CENTERBROOK
Introduction This is more than a monograph of an architecture firm’s projects. In these pages we partners of Centerbrook (Jeff Riley, Mark Simon, Chad Floyd, and Jim Childress) show our work of the last 15 years, but in a departure from the monograph norm, we reveal the formative ideas behind it. Our first three books presented us more or less as a collective, but here we present material by partner, each of us devoting 96 pages to photographs and drawings of projects accompanied by candid explanations of our inspirations, references, and design goals. The reader can judge how well we realized them.
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We believe it’s fitting that this, our 4th book, which comes at the conclusion of our 4th decade, should bring our 4 ways of working into the light. The organizational format we followed these many decades has allowed the luxury of four unique approaches to cohabit within a single office. That’s a little different from what’s found at most places, where specialized partner roles such as manager, marketer, or designer, are the order of the day, and office output reflects a more singular point of view. At Centerbrook each of us finds and performs his own projects. We use communal office resources and are blessed with a spectacularly talented staff, but other than that, we’re pretty much on our own, and our work reflects it.
The partners of Centerbrook receiving the AIA Firm of the Year Award (left to right): Jeff Riley, Bill Grover (Emeritus), Chad Floyd, Mark Simon, Jim Childress Below: Centerbrook’s offices are housed in a 19th-century factory.
We do share a lot, however. We support each other, heart and soul; we influence each other; we watch over each other; and we’re generally of like minds. We respect rather than eschew tradition and are not afraid to make buildings that resemble something that came before. We are devoted to sustainability, including the enhancement of disappearing land and cityscapes that people hold dear. On campuses and in cities we try to stitch together torn and frayed seams, bringing focus, harmony, and completeness to places where architectural entropy had been setting in. We think buildings and the spaces between them should invite people to sit comfortably in shady spots, provide intriguing vistas, create special landmarks, convey special meaning, inspire small ceremonies, nurture big festivals, kindle memories, and delight the eye.
In our approaches there are differences to these ends and thus differences, too, in our buildings—some of them subtle, some less so, many revealed in these pages. We have long sensed a gentle and positive competition between us, but that competitive spirit is tempered by the mutual friendship, admiration, encouragement, and wisdom that comes from many years working together. Our format has remained unchanged from our earliest days in 1975, when the oldest three of the current four partners—that’s Jeff, Mark, and Chad—along with emeritus partner Bill Grover and partners Bob Harper and Glenn Arbonies, both deceased—inherited our 19th-century factory in Centerbrook, Connecticut, from Charles Moore, our mentor. Charles had been Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, so as Yalies we three of the current four partners went pretty far back with him.
Clockwise: Our rooftop garden of wisteria and sedum; the firm gathered in our Upper Drafting Room; Mill Pond ice hockey; our home, 1895
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The materials under the sloping roofs recall Lancaster barns with natural wood beams and whitewashed boarding. The whole place is flexible. Almost every space can accommodate multiple uses, from display to reception to lecture. Even the reception desk in the entry hall rolls out of the way for events.
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The lecture hall is flexible and can be used for exhibits as well as gatherings. It has the same north light as the other halls but here augmented by light through south windows. These have a large overhang to minimize the hot summer sun.
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The back door leads to Wheatland and the surrounding arboretum so that the building serves as an entry pavilion to the whole campus. The basement archives have windows to show off the entire collection, even when not on exhibit.
The Geometry of the Sea Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut
For Mystic Seaport Museum’s new Thompson Exhibition Building, we were asked to design a building that would be emblematic of the institution’s identity. We found metaphorical inspiration in the institution’s sub-title, Museum of America and the Sea. For the building’s structure we used curving glued-laminated wood ribs that we hoped would imply a sailing ship’s “top timbers,” the curving members that delineate a hull’s shape.
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Crashing wave entrance faรงade, east
Mystic River faรงade, west
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We wanted the building’s overall form to recall natural phenomena, too, like a wind-driven wave crashing onto the shore. On its interior we curled the structural ribs at either end inward all the way down to the floor to suggest the spiraling vertebrae of marine creatures. Overall, our building stands for what we came to regard as “the geometry of the sea”—the spiral shape of sea life, the kinetic movement of ocean swells, the crash of waves on the shore, the billow of sails, and the faring of wooden hulls. We found wood to be the ideal material for these purposes, because it can economically enclose a large clearspan space while forming complex organic geometries.
Clockwise from top left: the inside of a wooden boat hull, a crashing wave, a billowing sail, the meeting room, and the spiral-shaped vertebrae of sea creatures
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The curving geometry of the lobby 209
Making Music House and Music Studios, Guilford, Connecticut
I don’t think architecture can substitute for someone’s biography, but it is possible to use forms, shapes, and details to create a portrait, of sorts. Architecture does convey a personality, so it might as well be the owner’s. Working with this client over a period of 15 years, we used memories, places, and things that were important to her to transform a rambling bungalow into her home. Over time, we renovated her house, turned a shed into a music studio and added a tower. We solved common problems like getting more natural light and fixing a collapsing roof, but to make the place special, we sought inspiration from the Southern New England setting, our client’s Japanese heritage, her interest in wood, and her experience as a worldclass violinist and professor of music at Yale University. The first project was to renovate the house. To make the most of what existed, we kept the original roof of the house intact. We extended the eaves and set a rhythm of wood columns and beams to hold the roof up. For the columns we designed abstract tree trunks made up of a cluster of “sticks.” 1 2 House Renovation 3 Music Studio Tower
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To soften the dining room visually and acoustically, fabric panels curved in the shape of a violin are woven through the rhythm of wood structural ties. The ties also act as light reflectors for the up lighting. The panels are made of two separated layers of fabric; the lower side with a tree trunk pattern, the upper side a simple sheet to diffuse light and hide insects and dust. Borrowing from nature and the different woods that make up a violin, we “painted with wood.� Instead of using paint colors, we used different woods, and wood grain textures, to accentuate different pieces and to create interest. Instead of a rice paper shoji screen that would not hold up to dog traffic, we laminated rice paper between two pieces of glass and installed it in a standard wood pocket door (to the right of the refrigerator). Japanese heritage meets Stanley pocket door hardware.
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For the music studio we used similar ideas to the house but wove wood panels through the space to provide an acoustically live room for playing and recording.
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The wood panels are interrupted with lights fabricated by our model maker. They are made of a plastic version of rice paper wrapped around inexpensive Home Depot light fixtures. The plastic sheets are simply slotted into one another and glued. In designing the fixtures, we thought of sheet music flying around but did not want to get too literal. The round window idea is borrowed from the Katsura Palace in Kyoto, Japan. To make it our own, we added asymmetrical straps of wood over the window. We were thinking of strings passing over a sound hole. Admittedly, the window is more reminiscent of a banjo sound hole than a violin f-hole, but we preferred the double meaning of Japan and music instrument over a literal representation of a violin.
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The most recently completed portion is a vertical music studio. The performers are at the top, the audience on the stairs, with the sound reflecting throughout. It continues with all of the themes of rhythms and trees, a lyrical curve weaving through, and painting with wood. We broke the curve at the top to help the tower appear more vertical than if we simply built a single wave. It also helps the tower appear to emerge from the existing house more gracefully.
Our client sampling the view before the tower was built.
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On the inside more rhythms are used. The horizontal striped ash paneling has a sense of weight by being wider at the bottom and getting narrower as you ascend the stair. The wood changes to vertical columns at the top. We were thinking of trees growing out of the base. We located the upper floor partway up these “trunks� to create a sense of lightness and being in a tree house. The spiral stair to the top is cantilevered from the edges so there would be no interior support to interrupt the spiral. Again, we painted with different woods: ash, maple, and cherry with ebony accents.
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“Centerbrook cares passionately about how buildings feel— about how we react to them viscerally. To these architects, buildings being warm and inviting and enhancing a sense of place, making a place feel special, is as important a part of architectural functioning as making the plumbing work.” Paul Goldberger “Centerbrook has done the best thing that architects can do anywhere. They have made a place where the natural and the manmade supplement each other in quiet grandeur.” Vincent J. Scully, Jr. “Centerbrook is probably one of the top half-dozen architectural firms nationally known for quality. They do powerful, unique, special buildings that are not so powerful, unique and special that they cast everything around them into doubt.” Robert A.M. Stern, FAIA “The partners at Centerbrook are convinced that profound or brilliant design begins not with moralistic ideologies, abstract theories, or trend-driven stylistic formulas. Transcendent architecture, they believe, starts with fulfilling elemental human needs.” Andrea Oppenheimer Dean “Centerbrook has managed to profoundly change our appearance in ways that made us even more of what we have always been.” Dr. James D. Watson, Nobel Laureate “Centerbrook continues to expand upon their design heritage, which is of exceptional pertinence today.” John Morris Dixon, FAIA