “sails” of Jørn Utzon’s Opera House, and the ferries coming and going from Circular Quay. Creating the tower’s geometry, with floor plates that are now about 22,000 square feet (up from 13,000 square feet), involved sacrificing the northernmost portion of the older building’s square-in-plan “tube-in-tube” structure, so called because of its closely spaced perimeter columns and placement of its core. The revamp process included grafting on new floor plates and then enclosing the expanded volume in a new glass curtain wall, which is in turn wrapped within an aluminum brise-soleil. Its grid pattern steps in alternating directions to distinguish each stack of floors from the next.

But the grid is more than aesthetic. “Its design is informed—it isn’t just form,” quips Holt. Depending on the facade’s solar orientation, the depth and profile of the brise-soleil’s blades vary to cut heat gain by more than 30 percent, lowering mechanical cooling requirements and thereby reducing operational carbon. In addition, the brise-soleil dispenses with the need for blinds, which would—for at least part of the day—block the all-important views.

Within QQT’s stacked blocks, the office space is organized as a series of vertical “neighborhoods,” each focused on its own multistory social space at the building’s northern edge and a rooftop terrace at the base of each stack. The atria, which tenants and visitors see as soon as they get off the elevators, serve, says Holt, to democratize access to the tower’s stunning vistas. They also drive daylight deep into the tower’s footprint, and allow for workspaces with an airy, informal feel that clearly appeals to tenants: As of late last year, the tower, ­completed in April, was already 95 percent leased—impressive performance in this work-from-anywhere era.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

The arrangement of blocks of floors that twist and cantilever creates the opportunity for terraces.

QQT is believed to be the largest and tallest building-transformation project anywhere. And, as one might expect, adaptive reuse at such a scale comes with a host of engineering and construction complexities. Chief among the challenges was the differential settlement between the new construction, which consists of concrete-filled steel-tube columns and steel beams, and the old building, with its concrete frame. “Usually, we just have to connect a tower to the ground, but here we also had to connect to an existing structure,” says Tom Benn, a senior associate with structural consultant BG&E. The concern was that shrinkage of the new construction would pull the existing core and its adjacent columns downward, affecting all facets of construction, including the elevators and the facades. The solution was to leave a temporary gap between the building’s old and new portions, tying the two together permanently only after the new construction had substantially settled.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

The original 1970s tower had closely spaced, view-obstructing perimeter columns, in contrast to QQT’s vertical villages, with their stunning harbor vistas.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

The designers and contractors not only had to take vertical settlement into account—they also had to consider lateral movement, for the completed, expanded structure, and for the new and old portions during construction. Predicting this performance, however, was complicated by the unconventional construction sequence that entailed top-down demolition happening concurrently with new construction at the base. Throughout the process, the engineers tracked building movements with a variety of low- and high-tech instruments, including plumb bobs, strain gages, tilt sensors, and accelerometers. This “structural health monitoring” allowed verification of the accuracy of the engineers’ early structural simulations and constant calibration of QQT’s digital twin, and provided a keen understanding of the retrofit needs for the older building. Along with some 1,600 core samples taken from the 1970s tower, the dynamic 3D model helped engineers pinpoint places where reinforcement was needed, adding such elements as steel jackets to increase compressive capacity and carbon-fiber laminates to strengthen for tension.

One of QQT’s most ingenious features is its “flex floors”—floors above and below the atria that have been configured to be removed, should tenants wish to extend their vertical neighborhood. The connections are primarily bolted, rather than welded, and the elements in the IKEA-like kit of parts are sized so they can be taken out of the building in the freight elevator without the need for temporary lifts or external scaffolding. Levels currently without such infill floors have connections ready that would allow their insertion if tenants so desired. It is a testament to the quality of the workspaces that 3XN has created that no tenant so far has chosen to fill in its atrium, prioritizing daylight, views, and social space over more occupiable square feet.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

That the expanded tower has been designed with further transformation in mind should help keep it viable well into the future. QQT offers a model for the many outmoded mid- and late 20th-century office buildings in cities globally, demonstrating that they can be reimagined, rather than demolished. The project shows that aging commercial towers can be redefined to create world-class workspaces—without the huge environmental toll of new construction.

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

Photo Courtesy of Adam Mork

 

Credits

Architect: 3XN — Kim Herforth Nielsen, founder & creative director; Fred Holt, partner in charge, 3XN Australia; Jeanette Hansen, Audun Opdal, partners; Alyssa Murasaki Saltzgaber, project manager
Architect of Record: BVN
Consultants: BG&E and ADG (structure); Arup (m/e/p, fire, facades); ASPECT Studios (landscape); Design Research Studio (lobby and market hall interiors); Studio Olafur Eliasson/Studio Other Spaces (public artwork)
General Contractor: Multiplex
Client: AMP Capital
Size: 1.1 million square feet
Cost: $600 million
Completion date: April 2022

Sources

Podium stone: Deemah Stone
Podium Glazing: G. James
Facades: Sharvain Projects
Lobby Feature Wall: Terrazzo Australian Marble
Feature Stairs: Icon Metal, Top Knot Projects
Raised Floors: ASP Access Floors
Glazed Balustrades: YAP Engineering
Vertical Transport: Schindler
Tuned Mass Damper: Visotech

Disappearing Act

KAAN Architecten discreetly inserts a contemporary addition inside a Beaux-Arts museum

BY ANDREW AYERS

Photo Courtesy of Sebastian van Damme

 

Founded by Napoleon in 1810, the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, or KMSKA) houses a world-class collection that includes 16 Rubenses, six Van Dycks, countless paintings by early Flemish masters, Belgium’s most extensive James Ensor holdings, and much, much more. In 1890, the KMSKA moved to its current, purpose-built home in the new neighborhood of Het Zuid, of which it was the centerpiece. The fruit of a forced marriage between the joint winners of a design competition, Jean-Jacques Winders and Frans Van Dijk (who reputedly hated each other), the eclectically ornamented Beaux-Arts temple dominates its surroundings. Already too small by 1925, when it was first reconfigured, the building was again refurbished in 1976. Untouched and unloved in the quarter century that followed, it had become a creaking, leaking liability by the turn of the millennium. A 2003 call for ideas, with a brief both to renovate and expand, produced a winning master plan by Rotterdam-based KAAN Architecten. Closed in 2011, the revamped KMSKA finally reopened 11 years later, in September 2022.

“The original architecture is so strong,” says Dikkie Scipio, the KAAN partner who led the $109 million transformation. “Our first principle was to respect the building for what it is and bring it back to its original state.” Like Charles Garnier at the Paris Opera (1860–75), Winders and Van Dijk followed classic Beaux-Arts theory when designing their museum. First, they made it a freestanding monument in the middle of a giant square, not only for temple grandeur but also to reduce fire risk. Next, at the exact center of their composition, they placed the dominante, a space embodying the building’s raison d’être—for Garnier the auditorium, for Winders and Van Dijk the Rubens and Van Dyck halls. Around the dominante, they lined up the remainder of the program in logical axial succession: a public-entrance sequence directly borrowed from the Paris Opera (external temple steps, vestibule, monumental stairwell); exhibition areas laid out like long galleries in a stately home and grouped around four large light wells; and another vestibule/staircase sequence at the rear, accessing administrative offices. Again in keeping with Beaux-Arts rationalism, Winders and Van Dijk divided their museum into three levels: tall, top-lit painting galleries on the uppermost floor; side-lit sculpture galleries on the second floor; and a ground-floor storage podium that included a fire-, flood-, and bomb-proof bunker into which the Rubenses and Van Dycks could be lowered via traps (a precaution deemed necessary in light of the long history of armed conflict in the Benelux region).

Photo Courtesy of Sebastian van Damme

Set within a large civic square, the museum embodies Beaux-Arts principles of urban place-making and has been a landmark since opening in 1890. A grand lobby welcomes visitors on entering.

Photo Courtesy of Sebastian van Damme

The Rubens Hall displays some of the museum’s most treasured artworks. Daylight is an essential aspect to all of the museum’s galleries, including this historic one. An 18-by-30-foot pivoting door allows large artworks to access a special elevator.

Photo Courtesy of Sebastian van Damme

 

Photo Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

 

Image Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

 

“In the century following inauguration,” says Scipio, “all sorts of clutter was introduced.” Parts of the main gallery sequence were divided up, either to gain display walls or to squeeze in supplementary back-of-house activities, and extra accommodation added in the light wells. KAAN’s first step was to strip all that out—a huge job in itself, involving asbestos removal and the hand demolition of a nuclear-bomb shelter—to recover the logic of the 1890 plan. “The original concept was fantastic, but then they messed it up!” laughs Scipio. There remained the question of the 24,000 square feet of new gallery space—a 40 percent increase—requested in the competition brief. “We felt the extension had to be invisible from the outside,” explains Scipio. “Otherwise, you destroy the building.” This meant the only place to put it was in the light wells and on the roof. “It’s like a table with four legs,” she continues, “except the tabletop is U-shaped, to skirt round the skylights of the Rubens and Van Dyck halls.”

Such discretion is not only uncharacteristic for architects—see Zaha Hadid’s Antwerp Port Authority enlargement just downriver (RECORD, November 2016)—it is far more complex to achieve than Scipio’s description suggests. First, the steel-framed addition comprises four levels organized as a new, separate circuit: the skylit top-floor galleries, ideal for paintings; below them a technical floor, containing climate-control equipment for the entire building; then a floor of low-ceilinged galleries for fragile and small-scale works; and, at the level of Winders and Van Dijk’s second floor, high-ceilinged monumental halls for large-scale works. Second, to match the quality of the historic museum, KAAN decided that all the new galleries must be naturally lit, which involved cutting light shafts through the middle levels of their extension. Last, there was the question of visitor flow: to avoid a U-shaped circuit with two dead ends, KAAN played with the poché, widening original walls—including the one between the Rubens and Van Dyck halls—to run stairs and passages within them. Highly complex, the slotting of new into old recalls a Chinese 3D puzzle.

Photo Courtesy of Mediamixer

 

Diagram Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

 

Photo Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

NEW GALLERY skylights bounce daylight off angled white surfaces (above). A new level with low ceilings and reduced light was inserted between existing floors to accommodate small and fragile pieces of art (below).

Photo Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

 

Where the historic visitor route is concerned, the architects transferred the library and coat check to the ground floor, installed a new spiral stair linking the coat check to the main vestibule, and moved the restaurant and the museum shop/cafeteria to either end of the latter, creating a new, logical entrance sector. Restored to its 1890s configuration and appearance, Winders and Van Dijk’s gallery circuit now sports rich colors based on paint-scratch samples and teems with a multitude of original details that have been cleaned, repaired, or remade where necessary. Furthermore, KAAN cut concealed slits through certain walls to allow large-scale paintings to move between rooms, and rebuilt all the skylights to bring them up to modern standards. The firm also replaced the HVAC with an innovative new system that forces “art-friendly” air down from the cornice over the paintings, after which it mixes with “human-friendly” air rising from the floor, and exits via the ceiling. Dissimulating all the ducts and vents, which the historic galleries were not designed to contain, was a tour de force, as was the widening of walls to contain hidden stairways and passages. In the Van Dyck hall, for example, the wall moved forward 7 feet, pushing the elaborate gilded ceiling moldings with it; along with cutting and rejoining them, the architects had to redimension the skylight. Despite their magnitude, KAAN’s interventions remain invisible to the uninitiated. “I’m so proud to have completed a job where it looks like nothing happened,” says Scipio.

In contrast, self-expression reigns unchallenged in the new galleries. “I felt you could only fully respect the strength of the historic building if you answered it with equally strong architecture that didn’t try to say ‘I’m better than you,’ ” explains Scipio. “How do you do that? By designing the complete opposite and keeping it entirely separate.” To underscore the through-the-wardrobe transition, the entrances to the new galleries (located on the second floor, in the hallways beyond the monumental stairwell) take the form of fat pivoting-wall sections. Once over the threshold, you suddenly find yourself in snowy Narnia, an abstract, all-white world whose high-gloss resin floors reflect the daylight streaming down from 92 feet above. “Most of the canvases here were painted in natural light,” says Scipio, “so it’s of such value to bring it in. Though you must treat it carefully, to protect the artworks.” This is why KAAN’s 198 triangular skylights face north, bouncing daylight off their inclined white surfaces to achieve a diffuse effect.

Photo Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

 

Photo Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

 

Photo Courtesy of Stijn Bollaert

A Long, narrow stair takes visitors to top-floor galleries. A gallery for 21st-century art is topped by a light well. A spiral stair connects the street level to the second floor.

 

The new upper galleries are reached either by elevators or monumental stairways—another cue picked up from the old building but, again, modernized, most spectacularly with a 103-step canyon cadenced by serried ranks of wall-mounted strip lights. Such dazzling Dutch aesthetics have proved controversial in the sophisticated world of Belgian architecture, known for its subtle approach to materials and renovation (“Star Wars,” sniffed an associate member of the Robbrecht en Daem team that designed new KMSKA furniture). Despite some soigné detailing—marble treated so the slabs remain whole, for example—Carlo Scarpa this is not. Dialogue between new and old fabric has been categorically shut down, while the restoration of Winders and Van Dijk’s galleries, though ingenious and meticulous, is a form of heritage make-believe whose ambiguities and ironies are neither explored nor even acknowledged. Furthermore, flexibility of display is precluded—Impressionist paintings, for example, being forced to contend with a gleaming and anachronistic white cube. Kristian Vis­trup Madsen, in a generally positive Artforum review, wrote of “an aggressive spotlessness” and a “snowstorm” brightness that eventually “becomes strenuous.” But nonspecialists seem to like the revamp, an important consideration for a museum looking to broaden its appeal and increase attendance. “I never experienced this before,” confides Scipio, “but people in Antwerp reach out to me in the street and say, ‘Thank you for the museum. We’re so happy.’ Ordinary people, of course,” she laughs, “not architects.”

Credits

Architect: KAAN Architecten — Kees Kaan, Vincent Panhuysen, Dikkie Scipio, principals; Walter Hoogerwerf, senior project leader
Engineer: Royal Haskoning DHV (structural)
General Contractor: THV Artes Roegiers; Artes Woudenberg
Consultants: Architectenbureau Fritz (restoration)
Client: Flemish Department of Culture, Youth and Media
Size: 323,000 square feet
Cost: $109 million
Completion date: September 2022

Sources

Elastomeric Roofing: ADCO
Copper Roofing: Lion
Glazed Roofing: Deforsche
Cabinetwork: Kulapro
Floor and Wall Tile: Vitra
Lighting: Phillips; Bega; Luceplan; Trilux; LTS; Nemo; DKN Kreis; Ixilum; Etap
Elevators: Hugo de Jongh

Raising Expectations

Perkins&Will lifts an old pier building in San Francisco to accommodate climate change and new economic realities.

BY JOHN KING

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

 

Even if you didn’t know the backstory, the gaunt steel hulk of Building 12 at San Francisco’s Pier 70 would resonate as a triumph of historic preservation—one that forges an enticing amalgam of new makerspaces and offices from a vast monolith built to fabricate ship hulls during World War II.

The triumph is even more compelling when you grasp the most startling aspect of all: this three-story behemoth with 1.5-acre floor plates was lifted 10 feet into the air before its recent renovation began.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

The rusting envelope of an old shipbuilding factory has been reborn as a retail, office, and makerspace at Pier 70 and welcomes visitors through an industrial-style portal.

The higher position responds to sea-level-rise projections for the Pier 70 area, which mostly consists of reclaimed land that in the early 20th century turned tidal marshes into the site of one of the West Coast’s largest shipbuilding facilities. Many neighboring industrial structures were torn down in the decades after Bethlehem Steel closed its operations here in 1982. Building 12 is intended as the atmospheric centerpiece of what is envisioned as a 28-acre mixed-use district including 2,000 housing units and nine acres of public space.

This flavorful role—adding patina and blue-collar grit to what otherwise will be a 21st-century development—explains why such care was put into an 82-year-old rusty relic that consisted of little beyond a corrugated steel skin punctured by banks of steel sash windows, held up by 66 structural columns deployed in four rows. The project isn’t a moneymaker on its own; rather, it is intended to set a tone for a previously obscure location that developer Brookfield Properties is marketing as both evocative and inventive.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

Contractors lifted the entire 1941 building 10 feet to accommodate rising waters, working 6 inches at a time over a five-week period. New roads and outdoor common spaces were built at the new height, as large pits at the original level wait for future development.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

 

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

 

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

 

“We never intended it to be bright and shiny and new,” said Ariana Fehrenkamp, a senior project manager at Perkins&Will, Building 12’s lead architect. “We wanted something that is celebrating the industrial past, but also the present.”

To perform the act of architectural levitation, general contractor Plant Construction rebuilt the decrepit crenellated roof and its diaphragm to make the long-decayed roofline rigid, then wrapped the outer walls in cables and inserted horizontal steel beams between each pair of columns to hold the old structure steady. After the columns were severed from the original slab foundation, hydraulic jacks were placed underneath the crossbeams supporting the columns, and the entire assemblage slowly was lifted 6 inches at a time, with bars of wood inserted underneath each column to hold it at its new, temporary position.

Measurements were recalibrated each time, and the cycle was repeated—a process that took nearly five weeks before the 2,000-ton structure was high enough to build a new concrete foundation beneath it, one that exceeds sea-level-rise projections through 2100 for this stretch of the San Francisco Bay shoreline. Only then was dirt trucked in to create a new ground plane matching the roadbeds alongside the structure, which already were set at the planned height.

Enter Building 12 now, and nothing about its topographic transformation is apparent. The structure’s rugged simplicity is what casts a spell—starting with your entrance through the steel frame of Building 15, which was built as an annex during World War II and now survives in skeletal form, with its columns and trussed roofline forming an open canopy outside Building 12’s southern entrance.

The first level, with its 39-foot-high ceiling running through the central bay north to south, is especially striking; at present there are no interior walls, just the thick columns with their supporting trusses up high. The intent is to leave the ground floor largely open as a makers’ marketplace. The columns’ fat rivets are visible, as are the nicks and gouges that date from the 1940s, when steel plates were wheeled in on trains, then lifted up by gantry cranes attached to ceiling rails and lowered onto the floor once the train cars left. From there, blueprint-like tracings done in the workspace above were placed atop the plates, which were cut as needed for assembly into hulls outside.

Adding to the visual drama, a new 13-foot-high steel mezzanine floats above portions of the central bay. This will remain open to the public, a vantage point for anyone visiting Building 12’s innards to shop, attend an event, or simply gawk.

A second level—framed in steel with concrete floors and connected by catwalks that match the mezzanine—has been inserted on the east and west sides of the central bay, 9 feet above the mezzanine, and will hold the light-industrial space required by city zoning. The top floor is original and flooded with natural light from the jagged roof’s clerestory windows. This area will be conventional office space, its airy expanse softened by ceilings of tongue-and-groove slats of Douglas fir.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

Enormous clerestories and perimeter windows flood the top floor with daylight, creating an attractive setting for future office tenants.

There are a few contemporary design touches, such as grand entrances framed in steel, coated with a rich red paint that’s the same as what has been used on the distinctive mezzanine. Portions of the ground-floor walls that were roll-up doors have been replaced with a curtain wall framed in crisp black aluminum. (There also is diagonal seismic bracing tucked in amid original trusses). But these are accents on the original structure, complementing rather than competing with its first life. You’re always aware you are occupying a building from the past, which doesn’t always happen with historic renovation on this scale.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

Workers used tracings to guide the cutting of steel plates for ship hulls in the 1940s. A new mezzanine and catwalks animate the sprawling ground floor. At the entry and in makerspaces on the second floor an industrial aesthetic prevails.

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

 

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

 

Photo Courtesy of Bruce Damont

 

Given the pandemic that caused commercial development in San Francisco to slam to a halt, there’s no telling when Brookfield’s larger plans for Pier 70 might be realized. Building 12 is the only structure now open. The surrounding landscape juxtaposes new common areas, such as roads and plaza sites, high above the rectangular pits where buildings of six to nine stories are planned, their ground planes still at the old 1941 level. Building 12 is ready for tenants but, so far, has been used only for events, such as an exhibition in early 2021 of storefront murals from the first months of the pandemic. The potential of the space and the restored structure is palpable. The question is what the future might bring.

Historic Building 12 Lift from Perkins&Will SF on Vimeo.

John King, is the urban-design critic of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Credits

Perkins&Will — Dwight Long, Ariane Fehrenkamp, project team
Historic Architect:
Architectural Resources Group
Engineers: Nabih Youssef Structural Engineers (structural); Maffei Structural Engineering (structural seismic analysis); Degenkolb Engineers (constructing); Point Energy Innovations (m/e/p); BKF Engineers (civil)
General Contractor: Plant Construction
Lifting SubContractor:
Bigge Crane & Rigging
Consultants: S9 Architecture (retail); Tucci Lighting (lighting); DN&Co. (graphics and wayfinding); Vibrasure (acoustics); Teecom (telecom); RDH (building envelope)
Client: Brookfield Properties Development
Size: 230,000 square feet
Cost: withheld
Completion date: August 2022

Sources

Buckling Restrained Braces: Corebrace
Curtain Wall: Kawneer
Built-Up Roofing: Soprema; Georgia Pacific
Doors: DCI; Smoke Guard Systems; ActivWall
Glass: Vitro

Power Play

O’Neill McVoy Architects orchestrates a topographical playscape inside a former electric plant

BY LEOPOLDO VILLARDI

Photo Courtesy of Paul Warchol

 

“We’re all children at heart,” laughs Carla Precht, founding director of the Bronx Children’s Museum. “The building was close to the water, and it looked like a castle—I thought it had all the makings of a wonderful space for kids,” she adds. After 10 years of operating out of a purple school bus as a “museum without walls,” in December the institution moved into a long-awaited brick-and-mortar home and opened its doors to the public. Now it doesn’t just have wheels—it has walls.

Photo Courtesy of Paul Warchol

THE “Cloud” hovers above the early-learner area. CLT walls, translucent acrylic, and gentle shifts in elevation define the museum’s interior.

The Bronx Children’s Museum occupies the upper floor of a powerhouse that once supplied refrigeration and electricity to the borough’s nearby terminal market. Built between 1925 and 1929, the market was the first of its kind in New York and intended as a model for the sale of perishable goods in other boroughs. Today, only the powerhouse still stands—and with four crenellated turrets and arched brick corbeling, its castle-like form indeed invites curiosity. In 2010, the building was outfitted with a green roof, high-efficiency insulation and fixtures, and first-floor office space for the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. Three years later, O’Neill McVoy Architects, led by the husband-and-wife team of Beth O’Neill and Chris McVoy, was commissioned by the Department of Design & Construction to overhaul the top floor. But the bright, in-your-face polychromy typical of children’s museums is noticeably absent from the interior architecture—instead, a subdued palette, natural materials, and winding walls engage the senses. It’s a grown-up approach to design for children.

“The kids are coming from apartments, schools, and streets that are all orthogonal. We wanted to create a new kind of space that was open to their imagination,” says McVoy. Set within the 13,660-square-foot rectangular floor plate of the existing powerhouse, curvilinear elements meander, bifurcate, and reconverge to form a topographical playscape of thematic spaces that flow one into the other. “When the children walk in with their parents, it’s clear that they just want to begin exploring,” O’Neill adds.

Photo Courtesy of Paul Warchol

 

From the welcome area, young patrons can go in many different directions. One route takes them past the “cove,” a niche with an inhabitable rabbit hole, and up a small set of stairs to the natural sciences area. Here, the floor has been raised almost 5 feet to make sweeping views of the Harlem River accessible to the museum’s diminutive constituents. The sound of trickling water accompanies the panorama—Waterways, an interactive 35-foot-long exhibit by Boss Display that features a miniature version of the Bronx’s Old Croton Aqueduct, invites playful splashing (willing participants borrow raincoats). Perceptive visitors might even see, through the bottom of the basin, a window offering a glimpse into the cove beneath them. “Water connects us all,” Precht says, a theme that figuratively flows through much of the museum. As kids amble about interactive exhibits and terraria showcasing native flora and fauna, they eventually find themselves in the “Turret Gallery,” a vertical column of space curated by Natalie Collette Wood that stretches upward into one of the building’s towers. Dichroic film on clerestory windows and a torrent of suspended crystals scatter iridescent light onto an assortment of woodland-themed furniture—an arrangement that would please any young reader of Alice in Won-derland. (At night, the four turrets are lit from within, emitting a soft purple glow.)

Image courtesy of Paul Warchol

The BRONX Children’s Museum anchors the north end of Mill Pond Park. Inside, O’Neill McVoy Architects explore a subdued palette.

Diagram courtesy of Paul Warchol

 

Photo Courtesy of Paul Warchol

 

Photo Courtesy of Paul Warchol

 

In the community arts area, the interior architecture takes a back seat as the birthplace of hip-hop comes to life with a casita by artist Charles George Esperanza, as well as caricatures of various storefronts and portraits that pay homage to Bronx streetscapes and borough natives including actor Sonia Manzano, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and playwright Richard Abrons. With 15-foot ceilings, the architects squeezed in a mezzanine-level “loft” under another of the turrets, where children can survey the entire museum and gather for artist-led classes. Another mezzanine, a multimedia room called the “cloud,” is conspicuously hung from the ceiling (and connected to the natural sciences area via a bridge) and is mostly enclosed for storytelling or digital projection—providing a moment of respite from the scampering below. Tucked underneath the cloud is the early-learner area, an intimate space in which to keep a watchful eye on the youngest of youngsters.

In comparison to the literal yet lively exhibits, the interior architecture is more nuanced in its approach to spatial learning. To buttress their design, architects McVoy and O’Neill leaned on Swiss psychologists Bärbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, authors of The Child’s Conception of Space (1948). “It’s a dry book,” McVoy jokes, “but Piaget spent an incredible amount of time documenting how children understand space. It’s about here and there, continuity and separation, enclosure and openness, light and dark—fundamental notions.” Translucent acrylic obfuscates views but not the blurs of bodies moving behind it (McVoy spent one afternoon polishing edges to perfect the finish, too). Fabric ductwork evokes a playful spirit and catches light against a pale blue acoustical ceiling. Floors are covered with end-grain red oak tiles that make legible the oft-taught biology lesson that tree rings can be counted to age trees. “And everything was designed from the vantage point of a child,” O’Neill says.

The most noticeable material choice is the curving, knotty spruce cross-laminated timber (CLT). Today, CLT is most often used as a mass-timber building’s primary structure, but O’Neill McVoy Architects deployed it to create walls, guardrails, floor planks, benches, frames, and stair stringers that were inserted within the powerhouse’s existing envelope. These elements not only have their own independent structural properties, but are more slender than typical stud-and-drywall construction. It’s also the first use of curved CLT in the United States, explains Sebastian Popp, technical director at Austria-based KLH, which manufactured the Forest Stewardship Council–certified CLT components. Although walls with shallow curves can be produced flat and bowed in situ, more complex geometries require vacuum forming—a process used by Ray and Charles Eames to produce bent-plywood furniture. These components were produced oversized and milled to final dimensions (plus or minus 2 millimeters) on a CNC machine, giving the designers an opportunity to incorporate pebble-shaped apertures and making installation easier and more cost effective. If scuffed, the wooden walls can be sanded and refinished.

Photo Courtesy of Paul Warchol

Children as well as artwork can inhabit the “cove.” Artist Rachel Sydlowski’s Invisible River is a dimensional silkscreen using UVA pigment.

With very few dead ends, visitors inevitably end up where they began. Despite the curious difference between the artists’ and architects’ approaches, the new Bronx Children’s Museum offers up a multisensory feast for voracious kids. Just ask them—on departure, they complete an “exit poll” on a magnetic board. Judging from the results, the kids are having a blast!

Credits

Architect: O’Neill McVoy Architects — Beth O’Neill, Chris McVoy, principals; Ruso Margishvili, associate in charge; Richard Stora, project architect
Engineers: Silman (structure); Plus Group Consulting Engineering (m/e/p)
General Contractor:
A Quest Corporation
Consultants: Tillotson Design Associates (lighting); ADS Engineers (LEED consultant); TM Technology Partners (AV/IT/Security)
Client: NYC Department of Design and Construction, Bronx Children’s Museum
Size: 15,676 square feet
Cost: $14 million
Completion date:
December 2022

Sources

CLT: KLH
WINDOWS: NanaWall
GLASS: PPG; Walker Glass; Pilkington; Technical Glass Products
ACRYLIC: 3Form
LIGHTING: Ketra; Feelux; LED Linear; Ecosense; Soraa
Acoustical Ceilings: Sonacoustic
DUCTWORK: Ductsox