“The newest building on campus declares a truce among the university’s warring architectural personalities. The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations, dedicated in November, is what architects call a background building. It doesn’t especially call attention to itself. There’s nothing wrong with that. If every building shouts for attention, you end up with cacophony.
What matters, however, is that the Mandel building shows how you can have solid, contemporary architecture and a strong, neighborhood-sensitive design that fits well in its setting. The two qualities are not mutually exclusive.
Designed by Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood, one of Boston’s leading architecture firms, the $11.6 million Mandel building is very much a Modernist structure. Even so, it sits comfortably along Bellflower Road amid a collection of late 19th-century frat houses built in a variety of revival styles ranging from Tudor to Queen Anne…” (go to article)
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January 9, 2008 at 8:30 am
Yup.
Well, I have to admit that it looks a heck of a lot better than the renderings that were shown at the design review and were probably posted on Litt’s blog earlier. During construction it lost the charm of a bad 70’s strip mall complete with questionable medical offices houses above dollar stores that appeared to be the motif conveyed in the renderings.
This seems an overly long article for a “background building” especially when the finesse of the design is poorly conveyed in photo. I would also question the McKinnell quote as justification for the replacement of a neighborhood garden with a courtyard. It smacks of replacing public green space (such as play fields) with manicured store lawns that kids cannot play on and calling it a fair trade (Kauffman Park anyone?).
Other than that I will offer congratulations for a structure that works because it doesn’t do any one thing particularly well. It is almost contextual (because it is close to being as tall as the surrounding building?), it almost sets a design bar for ignorable buildings (because it isn’t offensively iconic nor falsely historic), it almost has a striking night presence (if you look through a fish-eye lens at a gloriously lit Cleveland sky) and, it isn’t shown in pictures or diagrams but you may infer it by extrapolating upon the buildings shape, it may look like someplace you may recognize from the street when you have to go there.
Personally, I would like to know what the clerestory is about, if it offers light to meeting rooms, is it in plane with the exterior “ribbon windows” but visually held back because the roof doesn’t float over it, is the wood trellis reflected as a rhythm or material elsewhere to actually tie the exterior to the interior instead of relying on the properties of the material known as glass to be, well, “glassy”?
I suppose in his own way this is Steve’s way of saying, “Hey Cleveland, do more amazing things I can actually write interesting prose about instead of putting me to sleep”. At least I like to pretend that.
January 9, 2008 at 1:07 pm
I have yet to see the building completed, so I won’t comment on the design yet… I simply wanted to note that “shiny”, “grassy”, and “chunky” have been added to “glassy”, Steve Litt’s “lusty” list of architecture adjectives.