|
|
 |
|
| |
Sometimes the dancer can't be distinguished from the dance, and at the New York Presbyterian Church in Sunnyside, Queens, the design can hardly be separated from the design process. The building's undulated roofline, the segmented ceiling planes of its sanctuary, and its serpentine stairways grew in a design choreography intimately linked with the capacities of the computer.
Whether computers can-or will-think on their own remains an open question, and the corollary issue now pushing the envelope in architecture is how they are emerging as design collaborators. In a project conceived simultaneously on screens in three cities, Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn, Chicago-based Doug Garofalo, and Michael McInturf, who practices in Cincinnati, tested the question by using their linked computers from the project's inception through the development and construction document phases.
The commission did not start with a well-heeled patron looking for a signature building. The church, with largely Korean immigrant and first-generation-American congregants, asked the architects to renovate an 88,000-square-foot former laundry factory on a tight budget. Previously housed in other recycled buildings, the congregation had no expectations of traditional church typologies. "The clients wanted the traits of a church, such as a focus on the altar, a central axis, and backlighting, but they didn't want a cathedral or cruciform plan," recalls Lynn.
Commuters on the Long Island Railroad have prime views of the new church. They now pass by a stock industrial building supporting atop its original roof an undulated Butler Building- type structure, which shelters a 2,500-seat sanctuary. The old Knickerbocker Laundry Factory, designed in the 1930s by Irving Fenichel with an oversized Streamline Moderne facade intended for audiences aboard the train, is intermingled with the new metal-clad shed that has grown around it. Seen from the front, the composite form- combining the old and new, symmetrical and asymmetrical, monumental and tentative-creates a field of architectural uncertainty offering no single reading.
Considerable invention was required to transform the two-story factory into a place of worship for a largely automobile- based congregation. The architect's parti changed the direction of the building so it would front the parking and negotiate a one-and-a-half-story level change up to the sanctuary. Three bridges and wide flights of steps connect the parking lot to two glazed entrances next to a new three-story translucent fiberglass facade. Inside, wide sinuous stairways lead past a second-floor cafeteria and wedding chapel up to the sanctuary. The stairs end on a third-floor corridor, where the angular ribs of the sanctuary form a long wall configured like environmental origami, energizing the space and prefiguring the sanctuary itself. The subtly contoured sanctuary, made of stepped rings of the creased ribs, gently leads the eye to the front, where the altar, choir, and pulpit occupy asymmetrical terraces. The stepped shapes of the ceiling then extend beyond the far, glazed side of the sanctuary and metamorphose into armadillo-like, metal-covered fins offering segmented views of the Manhattan skyline, while covering an exterior staircase exiting to the parking lot. Classrooms are organized in neat rows below street level in the first-story base.
"We wanted the addition to seem like it was responding to the existing building without seeming like an addition and without swallowing it up into a new whole," says Lynn. Structural analysis revealed that the existing roof could support the congregants in a new sanctuary-if the sanctuary's own roof were independently structured on columns threading through the factory to separate foundations. The architects opted for this scheme, deciding to create a wavy, kinetic new roof profile.
Conceiving the sanctuary as an independent shell within the rooftop shed liberated it from the lumbering steel superstructure, allowing the interior greater latitude. The architects modeled this space as a complex volume that would behave independently of the shed. Its lapping inside planes form the segmented carapace that angles toward the altar.
"Siting the sanctuary at the top required circulation paths, which suggested tubular forms flowing within the structural system of the building," maintains Garofalo. Square to the street, the original structure changed direction midbuilding, angling off the orthogonal, forming what project architect Gregg Pasquarelli calls a "crack" in the original design. "The gap between the front and back was a chink in the armor through which we could slide the tubes and bring them up to the roof," explains Pasquarelli.
Each of the partners' architectural offices is small, but together the three fielded 12 to 15 architects working in a shared digital environment. The principals talked over live computer connections, using monitors as a sketch pad. Lynn and McInturf had worked in Peter Eisenman's office, which often designs with generative rules, and they developed codes to discipline and systematize the basics of the design. Steel I-beams in the shed roof over the sanctuary, for instance, are a constant 22 feet long, but set on columns placed at varying distances. The roof beams consequently assumed sloping angles that created the heaving profile. The architects designed the sanctuary with what they call a "blob modeler" made for auto designers, who like to change isolated areas of a design without changing the whole. "It works like clay," says Lynn. "You take pieces of geometry and add them to the geometry of a larger surface, and the little pieces of geometry smooth in-which is how we did the roof." The architects shaped the space by manipulating surfaces rather than conforming to the coordinates of a regular geometry. The process resulted in a vague, drifting orientation toward the front of the sanctuary.
The mathematics of the computer is always calculus, and when a visitor squints in the sanctuary, the incremental steps of the ceiling and walls blur into a differential shape whose stepping describes an overall trajectory that is almost curvilinear, which Lynn calls smooth. "If you look at elements, you can pull out individual distinctions," he says, referring to "blobs" smoothly absorbed in the design. Sometimes, however, different geometries pass through each other without blending. The circulation "tubes," for example, cross each other in the spatially complex lobbies that ascend to the sanctuary. The architects reinforce the overlapped geometries graphically by picking them out with reglets on the ceiling and splines in the epoxy terrazzo floor.
It is wrong to apply tastes cultivated in voluptuous Catholic churches to a Presbyterian building rooted in warehouse structures. But there is still a disturbing dryness to the church that probably stems from several causes, not the least of which was a bare bones, $90-per-square-foot budget that sent the designers to fluorescent-light and vinyl-tile catalogues.
Further, one of the potential blind spots of the computer is the sense of materiality; even with texture-mapping buttons, the machine tends to produce airless, immaterial visions. Here the computer confirmed the material austerity set up by the budget and the asceticism of the church. The sum of generic materials, even if used unconventionally, connotes office blocks and factories. In an otherwise rich composition full of spatial complexities, the materials make the church seem diagrammatic.
If the materials offer no reason to touch this building, the architects have built many thought-provoking ideas. Their use of the computer is not simply a tour de force that pumps up design I.Q. The relationship between the computer and design supports a provocative theoretical position at the edge of current debate. In a complex world and a multicultural society, the designers wanted not only to acknowledge and sustain diversity, but also turn it into a cohesive whole in which that diversity is not considered fragmentary. Without trying to make a statement about fragmentation, the architects created a whole of parts that was not absolute and fixed but relational and in flux. The elements may be diverse, but their relationship is intricate and interdependent.
The architects have succeeded in creating a differentiated building that is a freeze-frame mix of simplicity and complexity. But in fact its duller parts-the new fiberglass facade, the amorphous roofscape, and the balanced and poised sanctuary interior-are those that approach unity and balance. The areas suspended in conflict or irresolution, especially the stairway lobbies, are the most compelling precisely because of the tensions of disparate systems encountering each other without resolution. In the sanctuary, the smoothing of differences leads to a cool self-containment oddly similar to closed platonic forms. The parts that enliven the building make it hard to believe that the duller parts are philosophically right.
Although the theoretical underpinnings embodied in the church may be debatable, the building is a remarkable achievement because the architects have integrated the computer in the design process in a way that supported theory: The use of the computer was conceptual rather than merely instrumental. The architects used the computer to expand and systematize an open design process, while maintaining procedural and constructive rigor.
Despite the theoretically liberal and sophisticated design climate in New York City, very few significant buildings have been built there in recent decades. The New York Presbyterian Church is one of the few latecomers to venture onto new conceptual ground. Largely because of its genesis through the computer, the church is emerging as a noteworthy building. Hopefully it will prove a spiritual space for congregants as well. Meanwhile, for architects, it is already auratic.
| Article provided courtesy of: |
|
 |
|
|
