Victoria Meyers : Invisible Buildings

Stair design 101: hanrahan Meyers architects

 

Laurentian Library stair: Michelangelo

Architects spend a great deal of time thinking about stairs.  Personally, I've always been fascinated by gorgeous stairs.  This would include the Laurentian Library stair by Michelangelo, the famous staircase by Louis Barragan, John Pawson (his own house);  and Louis Kahn (the Yale Art Museum).

John Pawson: Pawson House stair

Lou Kahn's stair at the Yale Art Museum

hanrahan Meyers architects have designed a few stairs, and we've put a lot of thought into each of them -  not that we believe that we equal the efforts cited above. 

Below I'm showing the stair hMa designed linking Pratt Pavilion to the bridge that links Steuben and Pratt Studios together. 

  Pratt Pavilion stair, Brooklyn, NY; post Victoria Meyers architect

The Pratt Stair was designed using hot rolled steel shaped into a single folded plate to make treads and risers.  The landing is a larger steel box.  The blackened steel is a result of the industrial process used to roll the steel (hot roll) - and the rails and balustrades are in the same material.  The stair is framed by the leftover remnants of the original Stueben Hall brick wall, excavated and opened, to create a new stair hall facing the Entry Lobby for the new Pratt Design Center.

Holley Stair at Holley House in Garrison, New York, is a simple maple wood stair that follows the pitch of the adjacent hill.  The stair becomes cinematic in relationship to the movable wall panel that separates the stair view from the living area. (see below)

  Holley House in Garrison, NY: post Victoria Meyers architect

Schrom Studio Stair is a free-standing sculpture in maple -  a solid carved block of wood - that lands on an open steel deck.  (see below).

Schrom Studios: post Victoria Meyers architect

At Ash 4Ways (White Space) hMa designed a 2-step down into the apartment, layering structural glass over old growth Ash from our collaborator, Hisao Hanafusa (Miya Shoji).  See below:

Ash 4 Ways/ White Space post: Victoria Meyers architect

This iconic photograph by hMa photographer Michael Moran captures the spirit of this composition.

Sacred Geometry: Won Buddhist Center; Dharma retreat by Architects; the architecture of infinity

won Buddhist Meditation Hall in construction.  Post: Victoria Meyers architect

Victoria Meyers architect (hMa):  Won Buddhist Retreat in Claverack, New York, employs simple materials (sustainably harvested wood) that blends into the landscape, and is shaped by the use of deceptively complex geometric forms.

hMa designed four courtyard buildings on the site, including the Administration building (below), as simple square shapes.  The simplicity of the plan is made dynamic and complex, however, by opening the courtyards to the public areas through a spiral circulation pattern, and placing complex roof forms above the courtyard entrances.The roofs and ceilings above the 'entry porches' to each of the courtyards are cut into complex biomorphic, triangulated geometries.  This triangulation speaks about the dynamic activity of walking into, and out from each private courtyard.

Won Buddhist Administration Hall in Construction: Post Victoria Meyers architect

The triangulating forms  soften the roof shapes, and make the walking porches places of meditation. They also make the porches feel like they are natural extensions of the site.

Won Buddhist Connector - Meditation Hall / Administration:  Post: Victoria Meyers architect

Won Buddhist Retreat, and the Bio-morphic design applied to the spiral porch roofs, is a further exploration of the architecture of infinity by hMa.  The Won Dharma retreat design by hanrahan Meyers architects applies many of the firm's researches to date, including researches into light as well as complex triangulated construction, which can be used to create self-supporting structures.

hMa's first venture into triangulating, self-supporting structures was their 'sound booth' design for Vox Harbour, a collaboration with sound artist Jane Philbrick.

 Won Buddhist Retreat will be open to the public in September, 2011.

 

DWiP: Digital Water Pavilion on CURBED Blog

Digital Water i-Pavilion (Battery Park City Community Center), hanrahan Meyers architects.  Post: Victoria Meyers architect

Excerpt:

At the north end of Battery Park City down below the new Liberty Twins, where ice rinks and ball fields have been usurped by a couple of acres of raw dirt, a new fun spot is going in: The Digital [Water] i-Pavilion! This 550-foot arc of fritted glass fronting the amenity-filled BPC Community Center, aka the DWi-P, is from the creative minds at hanrahan Meyers architects. Aiming for LEED Platinum certification, the design is all about water and sustainability and the idea is made musical by composer Michael Schumacher. A bar code etched into the glass, activated by smart-phoning passers-by, will let them play the wall (here's a prelude). Holy Digitization! ... read full article on ny.curbed.com by clicking the link below:

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2011/07/11/magical_musical_wall_going_in_at_new_bpc_rec_center.php

Digital Water i-Pavilion featured in Green Building and Design Magazine: "Revitalizing Existing Neighborhoods": Interview with Victoria Meyers architect

aerial view of DWiP in construction.  Post: Victoria Meyers architect

Excerpted from the article in Green Building and Design Magazine:

REVITALIZING EXISTING NEIGHBORHOODS
NEW YORK CITY, NY, USA New York City, the great metropolis, is rarely considered a place where you would go to connect with nature, but the inclusion of open space for all new developments has been a mandate—the first of its kind in the country—going back to the early 1970s. Today the trend is to go much further in converting and integrating cityscape with natural settings and parks. GBDM reached out to hMa Founding Partner Victoria Meyers to discuss her firm's involvement in changing attitudes toward urban design in the United States and elsewhere.  

In 2000, New York design firm hanrahan Meyers Architects (hMa) were hired as the master plan architects for Battery Park City Authority's North Neighborhood, an example of the redevelopment of existing urban sites. When completed in 2012, the neighbor-hood will include a total of 5 million square feet of sustainable community, 11 residential and public buildings, 4 major parks, and the renowned Stuyvesant High School. Nearly all of the construction and all of the landscaping will be under hMa's purview and meet LEED-certification standards. Each building aligns urban blocks at the 11th and 14th floors, and high-rise towers are placed up to the 25th and 32nd floors in a complex pattern of offsetting angles to open up view corridors and bring light and air into the parks below.

  Battery Park City North Neighborhood : isometric showing green roofs and parks.  Post: Victoria Meyers architect

The new neighborhood departs in many ways from the original concept—begun 45 years ago when the city first conceived of turning the Hudson River tidal-estuary shipping piers, at the southwest tip of Lower Manhattan, into a 92- acre planned community. "There was a general excitement then of advancing technology," says hMa founder and principal Victoria Meyers. "You had the World's Fair in 1964 with the machines of the future. The out-of-doors was not part of that vision. When the original Battery Park development started, it was based on some very vague ideas of urbanism, and that was a pot of not fully digested concepts. It was a time when people were still trying to figure out if trees were a good thing in the city or not. Was it better to have trees because they made things look good? Or mow them down so you could keep a better surveillance on crime?"

DWiP: view of north courtyard.  DWi-P is scheduled to open in September 2012.  Post: Victoria Meyers architect

Meyers credits the leadership of the former president and CEO of Battery Park City (now the COO of New York Authority), Timothy Carey, for the solid vision of North Neighborhood when her firm was hired in 1997. (And, naturally, once Carey joined the New York Authority, sustainable design went to the top of its priorities, Meyers says.) "Prior to coming to Battery Park City, Tim Carey singlehandedly created Energy Star," she notes of his impressively green legacy. "He called every manufacturer of appliances to Albany and said he would award whichever company could create an Energy Star appliance that would cost the same as regular appliances the biggest single contract in the country for affordable housing—and it happened." The politics of America's biggest city notwithstand-ing (though New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is continuing Carey's allegiance to green design), there are many approaches to making things stick. Connecting to nature can come from different perspectives. "Tim Carey, with Governor Pataki, forged a powerful com-mon bond on the importance of nature in urban environments," Meyers says. "Their political base

Click here to see more images of Digital Water Pavilion on www.hanrahanmeyers.com

Click here to browse the full May/June issue of Green Building and Design Magazine.