Metropolis Sept/Oct 2022 by metropolismag

One of Adjaye Associates’ 101 District Hospitals in Ghana

BuildingaHealthySociety HEALTH IS September/OctoberEVERYTHING2022

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The pandemic has revived one of the oldest questions in architecture and design.

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Adjaye Associates is designing 101 new district hospitals in Ghana, reimagining the healing power of design along the way.

Three projects n New York, Los Angeles, and London feature design that supports a kinder, more inclusive vision for dining.

TheFEATURESRecCenterReimagined

Fitness centers in Baltimore, Maryland, and El Paso, Texas, show that cities can offer high-level recreational services at a low cost, improving the well-being of all.

Life Support 96

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A+D practitioners who also work in medicine share their unique insights on healthy design, collaboration, and how health is being incorporated into non-medical spaces.

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ARCHIMANIACOURTESYWILLIS;COURTESYFABRICS;COURTESYTOPFROMCLOCKWISELEFT:MAYERMEL DEPARTMENTS SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022, Volume 42, Number 5. METROPOLIS® (ISSN 0279-4977) is published six times a year, bimonthly. Periodical postage is paid in New York, NY, and at additional mailing of ces. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product (Canadian Distribution) Sales Agreement No. 0861642. Publications Mail Agreement No. 40028983. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to circulation department or DPGM, 4960-2 Walker Rd., Windsor, ON N9A 6J3. Postmaster: Send address changes to Metropolis, PO Box 8552, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Subscription department: (800) 344-3046. Subscriptions: Six issues for $32.95 U.S.A., $52.95 Canada, $69.95 airmail all other countries. Domestic single copies $9.95; back issues $14.95. Copyright © 2022 by Sandow Media. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Material in this publication may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Metropolis will not be responsible for the return of any unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. Publishing and editorial of ce is at 3651 NW 8th Avenue, Boca Raton, FL 33431. On the cover: Workers lay rebar at Prampram, one of 101 new district hospitals under construction in Ghana. Adjaye Associates is designing the facilities

Photo by Edem

Tamakloe andRemediationARCHITECTURERematriation 68 OpenWORKPLACEAccess78 TheINSIGHTFuture of the Firm Library 84 AngieNOTEWORTHYBrooks132 p. 42 p. 60 p. 68CONTRIBUTORS 18 IN THIS ISSUE 20 SPECTRUM 28 BeyondTRANSPARENCYBiophilic38 InteriorSOURCEDMotives 40 AirPRODUCTSQuotes42 Flat-PackedTheENTERPRISEFutureIs48 ArtMADEonFabric 54 HighLowSUSTAINABLEDensity,Impact60 METROPOLIS12 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022

COURTESYPUBLICBRISBANECOURTESYCREATAR;COURTESYTOP:FROMTCLOCKWISELIBRARY;IWANBAAN In Taiyuan, a Coal Mine re-naturalizationelementstraditionalArchitectsMeisslstructures,largestWithGardenintoTransformedIsaBotanicaloneoftheworld’stimberlatticeDeluganAssociatedreinterpretsChineseforthis450-acreproject. MoreMETROPOLISMAG.COMofyourfavoriteMetropolis stories, online dailyJointopicsmostexpertswithdiscussionsindustryleadersandontheimportantoftheday. Register for free metropolismag.com/atthink-tank A New Library Is a Living Room for a Whole Town In Brisbane, California, a new library packs myriad user experiences into a small package, while delivering on sustainability. Bridging the Divide Between the Possible and the Impossible Michael Maltzan and Deborah Weintraub, leaders of the effort to construct L.A.’s newly opened Sixth Street Viaduct, talk about its lofty goals, significant challenges, and deep lessons. METROPOLIS14 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022

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RUTH-ANNE RICHARDSON

LEAH KIRTS

EDEM TAMAKLOE

Leah Kirts is a writer from Indiana based in New York, covering food, queer politics, and ecofeminist veganism. They write a monthly column for Them, and their work has appeared digitally and in print for publications such as Jarry, Saveur, and the James Beard Foundation blog. They also contributed chapters to Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (2022) and Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-oppression (2020). Kirts’s feature “Putting Care on the Table” (p. 108) spotlights hospitality projects that are giving back to their communities.

CONTRIBUTORS

Edem Tamakloe is a Ghanaian architect and architectural photographer. His work in photography started during his final year of architecture school, when he contributed to Adansisem, a blog dedicated to documenting Ghanaian architecture. His images have been published in Architectural Digest and the Robb Report Through his work, he aims to awaken a curiosity in viewers that makes them perceive the everyday with novel regard, by focusing on the indiscernible— light, heights, volumes, and shadows.

Ruth-Anne Richardson is a practicing Ghanaian architect and writer based in Accra. She is founding principal of StudioRED, an emerging architectural practice in Ghana; a senior researcher at the African Futures Institute; and an independent research tutor working with architecture and planning students in Accra and Kumasi. She was also project architect for the country’s first 100-bed Ghana Infectious Diseases Centre, completed in July 2020. For this issue, Richardson penned a feature on Adjaye Associates’ District Hospitals project in Ghana (p. 96).

Tamakloe photographed the District Hospitals project in Ghana for “Life Support” (p. 96) and the cover of this issue.

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We need more architects, designers, and health experts engaged in similar endeavors, and we need a framework for how they can incorporate health as a factor in every design project they undertake, no matter how big or small. Only then will we see the positive impact of healthy design reach those who have yet to be touched by it. Our efforts so far have been inspiring; it’s time to make them widespread and consistent. —Avinash Rajagopal, editor in chief

It’s time to similarly codify “Health in All Design.”

Some architects and interior designers, of course, don’t need convincing that their work can influence people’s health and well-being. Just look at the scale and diversity of the projects and initiatives published in this issue.

In Ghana, Adjaye Associates is participating in a massive experiment in healthcare delivery, using modular design to build 101 district health centers and significantly expand the West African nation’s health infrastructure (“Life Support,” p. 96). Here in the United States, recreation centers are taking a cue from the multibillion-dollar fitness industry to create community around health and wellness,

CLARIFICATION: Group 4 Architecture served as library designer of the Olathe Indian Creek Library shown in “Together Again” (p. 103, July/August 2022). Multistudio (formerly Gould Evans) was lead designer.

In 2006, policy makers in the European Union defined a revolutionary approach to lawmaking and public initiatives that they called “Health in All Policies” (HiAP). The idea was bold but simple: Experts had long recognized that delivering high-quality health care was not enough to keep people healthy. Roads, schools, industry, and nearly everything else that governments control or influence can play a part. So policies or initiatives should be undertaken only after considering how they could affect people’s health—through processes called “health lens analysis” or a “health impact assessment.” Over the past 15 years, the HiAP framework has become widespread—even the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends it to improve health outcomes and health equity.

through elevated design (“The Rec Center Reimagined,” p. 88). And a new generation of restaurateurs, inspired by the experience of the pandemic that hit their industry so hard, are using their spaces to advocate for the marginalized, strengthen communal ties, and educate children about healthy food (“Putting Care on the Table,” p. 108).

IN THIS ISSUE

We now have a cohort of leaders who are both medical and design professionals (“Doctors Who Design,” p. 116) pushing at the frontiers of how design can heal. Meanwhile, as Elissaveta M. Brandon reports in “Can We Design for Happiness?” (p. 120), architects and design professionals are seeking to understand the role design can play in mental and social health, both key components of holistic well-being.

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Nothing says modern design quite like molded plywood. A modern innovation constructed of layers of wood veneers laminated together in a cross-grain pattern, plywood is lightweight, strong, and beautiful. Bending that material into new forms, as Charles and Ray Eames discovered, allows designers to transform and mold the material, using it in ways unachievable with solid wood. The honest functionalism in both form and aesthetic that drew mid-century designers like the Eameses to molded plywood also attracted Norwegian designer Lars Beller Fjetland.

His Softwood Collection for Spinneybeck builds on the legacy of mid-century design and brings this iconic material into the 21st

“With Twist,” says Fjetland, “I wanted to explore new grounds for what could be achieved in wood. The wood is both stretched and twisted to create an almost impossible form that I associate with hanging curtains.”

century with a proprietary new production technique. Perhaps the most significant technological innovation in molded plywood since the 1960s, it allows designers to push plywood beyond its conventional limits, twisting, bending, and deforming it into radical new Forshapes.Fjetland this technological development led to a design breakthrough and enabled him to develop three wall panel designs that he says draw inspiration from “the soft and calming characteristics of draped, folded, and suspended fabrics—an aesthetic that offers something warm, gentle, saf e, and comforting.”

The three products, Pleat, Quilt, and Twist add a new dimension to plywood and

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bring visual interest, activity, and an acoustic benefit to walls. “But,” says Fjetland, “It is not just about the acoustic qualities. To me, it’s also about form. When fluid lines break up straight lines, a space can feel more like nature—establishing a balance between the static and the non-static.”

Because the new production technique requires no liquid glue, its far more sustainable and easier to work with than conventional lamination techniques. The Softwood Collection also requires no additional machining after the wood is pressed, reducing waste and saving money. The result is that Softwood can be serially produced and brought to market for all to enjoy—something the Eameses would have appreciated.

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its designers, Markus Jehs and Jürgen Laub, Bonh was developed as a solution that would support not only the physiological but also the psychological needs of its end user. With the principles of biophilic design in mind, they created a cascading planter whose three cylinders are suspended from steel rods, giving the piece an unmistakably architectural form.

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A color palette of blues and greens reflects the Lowcountry marshes that surround the Shawn Jenkins TourvilleHospitalChildren’sandPearlWomen’s Pavilion in Charleston, South Carolina. The hospital, which specializes in women’s health and pediatrics, was designed to feel safe and inviting to patients and their families during what can be stressful times.

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AnSPECTRUMessential survey of andarchitecturedesigntoday

For mothers facing congenital issues and premature births, the architects created spaces twice the size of a typical room, so mother and child aren’t separated, as is usually the case. “The baby is in an incubator and the mother is in a family space to keep that family together,” Scheurer

Inside, soft green and blue tones inspired by surrounding Lowcountry marshes soothe patients and visitors alike. “Charleston is pretty colorful, and the project is informed by nature and environment,” Tanabe says.

“We wanted an environment where people felt like they belonged—in a place where no one wants to find themselves,” says Mark Scheurer, M.D., the Medical University of South Carolina’s chief of children’s and women’s services. “We wanted them to feel safe, invited, and as normal as possible.”

For that, they commissioned healthcare experts from Perkins&Will’s Atlanta and New York offices, and Charleston’s McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture. “It’s a healthcare project and a commercial project, but still we wanted to create a welcoming, familiar place,” says Aiko Tanabe, senior interior designer at Perkins&Will. “We tried to create small moments for children to discover and create a wow factor.”

South Carolina’s newest comprehensive care hospital was a collaborative effort. In 2014, 26 teams of nurses, physicians, architects, and designers mapped out plans for the Medical University of South Carolina’s Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital and Pearl Tourville Women’s Pavilion. Once completed in 2020, the facility introduced a new level of patientoriented care to women and children.

FamilyHEALTHFocusedDesigningCharleston,

Consolidating women’s and children’s health care in a single facility, the Medical University of South Carolina’s Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital and Pearl Tourville Women’s Pavilion offers heart and liver transplant services, along with an 82-bed neonatal ICU unit, and South Carolina’s only Level 1 pediatric trauma center.

(2)MASONCOURTESYSTEINKAMP;JAMESCOURTESYTOP:FROMCLOCKWISEHALKIN

Sited prominently on a peninsula where the Ashley River meets the Cooper, the 11-story hospital serves as a gateway to the city. Its curved facade offers panoramic views from a seventh-floor porch, and its ground-level park is used by patients, family, and community members. A three-part rooftop deck is designed for respite, gathering, and play.

—J. Michael Welton

says. “It reduces complications, and the stay is actually shorter.”

AT T H E M U SEU M CO L L EC T I O N

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The latest, installed at The Wharf, is a stabile of colorful buoys suspended at various heights from steel arches and imprinted with the years and high-water lines of past and future inundations.

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To mount the sculpture securely where it would have the most dramatic effect, they had to fabricate a frame of steel arches to suspend the markers above a stormwater manhole and fasten that with bolts to four corners of an existing concrete curb.

STUDIOWAYSIDECOURTESY SPECTRUM

In 2018, D.C.’s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE) solicited proposals from artists to see whether a creative approach could help. Designer Curry J. Hackett and artist Patrick McDonough responded with a system of wayfinding sculptures titled High Water Mark that use sight lines and color to visually communicate flood history and highlight how much worse future events might be.

“We needed that location because it’s one of the lowest lying [spots] with the tallest data point,” says McDonough, describing the impact of having to look up to read the information. “The 500-year flood line is nine feet in the air!” he exclaims.

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flood history hasn’t stopped developers from building in low-lying areas, nor has it significantly altered residents’ behavior when the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers (and their tributaries) overflow.

A 2006 flood was troubling enough to revive a stalled update of the capital’s levee-and-flood-wall system, though not memorable enough to deter people last year from carrying on business as usual at the Municipal Fish Market in the middle of a flash flood.

“Architects are always talking about climate change, but those conversations get mired in credentials, performance, or LEED certifications—like the conversation is being had on behalf of the public, without the public. What we’re trying to do is engage them directly and offer an incentive to make choices,” Hackett says. Freedom to select the sites (the first two totems are in Marvin Gaye Park and Kingman Island, predominantly Black neighborhoods) got McDonough and Hackett envisioning a gradual expansion of the program throughout the city’s entire 100-year floodplain. “That,” Hackett says, “is a different kind of agency.” —Kelly Beamon

The designers’ enthusiastic approach reflects a shared passion for water management: McDonough was previously on the DOEE’s radar for proposing a collaboration with a microbrewery to use stormwater to make an experimental rainwater beer. Hackett, who earned his B.Arch from Howard University, landed his first job as a subconsultant for the D.C. Water Authority making CAD drawings and believes this gap in public information might be design professionals’ problem to fix.

For their first two installations, Curry J. Hackett (top) and Patrick McDonough (bottom) conducted research to determine which Washington, D.C., neighborhoods most needed their bold, friendly reminders, selecting Marvin Gaye Park and Kingman Island, serving predominantly Black neighborhoods along tributaries to the Anacostia River.

How to make people take floods more seriously?

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A new residence hall (top) creates a stronger sense of campus life. It is clad in beige bricks with a stamped texture, varying the school’s monolithic red-brick palette. An airy new atrium (bottom) connects disparate zones and transforms the school’s arrival experience.

The centerpiece is the 7,000-squarefoot atrium, which wraps around two sides of a new courtyard, suffused with natural light from large picture windows and a rhomboid skylight. The area can be used for studying, socializing, and large events like the school’s commencement ceremonies. Although a substantial amount of green space from the original courtyard was sacrificed to accommodate the redesign, much has been reclaimed with the groundlevel courtyard and a second-level terrace

above the atrium, including a hardscaped outdoor seating area with movable chairs and tables. The atrium also offers a much more efficient and inspiring entrance experience than JTS’s former long corridors.

ARCHITECTURE Exhilarating Alteration

JTS now has a host of open, practical new spaces, many enlivened with large windows and skylights, brightly colored upholstery, light wood furniture, creamcolored Jerusalem white limestone surfaces, and tapestry-covered walls displaying images from sacred Jewish texts. The renovation includes an airy new atrium, a new library where rare books can be better showcased, a residence hall designed with varied gathering spaces, as well as an auditorium equipped for high-quality livestreaming. Outside, the architects broke up the monolithic red-brick campus by cladding the new structures in beige bricks with a stamped texture, sourced from Utah.

“Until this renovation, when you walked into JTS, you walked into an elevator bank,” says Chancellor Shuly Rubin Schwartz. “Now you walk into a beautiful common space that leads out to a library, to our performance space, and to our dining hall.”

The new update to the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects is one of the most transformative recent architecture projects in New York. Located in Morningside Heights, JTS is one of the country’s most prominent centers for Jewish higher learning. However, until the recent renovation it looked more like a hermetic cloister than a 21st-century institution.

—Alex Ulam

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FUNDDEVELOPMENTREGIONALEUROPEAN EUROPEMAKETOWAYA ISSPAININ INTERIORSFROMSPAIN.COM@INTERIORSFROM_SPAIN NOVEMBER 13 – 14 NEW YORKEUROPEAN UNION BDNY ISIMAR KRISKADECOR HURTADO KLEIN LEDS C4 LZF NANIMARQUINA NOMON NOW CARPETS RS BARCELONA SANCALSANTA&COLEPOINT WOOP RUGSROCA GRASSOLERGRATOEXPORMIMESTILUZ GIRONÉSCOMERSAN ADEX B.LUXBD BARCELONA DESIGN BOHEME DESIGN BOVER A EMOTIONAL LIGHT

SØN&HANSENCARLCOURTESY SPECTRUM

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Often referred to as the “Pioneer of Danish Functionalism,” Lauritzen revolutionized a Modernist “inside out” approach to architecture and design that prioritized functionality, context, and inclusivity. Firmly believing that architecture should be an applied art that serves all, rather than a luxury for the elite, Lauritzen left a legacy that lives on in the city today, whether one is catching a show at VEGA or a flight at Copenhagen Airport. —Jaxson Leilah Stone

As part of the firm’s centennial, the company has partnered with Danish furniture manufacturer Carl Hansen & Søn to reproduce the Vega Chair for a wider audience, introducing a version that can be specified in steel or FSC-certified oak and upholstered in fabric or leather. Anne Møller Sørensen, partner at Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects, attests that while the design was “effortlessly simple,” it has always maintained “a very clear character” in its uncompromising detail and comfortable proportions.

David Bowie played his last show of the millennium to a crowd of 1,500 fans in the woodpaneled halls of Denmark’s VEGA music venue. If those perfectly Functionalist walls could speak, perhaps they would hum the tune to “Life on Mars.” Maybe they would recall the set lists of Prince or Björk, or they would share the wild stories of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll that unfolded in the building’s magical arrangement of variously sized concert halls, moody midcentury bars, and labyrinthine staircases. To be sure, the walls would tell the story of how Danish architect Vilhelm Lauritzen’s 1956 Modernist masterwork was transformed into the country’s most iconic concert hall.

VEGAHISTORYVisionsInDecember1999,

The Vega Chair, designed by Copenhagenbased Vilhelm Lauritzen in 1956, is being reproduced this year by Danish furniture manufacturer Carl Hansen & Søn. Originally intended for use in Copenhagen’s Folkets Hus, it is the first time the modern, stackable chair is being introduced and sold to a wider audience.

Lauritzen (1894–1984) designed the building as a universal meeting place for Copenhagen’s labor movement. Originally called Folkets Hus, or “the People’s House for the Employees’ Association,” the structure fell into disrepair and faced threats of demolition before it was restored and inaugurated as a music venue in 1996, when the city was designated a European Capital of Culture.

Known for designing buildings as total works of art, Lauritzen had a signature approach to craftsmanship that contributed to VEGA’s timelessness and durability. The architect meticulously designed everything from the paneling, friezes, and chandeliers to the lighting fixtures, door handles, and even sockets. But today, one object stands out from the rest: a simple, stackable chair. Designed for the original People’s House in 1956, but now referred to as the Vega Chair, it has never been released in serial production until this year.

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MEET ME BY THE FOUNTAIN: AN INSIDE HISTORY OF THE MALL

For many who grew up in American suburbs, the concept of a “dead mall” is familiar. Dead or ghost malls are those sprawling structures that developments such as e-commerce, high tenant vacancies, and socioeconomic decline have left completely abandoned or underutilized—mere shells of a recent consumer-driven past.

“Malls have been dying for the past 40 years,” New York–based architecture critic Alexandra Lange writes in her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. “Every decade rewrites the obituary in its own terms, but the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilizational collapse, keep reappearing.… And yet, people keepTheshopping.”bookchronicles the rise, fall, and reinvention of the shopping mall, from its emergence after the federal highway acts of 1944 and 1956 to its transformation into a public gathering place in the 1970s and ’80s,

While the book is a thoroughly researched scholarly account, Lange’s accessible and entertaining writing style also makes it appealing to more than just design nerds. As she observes in the introduction, “In contrast to many other forms of public architecture, which embody fear, power, and knowledge, the mall is personal.” Whether malls are dead or alive, almost everyone has a mall story to tell. —J.L.S.

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to its so-called demise (Lange will be the first to challenge this narrative) in the late 1990s. Arranged in seven chapters and illustrated throughout, the pages offer tales of postwar innovation and optimism, highlighting the architects, planners, and merchants who brought the “climate-controlled monuments”—to borrow words from Joan Didion—to life as well as the critical thinkers, such as Didion, who helped establish them as quintessential symbols of the American dream.

By Alexandra Lange, Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $25

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Richard Taylor, director of the Materials Science Institute at the University of Oregon, these carpet planks feature a geometric abstraction of fractals (the building blocks of natural patterns in things such as tree branches and clouds) to stimulate users’ sense of well-being. Mohawk combined that biophilic benefit with a lean chemistry and smaller carbon footprint to make it even healthier to be around. Here’s how.

recycledmaterial,speciallybackingCarpetWASTE-REDUCINGplanksuseapre-attachedmadewiththecompany’sengineeredEcoFlexONEmadeof74percentcontent.

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Standardahumandesign,TheWELL-ELIGIBLEcollection’sresearch-backeddevelopedtoadvancehealth,cancontributetoproject’sWELLBuildingversion2certification.

The Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI) issues this indoor air quality label for products tested and identified by a third party to meet its stringent standards for low-VOC emissions.

CARBON equitablethesupportsFluencyforflooringAsMANUFACTURING-NEUTRALofthisyear,allofMohawk’smeetsindustrystandardscarbonneutrality.Fractalproductioninparticulara5percentgivebackinareasofclimate,water,andcommunityinvestments.

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FutureteredEnergy,requirements—includingnosevenstandardAchievingCHALLENGEPRODUCTPETALthePetaltierofthismeansthecarpetsatisfiesCoreImperativesandmeetslessthanthreeadditionaltheWater,orMaterialsPetal—adminis-bytheInternationalLivingInstitute.

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“It has a great accent color that brings vibrancy to a room.” tarkett.com

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“It has a simple pattern that plays well with other maharam.commaterials.”

“I love the company’s story: reclaimed material that’s reused in a number of urbanevolutions.comfurnishings.”

“This is a statement piece that can serve as meeting, social, and work space.” orangebox.com

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From childhood model-building and electronics tinkering to his first design job planning spaces for a furniture company, Davis brings the full range of his lived experiences to his role as a principal in Chicago for Shive-Hattery. Like Davis, the firm’s 14 offices are known for balancing technical and aesthetic problem-solving. But Davis doesn’t credit his career trajectory to fitting in. “It’s an opportunity to stand out,” says the Ball State University alum.

05 SW_1 table

01 02 03 04 05 08 07 06

MICHAEL DAVIS

02 Cartography resilient flooring

07 Magis Steelwood stool

“The relaxed scale is perfect in breakout coalesse.comareas.”

06 Shapes side table

01 Go Figure fixture

MANUFACTURERSCOURTESYPRODUCTS:MBOSHPHOTO;COURTESYPORTRAIT:THE InteriorSOURCEDMotivesFlexible,morale-boostinginteriorsdistinguishMichaelDavis’sworkatShive-Hattery.

“The ability to reconfigure it provides customization without it actually being alwusa.comcustom.”

“The lines nod to the past, but with a twist.” knoll.com

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08 Away From The Desk seating

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Launched four years ago by its husband-and-wife founders, Backdrop makes paints which are Green Wise-certified and low-VOC, along with wallpaper that’s certified GREENGUARD Gold, designed in Los Angeles, and digitally printed in Brooklyn, New York, by its parent company Schumacher. Its paints are certified by the international Coatings Research Group Inc. and Climate Neutral. backdrophome.comBACKDROP

By Kelly Beamon

01 METROPOLIS42

Hours spent poring over products to compare volatile organic compound (VOC) levels can be reduced to minutes, thanks to the expanding number of certifications that confirm at a glance whether a sofa, paint, or flooring supports healthy indoor air. In addition to GREENGUARD and FloorScore (as well other ecolabels mentioned on the following pages), new labels such as the Climate Neutral Certification make it easier than ever to specify breathable interiors that also have lower carbon emissions. A great example is Backdrop, which is the first paint and wallcoverings company to be certified under Climate Neutral’s three-part “early and aggressive action” plan for carbon reduction, offering products that are certified for low VOCs.

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AirPRODUCTSQuotesMorethanever,productcertificationsareplacing the power of good indoor air quality in interior designers’ hands.

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TheseYOTAcabinets, including panel doors, carcasses, and sliding mechanisms, are all California Air Resources Board Phase 2 mandicasa.comMANDICASA(CARB2)–certified.

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04 nassimi.comNASSIMIinspiredadditionalant,HospitalsSupreenandwithoutStain-SUPREENandwater-resistanttheuseofPFAsfluorocarbons,isHealthierInitiative–compli-andnowavailableinmenswear-styles.

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05 MadeCAMBRIAintheUnited States, these quartz surfaces are Living Building Challenge–compliant, carry the Declare label and Health Product Declaration, and are cambriausa.comCAMBRIAGREENGUARDcertifiedGold. 04 05

03 DesigningRE-RUGa process to weave yarn from leftover wool led to a collection of rugs that celebrate the tonal richness of recycled feedstock—and it’s Climate nanimarquina.comNANIMARQUINANeutral–certified.

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10 SUN KISSED Being low-VOC, recyclable, and GREENGUARD Gold distinguishes this scratch-, impact-, and heat-resistant solid durasein.comDURASEINsurfacing.

07 mayerfabrics.comMAYERGold.certifiedtreatedpolyester,recycled,MadeFANFAREof100percentpostconsumerthisCrypton-fabricisalsoGREENGUARDFABRICS

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08 wallquest.comWALLQUESTandagainstcleanwallcoveringTedlarDUPONTWALLQUESTWALLCOVERINGcoatingmakesthiseasytowipeandprotectsitdirt,stains,scuffs,fading.

ThisPURLINEcommercial flooring is a bio-based polyurethane that is recyclable, certified Cradle to Cradle Silver, GREENGUARD Gold, and verified mattersurfaces.comMATTERLBC–compliant.DeclareSURFACES

09 DevelopedBIO-MBOby Patricia Urquiola, Cassina, and researchers from Milan Polytechnic, this upholstered headboard features a cassinausa.com/ww/enCASSINAcapturesair-filteringpatentedfabricthatpollutants.

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13 certainteed.comCERTAINTEEDformaldehyde-free.GREENGUARDrecycledinsulationThisINSULPUREfiberglassbuildingismadewithcontent,ratedGold,and

Certified Asthma and Allergy Friendly by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, this device uses a HEPA filter and six-stage filtration to combat VOCs in up to 1,070 square feet.

Designed by Altherr Désile Park, this lelandfurniture.comLELANDGoldSCScollectionversatileisalsocertifiedIndoorAdvantageforairquality.

A new upholstery,plain-wovendesigned to complement roomandboard.comROOMGREENGUARDyarnupcycledlinenloungeVermont-madetheEricsonchair,lookslikebutisactuallydurablepolypropylenecertifiedGold.&BOARD

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Nans

We wanted to highlight the craftsmanship of the lampshades and to look for a different way of weaving by combining different colours and formats to create a true Mediterranean style.

Nans is an extensive collection of luminaires that pay tribute to small cove in the Costa Brava. Designed for outdoors, Nans can also be used for indoor use.

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WORKSSTELLAROFCOURTESYGAO,ALICEOPPOSITE:WORLD;COURTESYPAGE:THISANDREU IsENTERPRISEtheFutureFlat-packed?Designingforeasyassemblyisbackinvogue,becauseit’safastwaytoachievemanufacturers’carbon-reductiongoals.ByKellyBeamon METROPOLIS48

For manufacturers, there’s also something demonstrably sustainable about designing for easy assembly, because when that is the goal, a direct result is fewer

Designed by Philippe Starck for Andreu World, the Adela Rex chair (opposite) consists of three pieces of molded plywood that can be assembled “like a puzzle. . .without fittings or Comprisingscrews.”sixpieces and minimal bentwoodby(above)chairBassamFellows’hardware,PagodaforStellarWorkswaspartlyinspiredMichaelThonet’sseating.

design Jamie McLellan that break down into six planks of wood at this year’s Salone del Mobile; Spanish brand Andreu World debuted its three-piece Adela Rex chair as the first in a series of easy-to-assemble plywood seating collaborations it has rolled out with designer Philippe Starck; and Loose Parts, a new manufacturer, has developed all of its products to fit together as a single kit of parts that users can reconfigure at will to make new furniture. To illustrate that capability, the company “reassembled” seating, tables, and storage daily during 2022 furniture fairs in Milan and Los Angeles. “There’s something empowering [for the user] about building your own furniture,” says Loose Parts founder Jennifer June.

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 49

Design for assembly (DFA) is hardly new. Thonet’s 1859 No. 14 chair, when disassembled, could be shipped in batches of 36 per 40-square-inch box.

Those cost savings tied to DFA are still valuable. And as it helped revolutionize shipping in the industrial era, it now carries prestige as a powerful carbon-reduction tool. In fact, DFA is currently the distinguishing feature of at least six highly visible product launches among commercial furniture manufacturers in just the past year. Notably, Huntingburg, Indiana–based manufacturer OFS earned a MetropolisLikes NeoCon award this year for debuting a dining chair that assembles “with a single screw”; Shanghai-based Stellar Works last year unveiled its Pagoda chair by BassamFellows, which it ships flat-packed in six pieces; New Zealand–based Resident launched a line of coffee and dining tables by Allbirds’ head of

OKANOTOAKICOURTESY

IsENTERPRISEtheFuture Flat-packed?

METROPOLIS50 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022

parts and shorter production—cuts that naturally remove carbon-emitting steps from operations. In fact, few other carbonabatement methods seem able to slash embodied carbon, shipping, and transportation for building products as quickly as flat-packed, easy-to-assemble goods can.

To put DFA-driven achievements in context, consider that a report coauthored two years ago by senior professionals at

“Easily disassembled furniture has never been more important, given the need to reduce carbon footprints and [cut costs to] transport goods,” says Allbirds’ McLellan, explaining that “minimal [shipping] volume and maximal impact were both considered” in his design for Resident’s Plane tables.

Andreu World CEO Jesús Llinares says ease of assembly is also central to achieving a circular economy: “We’re developing our products to achieve 100 percent circularity by 2025.” This year, the company earned Cradle to Cradle certification for its entire product range.

In its flat-packed state, the Plane Table by Resident “is a fraction of its assembled volume,” says designer Jamie McLellan.

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McKinsey & Company and Barclays Investment Bank found that less than 25 percent of surveyed companies described their carbon-reduction efforts as being on track. Yet in order to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement’s global warming cap, greenhouse gas emissions would need to be halved every decade until 2050, the report says.

METROPOLIS52 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022

Three-year-old Loose Parts sells all of its furniture as a system that users can reconfigure into their own designs across the collection. Individual components in the system are registered Declare and Red List–free.

“The pandemic revealed the awkwardness of [people] reengaging with public life,” Loose Parts’ June says. “I wondered how our relationship to the office, restaurants, and retail had changed. That’s when I started to think goals for commercial furniture could be realigned toward adaptability, recombination, continuity, ease of storage, and healthy materials. I designed my company to be a creative partner as we adapt to those new requirements.” M

TOLLECOURTESYMADELINE IsENTERPRISEtheFuture Flat-packed?

If those efforts can be sped up by DFA, Loose Parts’ business model sets the highest standard. Its collections’ intense malleability seems built to feed a circular system that emphasizes recycling, reuse, and the right to repair.

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EmbroideredCAVE-LIKE and woven, Doily is layered like Cave’s Soundsuits. Opposite: the artist with Guise, an upholstery pattern inspired by his artworks’ beading.

FRENCHLYNDONCOURTESYRIGHT:MANUFACTURER;COURTESYLEFT:THE

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A poetic man, Cave says he aspired to develop a collection of upholstery and wallcoverings that could speak elegantly “about the way in which a Jacquard is created, the way in which a woven is integrated with a taffeta,” rather than simply showcase a technique. In this way, Cave has created a line of dimensional fabrics that appear to have depth. Inspired by his Soundsuits, the new collection balances art and function.

To develop a new collection for KnollTextiles, fine artist Nick Cave mined his own creative processes.

Raised in Fulton, Missouri, Nick Cave is an artistic polyglot who fuses sculpture, high fashion, dance, and culture into beautifully constructed pieces, most notably his wearable Soundsuits. Therefore, when presented with an opportunity to design a collection for manufacturer KnollTextiles, his challenge was to create something functional that also felt true to the essence of his unique body of work. “When someone looks at this collection, it has to feel and read of Nick Cave,” he says.

By Chaseedaw Giles

ArtMADEon Fabric

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022 55

MORE IS MORE Cave’s multimedia artwork informed the upholstery(bottomandFloralincludingmultidimensionalcollection’spatterns,ForestandBigwallcoverings(topleft),Buttondraperyleft),andGuise(below).

To achieve that equilibrium, “I would go way out and pull back in,” Cave says in explaining how he adapted his three-dimensional ideas to the flat medium. He also applied the notion of building, by layering collage and assemblage techniques to create patterns such as Big Floral, a wallcovering with botanical beaded designs printed over olefin composite. It has texture and appears as if the surface were encrusted with fantastical beaded flowers. “It’s really me just breaking rules, asking alternative questions,” he adds.

FRENCHLYNDONCOURTESY ArtMADEon Fabric

Cave developed one design by printing a pattern on top of a textile with a metallic sheen “so that the metallic [finish] finds its way back to the surface to some degree, based on light and reflection.” That method adds another layer of depth to the material. As an Alvin Ailey–trained dancer, performance artist, and fashion designer, Cave brings the totality of his art world experiences to the work. Whimsical and intricate, the result is a well-choreographed collection, with pieces that can share the spotlight when used in the same room. “This is where dance comes in,” he says. “It’s all about the coordination. How does the wallpaper support the drapery, support the upholstery?”Caveisdirector of the graduate program of the Fashion Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and much like a fashion designer preparing for a runway show, he anticipated designers assembling separate pieces from the collection in various combinations to create harmonious looks. The overall color palette evokes a sense of calm, like the Taurean greens used in the Vert upholstery. “There is a strength to the collection, and there’s a timelessness to it,” Cave explains.

It’s also uniquely Cave. It evokes his studio process of excess, building, and surplus. Usually he starts with found objects like rusted tools, figurines, or dominoes that speak to him, then sometimes files them away for months, even years before he incorporates them into his work. “I’ve bought things and held on to them until they have

METROPOLIS56 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022

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To capture Cave’s vision, his process of collecting and combining fur, beads, sequins, and buttons was reproduced in Knoll’s production steps.

In the collection for Knoll, as in his art, he also weaves together global cultures.

ArtMADEon Fabric

from painted sections of bamboo curtain, and Until, a drapery inspired by an installation of the same name made from nets of brilliantly colored beads that was displayed at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The patterns are saturated in rhythm, motion, and vibrant earth tones. “These textiles are communicating in a very interesting way,” he says. M

“I’m looking at African textiles. I’m looking at [Caribbean] carnival. I’m looking at Haitian voodoo flags,” Cave explains. It shows in Forest, a wallcovering inspired by an installation—“Architectural Forest”—created

found their way. It could be like two, three years before it finds its way into the work.”

FRENCHLYNDONCOURTESY

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ARCHIMANIACOURTESY HighLowSUSTAINABLEDensity,ImpactATennesseearchitectureofficechartsanewpathforgreenbuildinginacarbon-intensiveneighborhood.ByEthanTucker

Archimania’s new office occupies one of a pair of single-story white buildings on South Cooper Street, a low-rise commercial corridor a few miles from downtown Memphis. The thoroughfare’s two lanes of traffic, lined by shopping centers, restaurants, and parking lots—lots of parking lots—make it an unlikely site for a firm that has garnered multiple AIA awards for its green building strategies. But despite—or maybe because of—that location, the headquarters’ design promotes a new type of sustainable reuse, one that targets the in-between areas that are not at the center of cities, but are highly car-centric.

Archimania reimagined an existing pair of low-slung commercial buildings (left) as a new office and a test-case in sustainability (below).

“It’s set up like a horizontal mixed-use community already,” Archimania senior associate Jacob Davis says of the location. The office is situated along a two-mile stretch that runs from Overton Park, a 342-acre green space in the city’s north, to Cooper-Young, a lively neighborhood of bars and restaurants in the south, and just off the main road, where single-family houses dominate. “We thought that if we plug in the right way, we can be a catalyst for change,” he says, explaining that activating the corridor between these two nodes could help increase pedestrian and bicycle traffic, connect the commercial strip to

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This isn’t the first time Archimania has moved its own office to a neighborhood in order to lead the area’s improvements by example. Its previous home, on South Main Street in downtown Memphis, opened in 1995, when the city’s newly dubbed arts district was still “pretty barren,” recalls founding partner Todd Walker. There, they helped design infill developments while working with retail groups to reoccupy vacant storefronts. The firm also collaborated with the Division of Planning and Development as well as the Downtown Memphis Commission to implement a more robust frontage that enhanced the street with native landscaping and lighting to improve walkability.

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In the new location on South Cooper, “we started by asking, one, how do we make this a better urban place? And then how do we make it a better place for the environment?” he

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Instead of a gutter, a linear bioswale (a planted channel) filters and conveys stormwater runoff

88 loops provide ground-sourced heat and cooling

The two buildings received the same passive sustainability treatments, but by using conventional systems in the smaller structure, Archimania tested its office’s solar, geothermal, and energy management technology against a baseline.

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37%

That’s how much of the site was reclaimed from impervious asphalt for landscaping that holds plantings for new pollinators and bird habitat, a lawn for recreation, and bioswales to manage runoff.

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They’resays.ontrack to earn LEED Platinum status through the Operations and Maintenance Path for existing buildings; it’s also the world’s first existing building to be dual-certified Zero Energy and Zero Carbon by the International Living Future Institute, by reusing as much of the existing structures as possible. The architects repurposed the

These provide light mid–floor plate

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surrounding residential areas, and reduce residents’ reliance on cars.

Davis agrees that the side-by-side comparison helps sell clients on green building technology: “Instead of trying to explain it all with a high-level detail, you literally can say, ‘Come to our office and let me show you.’ ” One of the most impressive things they can show clients is an estimated 9.7-year return on investment for the comprehensive energy saving strategies including geothermal and solar systems, part of which are supported by tax incentives.

buildings] as a case study,’ ” Walker says.

ARCHIMANIACOURTESY LowSUSTAINABLEDensity, High Impact

Making those physical connections to the rest of the neighborhood is crucial to the project’s larger impact. Both Davis and Walker envision those plans and outdoor

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building’s concrete foundations, steel structural elements, slab terrazzo flooring, and exterior masonry, which reduced the project’s embodied carbon footprint by 67 percent compared with baseline new construction. Then they beefed up insulation, added overhangs to southern exposures to reduce solar heat gain, and introduced more daylight to cut down on energy consumption. The designers employed these passive strategies on both their office and the neighboring smaller building, currently leased to an advertising agency. But while the Archimania office also got a geothermal HVAC system, a solar array, and a lighting system that responds to building occupancy, its neighbor has conventional systems. Withholding the most innovative systems from the second building allows the firm to use it as the “control” in its ongoing experiments with carbon-neutral design. “We talk to clients all the time about doing these things and they always ask us, ‘Well, how does this compare? How is this better, not just for the environment, but for utility cost or up-front cost? What does it take to maintain a building with geothermal energy?’ All these things. And so we said, ‘Let’s treat [our

Outside of the building, they can point to changes they’ve made to reverse the impact of the neighborhood’s car-centric

history. “The site was 98 percent asphalt,” recalls Davis. “There was a little landscape strip out front that had some overgrown hedges in it and everything was parking.” To build connections to the adjacent residential neighborhood, to potential new businesses along South Cooper, and anticipate new modes of transportation along the corridor, they ripped up a quarter of the existing paving to plant gardens and create a community courtyard of crushed stone.

LET THE LIGHT IN Every workstation in the office has a view to the landscape outside, and light wells let natural light into the core of the building. Interior furnishings were made of locally sourced plywood, further cutting the project’s carbon footprint.

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interventions as a test of what they’ve started calling “Carbon Neutral Corridors.” In the future, they envision developing a multi-unit residential project on the same parcel to further make the case that carbon-neutral mixed use can happen in a low-rise neighborhood and activate the area around the clock. “If we can create this better urban place and this more walkable street, maybe we can attract other businesses and building owners to change their thinking about how they’re using the building, how they activate the street, ultimately maybe they develop the older building stock to be better,” explains Walker.

ARCHIMANIACOURTESY LowSUSTAINABLEDensity, High Impact

OUTDOOR OFFICE

A benefit of this location was a chance to give staff outdoor space. In a central courtyard water-permeable gravel and trees replaced the asphalt of a parking lot.

A perforated metal gate secures the courtyard. Visibility to the street was important to creating a sense of openness and neighborhood connection.

Of course, Archimania’s sphere of control extends only to the property line, and to transform South Cooper into the kind of vibrant, walkable, bikeable, transit-oriented thoroughfare the designers have imagined,

they’ll need help from the city. But there are signs of progress: After the office opened, bike lanes appeared on South Cooper Street. “The opportunity there is not just to tear stuff down and come in with new construction and big apartment buildings. There’s actually a way to maintain the identity of these communities and to further grow these communities in a healthy way,” says Davis, who points out that in Memphis alone, there are probably 27 or 28 more miles of similar corridors that could be reimagined to improve walkability, connectivity, resilience, and sustainability.

On the subject of change, Walker takes the long view: “[The question is] How do we see this advancing over the next 40 years? It’s really tough to look at this short-term, if you think you’re going to accomplish a big-scale change.”

M METROPOLIS66 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2022

MCNEESECOURTESYDAVID andRemediationARCHITECTURERematriationOklahomaCity’sFirstAmericansMuseumisacelebrationofresilienceandculturalmeaning.ByTheodore(Ted)Jojola

FAM’s location, just outside downtown Oklahoma City, was once a highly polluted oil field. Museum buildings edge the FAM Mound, a Festivalpathwaysearthen1,000-foot-diameterspiralcontainingandframingaPlaza.

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Metal-clad gallery wings (top) follow the curve of the FAM Mound Walk. The Hall of the People (bottom), a curved glassy entryway rising behind stone Remembrance Walls, was inspired by a Wichita grass lodge.

RemediationARCHITECTUREand

When Scott Johnson and Bill Fain of Johnson Fain Architects first took on the commission to design Oklahoma City’s First Americans Museum more than two decades ago, they had little idea that they would literally “grow older and wiser” in the process. Inaugurated last year, the 175,000-square-foot, $175 million project, perched near the Oklahoma River just outside downtown, took 25 years to build from site selection to completion— or roughly one generation. It withstood severe tests of economics, politics, and culture—along with a severely polluted site—and now stands as a model of how architecture can incorporate, and gain inspiration from, native traditions and beliefs. It’s also the largest single-building tribal cultural center in the country. Oklahoma first started exploring the creation of what was called the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum (AICCM) in the late 1980s. In 1994, the state legislature created the Native American Cultural and Educational Authority (NACEA), and in 1998 formed the public-private American Indian Cultural Center Foundation (AICCF) to oversee museum development. Although construction began in 2006, it was halted in 2012 due to a lack of funding. The building’s empty shell remained vacant for years, prompting some legislators to call for its demolition. It took the combined efforts of all 39 tribes in Oklahoma to overcome these roadblocks. In 2017, the city and AICCM

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The light-filled Hall of the People’s ten columns (opposite) represent the ten miles per day that native people were forced to walk during the expulsion from their lands.

Beginning in the 1920s, 30 percent of the world’s oil supply and 60 percent of the nation’s domestic supply was extracted there. The consequences of this activity were ecological and environmental catastrophe. Once a riparian habitat and home to a forest of blackjack oak, the area became a toxic brownfield littered with abandoned buildings, concrete slabs, tires, and contaminated soil. Fifty-seven oil wells had to be capped on the property, which the EPA declared a Superfund site.

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Land Development LLC, owned by the Chickasaw Nation, entered into an agreement to accept the property and make the museum work in exchange for $14 million.

The museum’s site, at the crossroads of four interstates, was once designated Oklahoma City Oil Field Number One.

This was literally a place that no one seemed to want. Ironically, it was the original stewards of the land who did want it. “It was with enormous grace,” as Fain recounts, “that the native people embraced the responsibility to reclaim and nurture the land back into a healthy and beautiful state.” The project was just bestowed the 2022 Phoenix National Award, the highest honor given by the EPA for a brownfield remediation project.

The Hall of the People’s clear glass surfaces contrast with the museum’s Cor-Ten steel railings, which will age to a rust color similar to the red earth of Oklahoma.

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The 280-acre site is also situated in a floodplain, so structures had to be elevated 15 to 20 feet above existing grade. This required 45,000 truckloads of clean soil, which took two years to move. The soil also helped create the FAM Mound, a 1,000-foot-diameter, walkable earthworks hugging the rear of the museum. Taking the shape of a rising 90-foot-high crescent

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via an eastern processional path, greeting the rising sun. The end of the approach is flanked by two 40-foot-tall, 113-foot-long Remembrance Walls built from thousands of blocks of Mesquabuck stone that acknowledge the First Americans removed from their tribal homelands throughout North America to “Indian Territory.”

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Each gallery space, marked by undulating display cases and a vibrant interplay of light, presents themes and stories through historical and contemporary items. Most avoid right angles, which can “trap the

berm and cradling a grassy event space called Festival Plaza, it is reminiscent of the Indigenous-built Spiro Mounds that once graced the Constructionregion.ofthe berm, like the rest of the project, was guided by the Indigenous principle of rematriation. As the director of FAM, James “Jim” Pepper Henry (Kaw/ Muscogee [Creek]), explains, “the term includes the land and is more respectful of tribal matriarchal culture.” It means returning the sacred to Mother Earth. Indeed, the museum’s design is informed throughout by the earth and the cyclical worldview of its Indigenous people. Its parts represent the conjunction of time, space, and place, aligning with the cardinal directions and serving as a cosmological

Museumgoers then reach a semicircular, 110-foot-tall prismatic glass entryway called the Hall of the People. The hall’s rounded, spiked design was inspired by a Wichita

The Xchange Theater, featuring a curved video wall with a mezzanine above, functions as an educational venue and gathering space for live events.

clock. For instance, during the winter solstice, the sun sets through a tunnel embedded in the FAM Mound, while during the summer solstice the sun sets at the peak of the Visitorsmound.areguided into the museum

grass lodge, while its ten columns represent the ten miles per day that native people were forced to walk during the expulsion from their lands. From here, visitors move into the radial museum spaces, their curves following the bend of the mound (they also echo birds’ wings and First American feather fans) while invoking a sense of anticipation. They’re divided into two intersecting arcs: the western, featuring permanent and rotating exhibitions, and the northern, housing theaters, retail, dining, and other services.

CO.WILLIS©COURTESYMEL RemediationARCHITECTUREand Rematriation

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spirit.” Immersive, interactive theaters-inthe-round enrich the interactive storytelling experience, while the 4,000-square-foot FAM Center, adjacent to the circular entrance courtyard, houses educational activities.

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Fain sums up what he and Johnson learned through their collaboration with cultural specialists, community leaders, and fellow designers as an enduring journey of “self-realization and patience.” Such places come about “only once in a lifetime,” Johnson adds. The entirety of its elements represents an epic story. As Jim Pepper Henry puts it: “It’s all about telling the authentic story of the people. It doesn’t attempt to position one interpretation over the other but provides a venue for storytelling that depicts the interplay of countless voices and cultures—tribal people in their own ways.” M

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Located in the western arc’s south wing, permanent exhibitions (top and bottom) tell the collective stories of the 39 tribal nations removed from their ancestral homelands to Oklahoma. Visitors are immersed in photos, artifacts, and other media highlighting tribal origin stories and historical accounts from a native perspective.

CBRE DESIGN COLLECTIVE CONTRACT - 0-10,000 SQ FT STANTEC CONTRACT - 10,000-25,000 SQ FT IA INTERIOR ARCHITECTS CONTRACT - 25,001-50,000 SQ FT EASTLAKE STUDIO CONTRACT - 50,001-100,000 SQ FT PERKINS&WILL BEST IN SHOW (PICTURED) CONTRACT - 100,001+ SQ FT BOX STUDIOS HEALTHCARE bKL ARCHITECTURE PEOPLE’S CHOICE RETAIL NORR HOSPITALITY SOORIN CHUNG STUDENT AWARD WIGHT & COMPANY EDUCATION LAMAR JOHNSON COLLABORATIVE MULTI-UNIT HOUSING KADLEC ARCHITECTURE + DESIGN RESIDENTIAL WHEELER KEARNS ARCHITECTURE PHILANTHROPIC THESE FIRMS WERE RECOGNIZED FOR EXEMPLARY DESIGN AT THE 10TH ANNUAL IIDA ILLINOIS CHAPTER RED AWARDS

By Siyuan Meng

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Located in ZGC Software Park, a sprawling suburban complex of offices and factories in Beijing, the Lenovo headquarters accommodates 13,000 of the global technology giant’s workers. Designed by CallisonRTKL (CRTKL) and opened in 2018, the project is not only a milestone in the company’s office design history but was also designed to serve as a catalyst for workplace and cultural transformation, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

global headquarters in Beijing, designed by CallisonRTKL.

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“The facility performs more as a work in process, an open framework and mechanism that focuses more on activity and experiences,” says Xiaoguang Liu, a principal of CRTKL. “It distinguishes itself with spatial and program diversity and a high level of urbanity throughout the campus,” Lui adds. The result emphasizes interconnectivity, corporate responsibility, and vitality in urban public spaces.

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A core virtue of the headquarters’ design is openness. The architects programmed 50 percent of the project as accessible public amenity spaces for the community—an unprecedented example in the Zhongguancun science & technology zone, which, with a profusion of other tech giants, is often referred to as “China’s Silicon Valley.” The innovation lies in the spatial relationships between buildings and streets. Prior to the pandemic, these spaces were used to host community activities in the software park, from professional exchanges to fairs and sports events. “While the pandemic and restrictions are severely limiting social gatherings and communal activities, they also built up the desire and demand for [creative opportunities] throughout the early stages of the pandemic,” notes Liu.

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In 2018, global tech company Lenovo opened its global headquarters in Beijing. Designed by CallisonRTKL, the campus’s flexible design incorporates ample open courtyards, green spaces, and flexible areas for community events.

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Designed as a fluid space for Lenovo’s 13,000 workers, many of the headquarters’ amenities are also accessiblepubliclyforthe ZGC Software community.ParkInside the lobby, visitors will find a rock-climbing wall, bookstore, restaurant, and more.

Withcontrol.sustainability in mind, CRTKL prioritized design strategies that put environmental resilience first. Automated window systems allow for passive ventilation, while efficient water conservation and management measures employ rainwater collection and stormwater retention, permeable pavement, and graywater recycling. Lenovo’s centralized heating system is also supported by geothermal heat pumps, contributing to the project’s LEED Gold rating.

The 4-million-square-foot facility is divided into eastern and western parcels bisected by the communication pathway Canyon Concourse, which connects them. The campus’s collection of horizontal buildings are organized around a string of enclosed and semi-enclosed interlocking courtyards that act as transition spaces between rooms while providing ample access to green space and daylight. According to Liu, the courtyards have been a critical asset during pandemic times, hosting numerous outdoor events from fashion shows to exhibitions in order to keep the workers inspired and connected to theThecommunity.mainoffice buildings are southand-north-facing, and narrow in width in order to allow daylight to reach their interiors. The design echoes traditional principles of Chinese building typology, prioritizing natural lighting and automated lighting

The spacious lobby hall and interior plaza house Lenovo’s publicly accessible lifestyle amenities, which include a rockclimbing wall, coffee shop, bookstore, restaurant, brand showroom, auditorium, multi-function hall, conference center, exhibition center, mobile workstations, and informal meeting spaces. “The company,” Liu says, “is very encouraged to see that employees are engaging in a variety of activities in the space—team building events, art fairs, product launches, family days, business

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“Lenovo is tasked to renew its legacy in a dual quest for adaptability and integrity. On one hand, it wants to embrace changes and uncertainties and be future-ready; on the other hand, it honors timeless values and seeks long-term sustainability,” says Liu. “It is one step short of a radical hybrid workplace, but with a more realistic infrastructure and a proactive choice that recognizes the invariable nature of the workplace while allowing greater flexibility.” The headquarters’ resilience and consistent performance during the pandemic attest to the value of public spaces in private workplaces. M

education programs, and creative activities led by Gen-Z team members.” It’s a place that supports the company’s goal of creating a more inclusive company culture that’s integrated into employees’ lives.

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The campus is organized around a series of enclosed and semi-enclosed courtyards, inspired by a traditional Chinese building typology that helps protect the buildings from harsh winter winds while also supporting ample daylight. By integrating green courtyards, landscaping, and water conservation management, the headquarters has achieved both U.S. Green Building criteria and the China GBL 3-Star.

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EXPLORE THE WINNERS ANNOUNCING THE WINNERS OF THE 2022 PLANET POSITIVE AWARDS!

Metropolis’sPlanetPositiveAwards recognizes the most creative projects and products from around the world that benefit people and planet. Judged by industry experts across project types and product categories, the winners and honorable mentions represent the highest achievements today in design that addresses climate change, ecosystem health, human health, and equity.

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In Depth

The more we use design to improve human health and wellness, the more livable and welcoming the world can become. There’s already evidence that a basic formula of healthy, chemical-free building materials, daylighting, clean ventilation, and green space improves occupant well-being. And our reporting for this issue found that both health-care approaches and outcomes are evolving. In Ghana, authorities are betting that hospital buildings can help “heal” their surrounding communities through their form and arrangement; in New York, designers are enhancing ADA-compliant restaurant interiors to anticipate patrons’ psychological and social needs as well as their varied physical abilities. Even the health-related typology of recreation centers is being revised to deliver more. This groundswell of solutions is more integrated and holistic than ever. Wellness is not just a building trend; it’s an imperative.

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The iIluminated facade of the Eastside Regional Recreation Center in El Paso, Texas, was designed by the Dallas office of Perkins&Will.

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Nestled in Gwynns Falls/ Leakin Park, a 1,000-acre urban woodland, the Cahill Fitness and Wellness Center is operated by the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks.

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GWWO designedArchitectsthefacility so that over 80 percent of its occupied floor area, including the swimming pool and gymnasium, have direct views to the forest.

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Stephen Zacks

Fitness centers in Baltimore, Maryland, and El Paso, Texas, show that cities can offer high-level recreational services at a low cost, improving the well-being of all.

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rhetoric of well-being to attract workers back to the office.

The decision for cities to invest in new facilities that nurture public health and well-being should be intuitive: The benefits of physical activity for educational outcomes and the prevention of illness have been well established by the scientific community for more than a century. But local spending on such resources has been steadily falling, while private fitness has become a $30 billion industry in the United States, essentially filling this void. Luxury fitness clubs like Equinox and pricey training classes like SoulCycle have exploded, while corporate offices have begun to push fitness amenities and the

The architects sourced some lumber for interior cladding from the Camp Small Zero Waste Initiative, a wood recycling program started by the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks in 2016.

The Cahill Fitness and Wellness Center, designed by local firm GWWO Architects, comprises 30,000 square feet of performance spaces, fitness areas, dance studios, classrooms, picnic areas, and support spaces, along with pools, splash areas, and basketball courts. It’s one of six fitness cent ers GWWO has designed in Baltimore—Cahill is the third, another is under construction, and two more are starting soon—as part of a program led by city Recreation and Parks director Reginald Moore to improve

e’ve come to think of fitness and wellness as luxuries to be enjoyed only by members of private clubs or participants in yoga retreats. But two new public recreation centers shift this assumption, updating stale municipal models for a new era and a much wider audience.

But some public facilities are smartly incorporating attributes of the wellness world. By paying close attention to the desires of their neighborhoods and leveraging municipal funding, Baltimore’s Cahill Fitness and Wellness Center and El Paso’s Eastside Regional Recreation Center—both begun before the pandemic made public health a primary concern—deliver something equally tied to the health benefits of fitness: a sense of community belonging.

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public health and wellness by upgrading outdated facilities.

The nearly $18 million center is surrounded by the lush forest of the city’s Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park, which is visible in every direction through its glass-andreclaimed-wood facade. GWWO organized the service and private areas within clusters of wood-lined volumes and placed the exercise areas, pool, and public spaces within glass-walled volumes that feel immersed in the woods. “It’s located in this huge urban woodland, so conceptually we were drawn to that as we engaged

“We begin each of these projects by engaging the community,” says Alan Reed, president and principal of GWWO Architects. “It generally starts as a prototypical program, but then each community has different needs. For example, Cahill’s successful youth theater program had been operating out of an old school gym. One of the things that came out of that process was the desire to create a state-of-the-art theater for them to continue that program.”

This shift toward the language of wellness shouldn’t be such a surprise in a public recreational facility. Many rec centers originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when social reformers advocated for public bathhouses and playgrounds as ways of improving the hygiene and development of poor children and the population in general. Hundreds of parks and recreation departments established during that time continue to operate, along with school sports facilities. But the defunding of the public sector in the past half century has tended to leave these facilities feeling outdated and a little depressing.

Financed by a public bond for social service projects throughout El Paso, the Eastside Regional Recreation Center, designed by Perkins&Will’s Dallas office with local firm In*Situ, includes a senior center—a response to the multigenerational needs of the neighboring community—along with a gym, a natatorium, an outdoor water park, and a public art program. It will eventually feature illuminated ball fields, a skate park, a dog park, outdoor playgrounds, and an amphitheater.

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Since the center was conceived as an oasis for play in the desert, swimming took on central importance, both in the outdoor water park—as a means to escape the heat—and an indoor natatorium, for exercise. When ball fields are built, as part of a master plan designed by Halff Associates, they will be equipped with shade structures to keep players from overheating.

“This area didn’t have a lot of social spaces and there’s not a lot of park spaces, because you’re in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert,” says Ron Stelmarski, design director, Perkins&Will. “Shade or any area of respite is hard to come by.”

with the community and talked about the impact of nature on wellness,” Reed says.

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In addition to heat, the harsh sun was a central concern: The indoor natatorium features a wall made of staggered concrete panels that allow sunlight to fill the room without casting a glare on the water; elsewhere perforated metal screens and wooden slats diffuse light. Outdoors, native plantings and landscaping elements retain rainwater and restore the desert habitat of what had been an abandoned golf and country club development. In El Paso’s

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Located in El Paso’s Eastside Regional Park, the Eastside Regional Recreation Center has a staggered facade that acts as a shade, allowing light in while cutting glare on the pool’s surface. Droughttolerant landscaping and plants cut water usage, helping the project achieve LEED Silver status.

“There was a clear history of leisure and recreation on the site, but it was not usually in the public interest and was not usually the smartest environmental response,” Stelmarski says. “The water park and natatorium and gymnasium in our project are all really important pieces that serve the community.”

Known locally as “the Beast,” El Paso’s Eastside Regional Recreation Center features a natatorium, a gym, a senior center, and an outdoor aquatic park, while more facilities like ball fields and a skate park are expected in coming phases of the project.

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Both the Baltimore and El Paso rec centers are engineered to reduce energy consumption through passive methods. In Baltimore, Cahill’s strategic solar orientation and a high-performing HVAC system offer substantial power savings compared with the facility it r eplaces. In El Paso, tilt-up concrete walls and the exterior canopy use solar shading and thermal mass to reduce heat gain.

post-pandemic society, the building’s extensive outdoor fabric canopy has become an in-demand space for outdoor events.

Dallas-based sculptor Brad Goldberg contributed Oasis Sombrío, a landscape of granite boulders and paloverde trees inspired by the nearby Hueco Tanks, high-altitude rock formations that collect water in the desert. The multicolored lighting installation on the concrete panels owes a debt to El Paso’s public art program, which offers incentives to light up the city at night with artworks.

It’s a welcome renewal of a civic spirit that doesn’t rely on the multibillion-dollar fitness industry to sell subscriptions only to those who can afford it. M

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Adjaye Associates is designing 101 new district hospitals in Ghana, reimagining the healing power of design along the way.

Underscoring the hospital template’s flexibility, its layout is an abstraction of the Adinkra symbol Denkyem (above)—meaning crocodile, often associated with ingenuity. Construction of a district hospital (opposite) in Abomosu, about 85 miles north of Accra, reveals this plan in physical form.

By Ruth-Anne Richardson Photography by Edem Tamakloe

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The shape of Ghanaian health care stirred global conversation in 2020 when New York, London, and Accra–based Adjaye Associates took on a prodigious commission to design a hospital prototype that could translate across 101 districts around the West African nation. The facilities—innovative in their design, scale, adaptability, and execution—are being constructed in 63 existing and 38 newly formed districts, many without good access to primary health care infrastructure. Most are set to come online before 2024.

Adjaye’s assignment, awarded by the project’s Accra-based lead consultant Hospital Infrastructure Group (HIG), Ltd., followed an April 2020 declaration by Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo to “do something urgently” to improve the country’s health care infrastructure, a pronouncement largely spurred by the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic. The district hospitals are the core of the country’s Agenda 111 project, a rollout of 111 public health care facilities, the remaining ten of which are being designed by Ghanaian architectural studios.

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Early sketches (top) illustrate the template’s site plan and technical solutions coming into focus. Low-tech solutions (bottom) like broad overhangs, butterfly roofs, and operable clerestory windows maximize natural light and ventilation.

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“The challenge of the project involved organizing a diverse team within a very limited period of time,” says Ralph S utherland, principal architect for Sutherland & Sutherland. “This took skill, commitment, and endurance.”

“Agenda 111, the largest investment in health care infrastructure in our history, is part of a massive vision for Ghana’s health care sector,” said Akufo-Addo in his 2021 state-of-the-nation address. “[Its] realization will lead to Ghana becoming a center of medical excellence and a destination for medical tourism.” To help seed the estimated $1.76 billion district hospital program (each building’s construction is set to cost an average of $12.88 million, with another $4 million budgeted for medical equipment), the government secured $100 million through its Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund, launched to leverage private sector funds to aid with infrastructure assets.

The formidable undertaking, whose first hospital broke ground in August 2021, is a collaborative endeavor between local and international, private and public players. Adjaye Associates and Accra-based design consultant Sutherland & Sutherland Architects are teaming with myriad Ghanaian consultants, all appointed by HIG, which is coordinating project

integration and implementation. Ghana’s Ministry of Health (MOH) Infrastructure Directorate is providing information and resources, while metropolitan, municipal, and district assemblies across the country are facilitating the provision of sites and services, including water, power, and road access.

Adjaye’s template, designed to occupy a 91,000-square-foot footprint on a 15-acre site, merges high performance, contemporary design, and sensitivity to local culture with engaging, open public spaces and a healing connection to nature. Its layout follows a pattern of rectangular blocks and voids, arranged in long, north–south rows for high energy efficiency. Depending on site topography, these volumes splay across one level or are tiered in sections along a 2 to 5 percent slope. Blocks—including

“HEALTH CARE IS MORE THAN JUST EQUIPMENT OR THE —OFTHETECHNOLOGY.EXPENSIVEMOSTMEDICALIT’SACTUALLYABOUTWELL-BEINGPEOPLE.”KOFIBIO

Aerial renderings show multiple district hospital sites (left). When complete, facilities will open onto outdoor walkways (opposite, top) and green courtyards (opposite, bottom).

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Many internal spaces are organized to overlook greenery, with a 4,542-square-foot landscaped court enclosed at the heart of each campus. Sunlight filters generously into wards via clerestory window openings below steel-framed butterfly roofs, with broad overhangs for shade and cooling. (Alternatively, gable roofs are adopted for settings like ERs and operating rooms that require controlled internal temperatures.) Each hospital’s circulation network is defined by two central spines, with separate routes for support services, accommodating increased traffic and streamlining movement among patients, staff, and visitors. Movement is also distributed laterally along central walkways into double-flanked open-air corridors.

The facility’s earthen building envelope comprises stabilized compressed earth blocks (CEBs) that are locally sourced, prefabricated, and arranged in an interlocking pattern. (Other efficient components of the construction system include modular roof truss systems and interlocking roofing sheets.) The exposed, weather-resistant blocks—adding to the healing natural aesthetic while being inherently sustainable—will also function as the hospital’s primary external finish, complemented by a natural interior color palette. The project’s other sustainability strategies include passive ventilation, locally sourced materials, thermal mass, and insulated roofing systems.

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“We’ve really spent a lot of time working on creating a space that actually allows people to heal,” says Kofi Bio, associate principal at Adjaye Associates, w ho stresses that the design is intended to promote health for all patients, regardless of their background or economic circumstances. “What’s really important now, in the world we live in, is that health care is more than

entrances and waiting pavilions, reception, administration, pharmacies, labs, ER, public health and physiology, surgical, pediatric, and maternity—are all connected by ramps and walkways. Services and accommodation units are incorporated behind these primary buildings.

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Despite following the basic template, each hospital will take on its own nuances, based on location. Size, building form, materiality, technology, and landscaping will draw on each site’s unique conditions. “Rather than designing a tech-driven-type box that just lands onto a site without consideration for its context, the District Hospitals presents a new typology of low-cost, high-quality health care architecture that can be integrated within varying landscapes, townscapes, or cityscapes,” sums up David Adjaye.

“I THINK IT’S VERY IMPORTANT TO REFLECT THE CONTEXT THAT WE’RE BUILDING IN AND NOT —WHATPREDETERMINEJUSTWORKS.”GLENNDEROCHE

“As we understand more of the context we’re building in, we adapt the design to suit [that],” says Glenn DeRoche, an associate at Adjaye Associates. “In doing this, we create more work f or ourselves, but I think it’s very important to reflect the context that we’re building in and not just predetermine what works.” It is this culture of learning, unlearning, and exchange— give and take—that captures and reflects the core ambitions of

Prototypes, for instance, can adapt to 60-bed or 100-bed capacity, and housing units will be integrated into many remote sites to incentivize doctors and staff to take on live-work placements, and to better accommodate patient families. Plans are also in development to reconfigure the prototype vertically for smaller, more compact sites within congested urban centers.

just equipment or the most expensive medical technology. It’s actually about the well-being of people.”

Rows of compressed earth blocks (left) are prepared for installation at the district hospital in the coastal town of Prampram. Workers at the hospital in Trede (opposite) install foundations, set framing, and pour concrete.

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Compressed earth blocks ready for installation at the Abomosu site. Each site is divided into multiple lots, divided between the lead contractor and other contributors.

“Yes, it is an ambitious project,” asserts Ministry of Health head of architecture and engineering unit Richard Vanderpuye. “But this is something we were well aware of. The original intent was to have it done quickly, but we also recognize that this project must critically focus on the delivery of its intended scope and quality.”

Composed of eight granary-like cylinders clad in locally sourced rammed earth, this library dedicated to South Africa’s second post-apartheid president will include myriad functions, including a museum, exhibition space, research and archive center, auditorium, women’s empowerment center, reading room, digital experience space, and office space. Natural light will penetrate via large cuts in each structure’s domed ceiling.

Situated within 14 acres of newly landscaped gardens, this monumental project derives its silhouette—dominated by a long, canopy-like roof—from traditional symbols and forms of Christianity and Ghanaian heritage including Ghanaian umbrellas, Baoman ceremonial canopies, and Christian tabernacle shelters.

THABO MBEKI PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY Johannesburg, South Africa

To streamline oversight, HIG has sectioned the project into three belts—Northern, Middle, and Southern—and established eight “supervisory zones,” each monitored by a site supervisory consultant (SSC). The eight SSCs include Adjaye Associates, who were originally slated only for pre-contract work but took on a post-contract supervisory role later in the process.

the project. Underscoring this flexibility, the layout of the prototype is an abstract translation of the Adinkra symbol for ingenuity—Denkyem. (The literal translation is “crocodile.”)

— RICHARD VANDERPUYE

Ingenuity aside, some question whether the multi-site undertaking is overly ambitious. Between 60 and 70 percent of the 101 Adjaye-designed hospitals are under construction, but few appear ready to meet their 18-month completion deadline.

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NATIONAL CATHEDRAL OF GHANA Accra, Ghana

“We want this to be a success story through and through,” says Adjaye Associates’ DeRoche. “I think that given our experience in previous health care projects, it made us a right fit within the team to maybe question some of the outcomes and interrogate what delivery should look like.” (The firm is also working on a Pediatric Cancer Center in Rwanda.)

“THE ORIGINAL INTENT WAS TO HAVE IT DONE QUICKLY, BUT WE ALSO RECOGNIZE THAT THIS PROJECT MUST CRITICALLY FOCUS ON THE DELIVERY OF ITS INTENDED SCOPE AND QUALITY.”

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Born to Ghanaian parents in Tanzania, David Adjaye has long been deeply invested in the architecture of Africa. For his book Adjaye Africa Architecture: A Photographic Survey of Metropolitan Architecture, Adjaye documented buildings in 53 African cities over the course of a decade. In recent years he’s received commissions to create projects around the continent, from museums to office buildings; but the following upcoming buildings are arguably the most significant.

HELPING TO SHAPE A CONTINENT

Hospital infrastructure scale-up is not new to Ghana. But prior developments—such as Egyptian company Euroget DeInvest’s 2008 contract for the design and construction of nine major Ghanaian hospitals—have been typically sourced to foreign companies through contracts that lacked mechanisms to ensure a significant level of technical cooperation, resulting in little to no integration of local building skills or knowledge systems in those projects.

“We have real challenges with building local capacity and technologies in our built environment sector,” acknowledges MOH’s Vanderpuye. “I would argue that Agenda 111 is that kind of project that should ‘break’ procurement rules, in a sense. It is an opportunity-driven project, about encouraging a ‘made in Ghana’ sensibility.” Moreover, the design’s implementation of local compressed earth blocks could strongly advance capacities and standards of local material manufacturing in Ghana, as it has in a number of West African countries.

Building frames (top) and cube samples (below) at a site in Ave-Dakpa, capital of the Akatsi North District of Ghana’s Volta Region. Concrete foundations (opposite), still wet, reflect the Ghanaian sky. In order to meet tight deadlines, a number of contractors work simultaneously on each site.

The collective resolve of Adjaye Associates and the project team to shape and drive such a sprawling undertaking while promoting social engagement, wellness, and local involvement holds both risk and reward. While most facilities are progressing, there are still months of heavy construction work left. Keeping so many new hospitals operational once complete is yet another challenge on the horizon, particularly

But it is ultimately the project’s impact in confronting the quality of the public health care experience, particularly f or marginalized Ghanaian communities, that will be its legacy. The project contributes to a growing “glocal” mindset in the country, pushing against often-unsuccessful globalist tendencies. Enabling better health, equitable access, and climate resilience, it could prove to be a template far beyond Ghana.

with international donor funding for health services and infrastructure projected to decline from 19 percent of health care spending nationwide in 2017 to 1 percent in 2022, according to UNICEF. A clear funding and operational structure must support the project execution to reflect the country’s “Ghana Beyond Aid” ambitions.

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In Manhattan’s East Village, a new restaurant centers both workers’ and patrons’ needs through fun and thoughtful design elements by Sarah Carpenter & Studio. For example, unlike most professional kitchens, HAGS’s is painted pink with tall narrow openings cut into one wall that provide a peek into the hallway. Anyone working the line can view cheeky art from their workstation, and anyone waiting for the bathroom can observe the kitchen activity.

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By Leah Kirts

Three projects feature design that supports a more inclusive vision for dining.

Following in the footsteps of Lower East Side restaurant Dirt Candy’s chef Amanda Cohen, HAGS has instituted a tip-optional model with a flat rate of $23 per hour for hourly staff, $70,000 salaries with benefits for managers, and all staff typically working three to four shifts per week. “We want to pay people well and reduce stress for ourselves and everybody else,” says co-owner Camille Lindsley.

The latest, opened in July 2022 by chef Telly Justice and her partner, sommelier Camille Lindsley, is queer- and trans-owned fine-dining restaurant HAGS, which offers tasting menus for vegans and omnivores, and a pay-what-you-can sliding-scale option on Sundays. The snug restaurant, which sits on the first floor of a hundred-year-old building in Manhattan’s East Village, is funded by a silent investor and was designed by Sarah Carpenter of Sarah Carpenter & Studio, who brought an elegant softness and sci-fi spunk to the couple’s extraordinarily inclusive dining vision.

overhead that enclose a chandelier of wineglasses stored vertically. Widened for wheelchair accessibility, the inky, maroon-painted bathroom is a place for every kind of person to “feel cared for,” says Justice. Open shelves are stocked with complimentary mints, condoms, menstrual products, and fentanyl test strips. A fun-house mirror over the sink invites play instead of intense reflection, especially for those with body dysmorphia. “It’s democratizing in how silly everybody looks in it. You never feel dehumanized by your image reflected back at you,” she says.

Prioritizing workers’ needs over guests’ budgets has drawn scrutiny from some, but it allows Justice and Lindsley to overstaff shifts, encourage breaks, and normalize care in an industry known for abuse. The behavior they model within their walls has been mirrored by neighbors who check in on them to “make

he pandemic has left its mark on the hospitality industry. New challenges have exposed age-old inequities of workers’ livelihoods and patrons’ needs, pitted against the razor-thin margins of late-stage capitalism. As Joanna Parker has written for Failed Architecture, “Architecture designed to be habitable for one kind of body is not architecture intended for the public.” Few projects express this point better than three hospitality venues recently completed in the wake of the pandemic. Opening their doors amid economic uncertainty and an ongoing public health crisis, these initiatives reimagine how people actually inhabit spaces versus how they have long been expected to.

Informed by the specific trauma of working in fine dining, Justice and Lindsley wanted an interior in step with their labor practices, which are also designed to minimize the most stressful aspects of restaurant work: low wages, understaffing, overbooking, and the triggering churn of a kitchen order ticket machine. By crafting a five-course tasting menu, they avoided the perceived uncertainty that accompanies à la carte dining. Seasonal ingredients are sourced from farmers’ markets and other small mission-driven purveyors, and dietary restrictions are happily accommodated. Onl y the core components of daily prep and service are typical.

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With one natural source of light from the front windows, the dining room (ADA-compliant like the rest of the space) feels like a subterranean mother ship; its earthy taupe banquettes contrast with an electrifying chartreuse bar and matching velvet curtains

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Collaboration with neighbors is practically built into the layout of The Art Room in Downtown Los Angeles, a 7,750-square-foot combination restaurant, art gallery, and office space that also houses the project’s design firm AUX Architecture, helmed by Brian Wickersham. The project came together during the pandemic lockdown when Wickersham repositioned it as a collective arts and hospitality venue, with veteran chef D. Brandon Walker running the restaurant and Seasons LA curating the gallery space. Like HAGS, their retrofitted building is more than a century old. Preserving that amount of embodied carbon is “the single biggest thing that we could do” in terms of sustainability, Wickersham explains.

sure that we’re feeding ourselves,” Justice says with a smile. “They want to keep the neighborhood a place for people like them and us. It’s really cool to be a part of the East Village lineage of keeping it weird.”

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At the Hackney School of Food in East London, a teaching garden and classroom-style kitchen connect locals to the dining world’s culinary skills and farm-to-table processes.

In 2018, Surman Weston won the bid to br ing its design to life with a meager £300,000 budget—cobbled together mostly from school grants, fundraisers, and private donors. “We are just a small part in a project full of goodwill,” says principal Tom Surman, who led the transformation of a two-story, 506-squarefoot caretaker’s house and 3,300 square feet of grounds into an

On the restaurant side, chef Walker aims to blur the line between fast-casual service and fine-dining quality. He chose to go fully compostable, reducing contact between staff and diners, which means a $20 breakfast burrito is served on a compostable plate and a $35 steak is cut with a bamboo knife. Eliminating dishes is new for this kitchen, but Walker eighty-

LANGISMANOLOCOURTESY

The Art Room in Downtown Los Angeles is a 7,750-square-foot hybrid restaurant and art gallery. The space also houses the office of AUX Architecture, the firm behind the project. The Art Room’s kitchen is helmed by chef and culinary educator D. Brandon Walker. With ethical labor practices in mind, staff wages average around $22 an hour and Walker also provides training for incarceratedformerlyindividuals for positions in his kitchen.

The school, designed by Surman Weston, provides a unique learning environment for public-school children and adults to grow and cook food and doubles as a community space where residents can host workshops and gather outdoors. Funded by the LEAP Federation and Chefs in Schools, the project sought to bolster student enrollment and address food insecurity in the Hackney district.

sixed the role of the dishwasher years ago. To flatten the kitchen hierarchy, everyone is trained to do everything, including washing their own pots and pans. Staff wages range from $22 to $26 per hour, and universal tip sharing is mandatory. The menu is influenced by what Walker can source from Los Angeles–based Alma Backyard Farms, in an effort to remain “hyper-hyperlocal,” he says. “It isn’t at the farmers’ market. It’s right here in the hood.” The farm does more than generate fresh produce. “They are turning dirt back into soil, and they’re employing folks that are coming out of the prison system,” Walker explains. As a culinary educator, he has trained formerly incarcerated people as cooks and hired many past students to work in his kitchens. Now Walker is thrilled that some of the best locally grown produce he can buy is grown by their hands.

Their grand opening has been a moving target because of supply chain issues. (As of this writing, a necessary piece of equipment is stuck in traffic on the Panama Canal.) Meanwhile, Wickersham’s design for dynamic partition walls to expand and contract the indoor/outdoor spaces was out of compliance with municipal regulations because square footage isn’t supposed to change with the click of a button. But the team has taken it all in stride. If the pandemic has taught them one thing, it’s patience.

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East London’s Hackney School of Food was designed to be a place where people of all ages can go to be inspired and develop knowledge and a love for cooking. Since opening, the school has expanded to include a 12,600-square-foot site that includes various gardens where students can grow their own food and community spaces that host workshops.

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interactive cookery school and edible garden. After stripping the interior to its bones, the building materials such as the new Icynene roof insulation were left exposed to show how the structure is held together, from rafter beams and lumpy ceiling insulation that kids think resembles cauliflower or lunar cheese to mismatched bricks that map where the caretaker’s cottage ends and the School of Food begins.

The sterility of commercial stainless steel is balanced with warmth from birchwood and red Viroc flooring. Outside, visible gutters chart the path of rainwater to a metal basin where it is stored for garden irrigation. Everything here can be a learning opportunity: planting seeds in the soil, paddling dough into an outdoor pizza oven, collecting honey from a beehive, gathering eggs from a chicken coop, harvesting wheat grown on-site. Kids and adults with varying mobility can access the space through wide doorways, adjustable counters, and elevated garden beds. Since the inception of the project, the gardens have been substantially expanded, bringing the site to approximately 12,600 square feet. The designers identified an underused area of the school playground adjacent to the site, expanding it into an active, biodiverse green space.

The next phase is an open-source digital toolkit designed by Surman—thanks to funding from the William Sutton Prize for Social Innovation award—that will serve as a prototype for public use, helping other schools and community groups implement their own sustainable food-focused initiatives. For Surman, the idea of s ustainability is no longer measured in energy efficiency or renewables. “We now look further into the future, at societal issues as well as how we actually build.”

RORYCOURTESYDANIEL

Metropolis recently sat down with three members of this unique subset: an intensive care unit manager who also serves as senior consultant for CannonDesign, a geriatric internal medicine physician who doubles as a healthcare principal at Jacobs, and a surgeon leveraging his medical experience as a senior principal and chief medical officer for HOK’s healthcare practice. Beyond impressive résumés, these hybrid professionals bring an unparalleled boots-on-the-ground perspective to healthy design. Here, they share their insights, discussing how health care design methodologies have evolved in recent years, the ways they’re collaborating with design teams in the wake of the pandemic, and where they see heightened interest in health and well-being in the design of non-medical spaces. Lauren Volker

DesignWhoDoctors

PUBLIC HEALTH AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT have a long-intertwined history—one that was catapulted into the limelight amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The global crisis made us all acutely aware of how design, whether for dedicated medical buildings or other building types, can affect our ability to respond to health emergencies as well as our daily well-being. Those most attuned to this connection are a niche group of architecture and design practitioners who also have medical experience.

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Health is now more central to almost everything we design. Over the last three years I have seen non-health care projects grow to more than half of my portfolio. In short, health matters to everyone, and we can use design intentionally to make all parts of our life—where we work, eat, rest, play—healthier. So many of the principles that I use as a doctor to help patients live healthier lives are crossing over into the way we’re designing everyday space for health.

• Assistant Professor of Surgery, Architecture, and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan

Since the pandemic, data-driven decisions have taken center stage. While previous design decisions always took trade-offs into account, the unprecedented focus on climate and sustainability—as well as hospital efficiency and capacity—has made real-time understanding of quantitative data incredibly important. More and more, data-driven econometric modeling strategies are guiding our large design decisions.

ANDREW M. IBRAHIM, MD, MSC

The front line of health care is among the most complex and high-stakes environments of any profession. Medical professionals are constantly looking for ways to clarify purpose and simplify processes to ensure best patient care. As our designs for buildings get more and more complex—code requirements, new materials, emerging technology—health professionals may find their most valuable service is helping bring clarity and focus to what really matters most.

• Surgeon, Ann Arbor, Michigan

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The pandemic has given us not only permission but a mandate to be more innovative. Designing health care spaces to include natural air ventilation and retractable roofs may have seemed far-fetched before, but now these important concepts—which are common in stadium design and airports—can have a meaningful role in health care facilities. As such, many teams now include members across multiple disciplines and with experience in diverse building typologies to realize a more innovative design solution.

• Chief Medical Officer, Healthcare, HOK

• Co-Director for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy at University of Michigan

NG TENG FONG GENERAL HOSPITAL Located in Jurong East, Singapore, the HOK-designed Ng Teng Fong General Hospital features a performancebased design to support health, well-being, and resource efficiency. Most of the facility is passively cooled and naturally ventilated, with thermal mass, ceiling fans, cross ventilation, and exterior shading ensuring comfortable temperatures in the tropical climate.

DIANA ANDERSON, MD, M.ARCH HEALTHCARE PRINCIPAL AT JACOBS

• Cofounder of Clinicians for Design

While the clinical practice of health care and the fields of architecture, planning, and design have traditionally occupied different professional, social, and cultural worlds, emerging professionals are asking to move beyond these infrequent intersections and seek a convergence of career models through the domains of research, education, and practice. This movement has accelerated during the pandemic given the need for rapid, innovative, and often design-based solutions to many problems.

Health professionals can provide insights into health care operations and, most importantly, patient needs and experiences. These perspectives represent a unique opportunity for architects to experience the world of clinical medicine in a way that is typically hidden. We can walk the halls; we can talk to physicians and other clinicians; we can shadow individuals as they go about their daily routines. Having health providers participate in projects also promotes a data-driven design process, strengthening the built environment to benefit health outcomes.

• Instructor of Neurology at Boston University

We can certainly create sealed spaces to keep infections at bay, but there is often a domino effect. We have seen the negative health effects of social isolation and loneliness—in medical settings, research has shown that long-term-care residents without personal contact with family or friends experienced greater excess mortality early in the COVID-19 pandemic. And this concept spans all spaces and environments. The detrimental effects of forced social isolation can be mitigated through design, even within our own homes. For example, views of nature at home have been shown to reduce levels of depression, loneliness, and anxiety, sometimes more than the actual use of outdoor green space itself. Design of the built environment at all spatial scales—from our homes to our neighborhoods and cities—is a determinant of health.

EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT AT UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI HEALTH

CannonDesign and Blue Cottage of CannonDesign are prioritizing flexibility in their design of the new emergency department at University of Cincinnati (UC) Health. With a mass triage space and a 32-exam-room pod, the facility is equipped to run in “pandemic mode” in the face of future health crises.

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• Geriatric Neurology Fellow at VA Boston Healthcare System

The pandemic exposed the need for a shift toward a data-driven design process, and the role buildings play in our physical, mental, and social health. One striking example is research that demonstrated that smaller-scale nursing homes had better outcomes—significantly fewer COVID-19 infections, hospital admissions, and deaths. What concerns me is the reactive approach to design seen during the pandemic with infection control as the main driver, which in my mind is only one element of health design. Ensuring quality of life and health (which includes mental, physical, and social health) f or those who use health care spaces should still be paramount.

We all remember the intense stories from the early days of the pandemic, when medical teams lacked PPE and health-care institutions didn’t have enough space to properly care for patients. The ingenuity health care showed in that moment still inspires me, and many of the ideas that teams came up with in those moments were carried forward into today.

An interesting example of this can be found in our current work with University of Cincinnati (UC) Health. Our teams at CannonDesign and Blue Cottage of CannonDesign have helped them incorporate a remarkable level of flexibility into the design of their new emergency department. Once complete, it will feature a separate entrance with mass triage space and a 32-exam-room pod that can run in “pandemic mode” to treat infectious patients. These responses empower UC Health in the face of a future pandemic, but also in a variety of other scenarios.

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• Intensive Care Unit Manager, CHI Health St. Elizabeth, Lincoln, Nebraska

When you spend every day working in health care spaces, you’re able to see what is and isn’t working for patients and staff at an entirely different level. No designer or team can imagine or simulate all the different scenarios those of us working in the field may live through. Health professionals can point to certain furniture, equipment, tech, or designed workflows that might be aesthetically pleasing but create inefficiencies.

Blue Cottage of CannonDesign also works across all different sectors, and we’re seeing education and commercial spaces infusing more health and care resources into their environments. Health care providers who also work in design can directly impact these projects. I’ve always felt that designers and providers care about patient experience in their own unique ways. And when you can combine those unique perspectives and passions on a single team, that’s when the real magic happens. M

KAELEE STONE, MHA, BSN, RN

But at the same time, health systems recognize that global pandemics are inherently unique and are focused on bigger-picture ideas that improve care, pandemic or not: spaces rich with flexibility, beds and patient rooms that can more easily be upgraded to accommodate critical care, self-cleaning materials, and strategies for making isolation less lonely. All of this adds up to important change, but it’s not entirely about future pandemic prevention.

• Senior Consultant, Blue Cottage of CannonDesign

J. HYBL SPORTS MEDICINE AND PERFORMANCE CENTER

A partnership between the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) and Centura Health, the HOK-designed William J. Hybl Sports Medicine and Performance Center is a new hybrid facility on the university’s campus. Bringing together sports and health care spaces in a shared footprint, the building is designed to foster connections between researchers, medical professionals, trainers, and athletes.

Happy Street, a 2019 installation in London by designer Yinka Ilori, was created to transform a forbidding bridge underpass into a space that puts a smile on pedestrians’ faces.

O’DONOVAN©LUKE

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The pandemic has revived one of the oldest questions in architecture and design.

By Elissaveta M. Brandon

Can We Design for Happiness?

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A RECIPECOMPLEX

“There’s nothing that makes us feel better than feeling wanted,” she says, as long as

In the

reinforce the feeling of shelter that humans once felt when living in caves. In public buildings, the need for shelter could mean adopting human-scale proportions that make us feel enveloped instead of exposed. And in cities, it could be fulfilled by something as simple as a row of trees, or even umbrellas at an outdoor café.

There is no universal recipe for pleasure and delight, but some ingredients are foundational such as safety, comfort, inclusion, and the freedom to make our own choices. Many of these feelings have evolutionary bases. Visit pretty much any Frank Lloyd Wright building and you will be welcomed by low-ceilinged entrances that open into magnificent tall spaces. This was meant to

“Part of it is that we naturally evolved to be under tree canopies and feel safe in that way,” says Erin Peavey, an architect and design researcher at architecture firm HKS who’s also trained as a psychologist. We evolved in small tribes, says Peavey, and countless studies confirm that we live happier, longer, and healthier lives when we’re connected to other people.

Almost 2,300 years ago, Aristotle enshrined happiness as a central purpose of human life—or “the whole aim and end of human existence.” Some 2,000 years later, Thomas Jefferson declared it to be an inalienable right. But anyone who’s ever debated with friends on where to go for dinner knows that happiness is subjective. So how do we design for it?

17th century, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal posited that we can find happiness only when we stop trying to find it. This, of course, hasn’t stopped humans from trying.

Happiness is also becoming a metric of success in the design of buildings, interiors, and public spaces. Back in 2006, Alain de Botton published the now frequently referenced book The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon Books), and in it argued that the spaces and objects that surround us can heavily influence who we are and how we feel. Since then, the idea has been developed more pragmatically in the growing field of neuroaesthetics, which seeks to ground aesthetic judgment and creativity in brain activity. Meanwhile, design for well-being—based on a more holistic definition of happiness—has gained buzzword status. Once considered an abstract aspiration, happiness, it seems, is being crystallized into something achievable by design.

The pursuit of happiness is at the core of many organizations and creative practices today. Every year, analytics company Gallup gauges the world’s mood with its Global Emotions Report, and every year, the World Happiness Report ranks the happiest countries (Finland has topped the charts for five consecutive years).

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In The Happy Design Toolkit: Architecture for Better Mental Wellbeing (RIBA Publishing, 2022), Ben Channon gathers strategies for creating happier spaces, backing each up with evidencebased design and real-world case studies.

we at least have the choice to engage in a social activity. At the University of California San Diego, for example, HKS designed various degrees of connection, where a single dorm room is part of a small cluster of rooms, which is connected to a hall that is linked to a larger building with bigger connecting spaces— “like a Russian doll of architectural connection,” says Peavey.

Philosopher Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon Books, 2006) was a popular exploration of design and emotion. “One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment,” de Botton wrote.

For the 2019 Salone del Mobile in Milan, New Yorkbased Reddymade Architecture collaborated with Google Design Studio, Muuto, and the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University to present A Space for Being. Based on the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, the installation required visitors to wear a wristband that measured their physiological responses to the design of the space in order to understand how it impacted their emotions.

As loneliness continues to rise in the United States—a post-pandemic study commissioned by Cigna found that more than half of all American adults can be considered lonely—understanding the benefit of connection is crucial. One landmark study from 1998 showed tha t a lack of social connection is more detrimental to our health than smoking or high blood pressure.

HAPPY HEALTHYBRAIN,BEING

The relationship between health and social connection—and ultimately happiness—has deep roots. For the ancient Greeks, happiness could manifest only in a community, but they didn’t really have the concept of happiness that we do today. Instead, they used the word eudaimonia to describe “the good life.” This encompassed both spiritual and physical well-being, and according to Peavey, it was reflected in the kinds of buildings that were built at the time. “[Eudaimonia] was an embedded part of the Greek temples that were some of the first ways that we think of architecture of health and healing, because that’s what they were really about,” she says, noting key features like sunlight, nature, and water in the form of healing baths.

seemed more attainable, as people lived healthier lives thanks to germ theory and the decline of epidemics (so much for that), but also more comfortable ones, with technological advances like modern heating and electricity.

That brings up the important distinction between individual contentment and organiza tional happiness. The Industrial Revolution in the 18th century marked a shift in the way people thought about happiness. In one sense, happiness

HKS is now putting the pursuit of eudaimonia to the test in the workplace.

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But capitalism simultaneously put an emphasis on productivity and efficiency. Take the office cubicle. “The cubicle was probably [about] looking into the happiness of an organization, which could equal financial performance. But did that really equal happiness for everyone?” asks Susan Chung, a senior research program manager at HKS and a key driver in the firm’s BrainHealth training. “Now with the pandemic, we’re getting back into understanding what’s the meaning and purpose behind our individual happiness within an organization.”

UC San Diego’s North Torrey Pines Living and Learning Neighborhood reflects architecture firm HKS’s research into design strategies that enhance social and mental well-being. The firm has been partnering with academic institutions, including The University of Texas at Dallas’s Center for BrainHealth, to understand how to design spaces that make people feel happier.

Earlier this year, the firm partnered with The University of Texas at Dallas’s Center for BrainHealth for a six-month training program on brain health. The program includes online training, think tanks, and daily brain exercises designed to optimize almost 200 employees’ nervous systems. It seeks to improve their emotional balance, compassion, and resilience—all of which can help architects achieve a balanced lifestyle, but also be more attuned to the needs and challenges of their clients, with the ultimate goal of becoming better innovators.

HARRISTOMCOURTESY

Earlier this year, CallisonRTKL launched the Happiness Ecosystem Index (HEI). Created in partnership with Delivering Happiness, which describes itself as a “coach|sultancy,” and Egyptian developer Mountain View, HEI acts as a guide for organizations, communities, and ultimately designers who want to improve the connection between buildings and people. “The intent was to take what was done for sustainability with LEED, and for wellness with WELL, and think about that more holistically,” explains Jodi Williams, a principal at CallisonRTKL.

Ultimately, though, happiness is a complex condition and doesn’t come tied up in a neat little bow. “There’s beauty in sadness, and we don’t need to strive to be 100 percent perfect; that’s not a realistic goal,” says Williams. “Happiness is about the ability to be who you need to be, where you need to be, where you have choice and control to live your life to the fullest.”

The pandemic, and the Great Resignation that it fueled, has inspired a wave of creative hand-wringing over ways to attract people back to the office and make them feel supported and seen. But here’s the problem: How do you build a strategy to make people happy, and then how do you measure its success? Putting a number on something as abstract and personal as happiness can be a challenge, but one company is proposing a solution.

Unlike LEED or WELL, however, HEI is less of a point-based system with a rating, and more of a roadmap. It’s broken down into five categories called “Truths” (meaning vitality, freedom, engagement, and delight) and includes 200 design actions. Organizations fill out an initial survey (a bit like the Myers-Briggs personality test) to get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses. If a company’s interested in making a change, it can then take a deeper dive in the form of a consult with CallisonRTKL and use the final assessment as the basis of a design brief. To date, HEI has informed the design of an office building in Egypt and several of CallisonRTKL’s own offices, including a retrofit in Washington, D.C., and a new lease in London.

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The Happiness Ecosystem Index has been developed by CallisonRTKL in partnership with consultancy

CRTKLCOURTESY

Delivering Happiness and developer Mountain View as a way to assess how happy a space makes its occupants. It also suggests 200 actions that designers can take to improve the outcomes of their projects.

Anything that architects and designers can do to give people that sense of connectedness and purpose is a step forward in the pursuit of happiness. M

ATHAPPINESSWORK

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Sustainability Next Showcase Make a positive impact on people and planet METROPOLIS128

Caesarstone

Designtex is offering a big, brilliant curation of 101 new Crypton Fabrics that they’ve assembled into a remarkable Crypton Toolkit. Let this versatile Crypton-powered collection become your new way to solve for every space and stand up to the toughest stains, all delivered with PFAS-free chemistry. From multi-layered tweeds to soft chenilles and linen-like looks, get immersed in high style and unmatched performance with these great options in textures and solids.

HPD bio-polyurethane flooring brings a new sense of versatility and sustainability to the commercial flooring industry. The collection boasts 42 visuals, including abstracts that mimic both hard and soft surfaces, and a variety of planks inspired by the world’s most popular wood species. Nature’s Tile and Plank HPD offers all the advantages of luxury vinyl: durability, easy maintenance, and versatility without vinyl or red-list materials.

@caesarstoneus | caesarstoneus.com

@cryptonfabrics | designtexdrop.com

Invite nature back into your home with the new nature-inspired Darcrest 5820. This mysteriously dark, earthy base is enriched with tiny spots and sediments to remind one of rocky hillsides. Breathe life back into the dark kitchens by pairing with oxidized metals, stained woodgrain, and coarse textiles. This design is reminiscent of metamorphic rock with a soft weathering, connecting your home with nature’s heart.

Crypton

TeknoflorIndustries/TeknoflorNature’sTileandPlank

HMTX

@teknoflor | teknoflor.com

Carnegie Fabrics

@carnegiefabrics | carnegiefabrics.com

@humanscalehq | humanscale.com

Composed of natural raw materials - such as clay, sand, feldspar, and kaolin - Italian ceramic tile is a sustainable choice for hard surfacing. Completely free of plastic, VOCs, and other harmful substances and boasting a 50+ year lifespan, ceramic and porcelain tiles from Ceramics of Italy manufacturers are a durable and hygienic material choice for architects and designers looking to create healthy spaces while reducing their environmental footprint.

PlastPro Inc.

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