VJAA: Vincent James Associates Architects

208 Pages·2006·48.45 MB·English

by  Vincent James

VJA A

VINCENT JAMES ASSOCIATES ARCHITECTS
V J A A
VINCENT JAMES ANd JENNIfER Y OOS
Introduction by Hashim Sarkis
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Cataloging-in-Publication Data
James, Vincent.
VJAA, Vincent James Associates Architects /
Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos ; essay by
Hashim Sarkis.
p. cm.—(New voices in architecture)
“Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in
Image Credits: the Fine Arts, Chicago.”
All images © VJAA unless otherwise noted Includes bibliographical references.
Paul Crosby: 87, 90 ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-588-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Donald Cordry: 182 1. Vincent James Associates. 2. Architecture—
Ellsworth Kelly: 38 United States—20th century. 3. Architecture—
Mary Ludington: 20, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, United States—21st century. I. Title: VJAA.
52, 56, 59, 60, 62 II. Title: Vincent James Associates Architects.
Michael Moran: 158, 160, 165, 166, 168, 169 III. Yoos, Jennifer. IV. Title. V. Series.
Sport Books Publisher: 53 NA737.V55A4 2006
Don Wong: 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 88 (top) 720.92’2—dc22
2006006647
Contents
7 Acknowledgments
8 SOCIETY Of fORMS: ON THE RECENT w ORk Of VJAA
Hashim Sarkis
16 A POlYVAlENT S TRATEgY fOR dESIgN
Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos
CulTuRE wARS: C ONTExT
23 Type/Variant House / Northern Wisconsin
39 Dayton House / Minneapolis, Minnesota
49 Children’s Museum of Richmond / Richmond, Virginia
ANIMATE BuIldINg
55 Minneapolis Rowing Club Boathouse / Minneapolis, Minnesota
THE TEMPORAl fIEld: ENVIRONMENT ANd S OCIAl SPACE
69 Cable Natural History Museum / Cable, Wisconsin
83 University of Wisconsin-Madison Porter Boathouse / Madison, Wisconsin
93 Tulane University Lavin-Bernick Center for University Life / New Orleans, Louisiana
109 American University of Beirut Charles Hostler Student Recreation Center / Beirut, Lebanon
SOCIAl ENgINEERINg
127 Rainbow Mixed-use Housing Development / Minneapolis, Minnesota
133 St. John’s Abbey and Monastery Guesthouse / Collegeville, Minnesota
BOuNd ARIES, lININg S, ANd AMBIENCE
141 Longitudinal House / Southwestern Michigan
155 Private Apartment / New York, New York
163 Private Apartment / Chicago, Illinois
SIgNS Of dESIgN
173 Unbuilt House
181 University of Cincinnati Clifton Arc Gatehouse / Cincinnati, Ohio
SuRREPTITIOuS uRBANISM
193 Skyway/Subway Cities
203 Project Credits
206 Select Bibliography
207 Office Credits
208 Biographies

ACknowledgments
The work represented in this book is the product of
an ongoing, ten-year collaboration between the three
principals and a group of talented and committed
architects and designers at the core of our office.
We would like to especially recognize the contributions
of Nathan Knutson, managing principal, who has been
with the firm since the beginning and has participated
in all of our major projects.
Also, we would like to thank our friends and
colleagues at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design,
particularly Hashim Sarkis, who have inspired and
provoked our thinking and Tom Fisher at College of
Architecture and Landscape Architecture (CALA),
The University of Minnesota, for his progressive vision
of architecture. And, of course, our special thanks
to our editors at Princeton Architectural Press
for their patience and support in the production of
this project.
7
soCiety of forms:
on the reCent work of VJAA
Hashim Sarkis
8
The winning entry for the American University of Beirut Charles Hostler Student Recreation
Center by VJAA defies the competition brief and campus master plan requiring a single mass.
Instead, the different functions of the center are distributed into a cluster of loosely placed
volumes oriented toward the sea. There is no pretense of chaos or fragmentation: these are
very simple volumes, carefully placed and calibrated. Other factors anchor the decision to break
the mass—from environmental to programmatic to circulatory—but it is clear that the main
purpose behind this formal arrangement is to heighten the possibility of interaction among the
students. The gaps are too wide to be considered pathways, and they are also too narrow and
loose to operate like campus yards. Through their typical layering of subtleties, VJAA creates
something of a sieve between the water’s edge and the inner campus. By indenting the surfaces
of the buildings, including the roofs, they also create seemingly makeshift but, nevertheless,
highly specific spaces of gathering.
Throughout their work, VJAA articulates the shape of such emergent social spaces. When
they detect unconscious social events, they elevate them to form. Conversely, they work with
the repertoire of contemporary architecture to extrapolate the social possibilities it suggests.
In this sense, they are persistently expanding the formal potentials of contemporary forms by
observing how inhabitation could transform them. Along the way, VJAA reveals an unusual
dexterity in engaging a broad range of compositional strategies—from clusters to frameworks
to networks—and in synthesizing them.
Distensions
Like the Hostler center, many of their other projects consist of a cluster of forms loosely spread
over a complex terrain or armature. Despite several serious undertakings to develop it as
a compositional strategy, clustering remains one of the more underexplored propositions of
contemporary architecture.
The clustering strategy of VJAA relies on the distension of similar forms because of their
relative proximity to each other. The forms they use are similar, not the same. The even spacing
between them suggests that the exteriors and the interiors are treated equally. The distortions of
the exterior surfaces are carefully calibrated to produce differentiation without losing the identity
of the forms. VJAA is constantly testing the limits of elasticity of the modernist objet trouve and
its capacity to respond to the presence of other found objects. Compared, for example, to the
clustering strategy in the work of Greg Lynn—particularly, his idea of a “pack of wolves”—the
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clusters of VJAA tend to distort in response to each other’s physical presence, not as evolving
phases of each other. Not that VJAA’s clusters are spatial and Lynn’s are temporal but rather,
that their differentiations are produced by a reciprocal distension of the objects and spaces in
relationship with each other as much as by their “genetic” predisposition to differentiate.
The concept of differentiation is most fully developed in the Type/Variant House. VJAA
shares with many contemporary architectural firms a fascination with genetic coding, with
the mathematics of biology, and with the classification methods of Charles Darwin and D’Arcy
Thompson. Somehow this fascination has led many contemporary architects to focus on
charting types and classifying differences. It has also distracted them from a modest realization
made by VJAA that variation and differentiation need not be carried across a single species
(read, across a series of similar buildings). Rather, it could be explored within one form, in the
breakdown of the Type/Variant House itself, for example, into a society of forms that are highly
articulated within the proposed formal order and tectonic. Importantly, and consistent with
VJAA’s interest in the social implications of contemporary design strategies, this internal differ-
entiation allows for the elevation of waiting areas and transition spaces to the status of the
exhibition spaces and main halls by virtue of the similarities created by differentiation.
VJAA’s clustering strategy could also be compared with the method devised by SANAA
and its principals, Kazuo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, of placing intense, geometric boxes
containing program in such close proximity to each other that they generate several possibilities
of interaction among their users. In SANAA’s work, however, the forms maintain their taut skin
and geometric integrity. The firm confines its reaction to social activities to the manipulation
of the degree of transparency of the boxes’ surfaces. With VJAA, clustered forms do not remain
intact nor is their geometric identity untouchable; it is rather their relatively simple geometric
derivation that allows them to distend without losing their identity. SANAA holds on to simple
geometry perhaps because it keeps in check the danger of excessive differentiation or “pavilion-
ization” found among the children of Gehry. VJAA cunningly avoids both “pavilionization”
and subservience to geometry by holding their clusters together via frameworks produced by
the very means of differentiation.
This difficult but successful technique is illustrated in each of the projects featured in this
book, but is most notable in the Longitudinal House, in which VJAA applies the corridor and
enfilade to the same building not only to test the validity of academically established opposition
of these two circulation models but also to push for the generation of a hybrid. In this project,
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