Every year the American Institute of Architects conducts an awards program for interior architecture by licensed US architects. An architectural firm may design interiors as parts of whole buildings, or of additions and renovations to them. When architects take on separate commissions for interiors within buildings, those are more likely to be for facilities such as restaurants, galleries, or performance venues, which pose special functional and technical demands – or for public spaces in office or apartment buildings, where most of the total space will be designed by others.
In terms of what interiors by architects are likely to be submitted to awards programs, that may depend on diverse factors, including how much these honors may relate to the firm’s overall image or are expected to impress prospective clients. And, as all recent architectural awards have shown, today’s honors may depend to a considerable extent on how the work deals with broader current issues such as social and environmental concerns. All of these factors are represented in this year’s impressive award winners.
Amherst New Science Center
Amherst, MA, Payette, Architect
Amherst College’s new science center was designed to replace aging facilities that could not support today’s technology, equipment, or teaching methods. Conceived as five distinct buildings connected by day-lighted circulation spaces, which form a sheltered portion of a campus walkway, the complex offers all students of this undergraduate school an invitingly transparent window into the sciences.
The roof covering the common spaces acts as a unifying feature for the entire center while serving several key functions. A series of finely configured skylights animate the roof’s form and modulate the daylight entering. The roof also supports photovoltaic panels to generate electricity and offers radiant heating and cooling to spaces below, while its shapes and materials provide acoustical control.
A palette of carefully articulated materials appears throughout the complex, relating it to the traditionally designed campus of which it is part. Handmade gray brick evokes local stone walls, natural-finished wood maintains a campus tradition, and custom weathering-steel screens echo the colors of neighboring structures.
Chicago Architecture Center
Chicago, IL, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
Founded as a nonprofit in 1965 – then known as the Chicago Architecture Foundation – the nonprofit facility has found an ideal downtown home in the Illinois Center commercial complex. It occupies the lower floors of Mies van der Rohe’s One Illinois Center tower, an architectural landmark in itself, and faces the skyscraper-lined Chicago River, convenient to the foundation’s ever-popular boat tours of the city’s design heritage.
Serving nearly 700,000 visitors a year, the center accommodates on-site exhibits, lectures, and retail operations. Its 85 annual tours take place on foot, by bike, bus, and Chicago’s iconic elevated trains, as well as by boat.
The Skyscraper Gallery comprises the heart of the 20,000-square-foot space. A panoramic city view can be enjoyed through 40-foot-high windows. Its acoustically effective metal ceiling reflects the movement of the river and its traffic. The foundation’s signature vivid red, employed on key surfaces and signage, contrasts boldly with Mies’s sober materials palette.
Geneva Car Barn & Powerhouse
San Francisco, CA, Aidlin Darling Design, Architect
Constructed in 190l for San Francisco’s first electric railroad, the two-story car barn and the one-story powerhouse served their original purpose until the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Seriously damaged, then abandoned, these memorable landmarks of the Outer Mission neighborhood were saved from demolition by Friends of the Geneva Car Barn and Powerhouse, a community group seeking to repurpose them as a cultural hub.
The design team was commissioned by that group and the city’s Recreation and Parks Department (which became its owner) to adapt the buildings as a cultural and educational center for underprivileged young people. To secure tax credits for the project, its team coordinated closely with the National Park Service and the California State Historic Preservation Office throughout the phases of design and construction.
The car barn, renovated in 2020 as the first phase of the project, contains a café, a gallery, a black-box theater, and an event space that can accommodate 300 people. The new program elements, including plywood-clad enclosures for specific functions, were carefully inserted into the structural shell. Brickwork was wire brushed for lead abatement, then sealed. Damaged plaster was sparingly repaired, using a subtly different color to distinguish new from old. Examples of graffiti from various periods were retained. Glass flooring covers pits that once contained turbines now display artifacts from the buildings’ histories.
Duke University, Rubinstein Arts Center
Durham, NC, William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc.
The new arts center, known on the campus as “The Ruby,” is designed to extend to the arts the culture of interdisciplinary studies the university has applied to its programs in science, engineering, and medicine.
The building houses 14 flexible studio modules arranged around a central gathering place and an outdoor working yard. Each module is deliberately non-departmental, equipped to accommodate different disciplines working individually or together. Functions for a given module can fluctuate year to year – or even day to day. The focus on convergent, rather than specialized, venues differentiates this arts center from its peers at other schools.
The design of the studios assures that art-making of all kinds is on display at all times. Each module has large glazed openings and a set of acoustically treated barn doors, which can be fully open for maximum exposure, fully closed for total privacy, or partially open for acoustical privacy while offering visual transparency through generous double-glazed sidelights.
The architectural enclosure accommodating these facilities is designed to provide for – and express – flexibility, collaboration, the virtues of natural light, and a connection to the broader campus.
Richardson Olmsted Campus
Buffalo, NY, Deborah Berke Partners, with Flynn Battaglia Architects and Goody Clancy
The transformation of spaces in the former Buffalo Asylum for the Insane has been doubly blessed this year with national AIA Honor Awards in both Architecture (officeinsight, February 28 issue) and Interior Architecture.
The hotel functions here are intended to complement other adaptive-use functions being developed in the sprawling structure designed by one of America’s most famous 19th-century architects, Henry Hobson Richardson. And the hotel will offer its own appeal, centered as it is on a generous site designed by the equally famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
The hotel is entered through a tall, glass-enclosed lobby on the central axis of the stone-clad structure. Its 88 newly configured hotel rooms are reached by a restored grand stairway and broad day-lighted corridors. Wider than needed for their new uses, the corridors now accommodate small cabinet-style bump-outs adding space to bathrooms for the guest quarters. Carpets throughout are custom designed in abstract patterns recalling the surrounding landscape.
Pennsylvania State University Recital Hall
University Park, PA, William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc., with Bostwick Design Partnership
The project is the first to be completed under a new master plan for the campus’s College of Arts and Architecture precinct. To strengthen relationships among the arts components, the plan envisions a central quadrangle ringed by compelling new art, music, theater, and architecture facilities, for which the recital hall sets the example.
As a 14,000-square-foot addition to the existing music school, this hall rectifies the deficiencies of its predecessor, acoustically and in terms of visibility. The new construction includes a 410-seat performance hall and lobby, while the existing hall has been converted into a rehearsal room and backstage facilities. The activities in the new space are visible from the campus through 40-foot-high double-skin curtain walls that acoustically isolate the interior from nearby bus traffic. A terraced outdoor space provides a link to the nearby theater building, fostering contacts among students and faculty of both programs.
Inside, the hall’s shape promotes interaction between audience and performers. The vineyard-style seating surrounds the performance space on four sides, with no seat more than eight rows from the stage. Interior design elements, including a distinctive wood-clad ceiling, address acoustical needs while providing a memorable spatial experience.
Two Union Square Repositioning
Seattle, WA, NBBJ, Architects
While the Two Union Square tower remains a notable icon on the Seattle skyline, the needs of today’s office tenants are rapidly evolving. Moreover, a series of incremental, uncoordinated modifications had interrupted the continuity of the building’s public areas, leaving some of them underutilized. These issues have been addressed by repositioning all of its essential public spaces.
The redesign was developed not only to improve these areas functionally, but to express in them the intersection of technological innovation and natural beauty that the Northwest has come to represent. Wood ceilings recall the motion of winds and waves; a fractal travertine wall is inspired by the region’s tectonic activity.
Advanced technologies such as VR modeling were applied in both the design and construction of key features. The fractal stone wall was computationally configured and engineered, with each of its 1400 stone pieces optimized to minimize material waste. A similar technically sophisticated approach was taken for the wood wave ceiling, which is comprised of 3,000 curved planks.
