Five Questions With: Kyna Leski and Chris Bardt

By Patrick Anderson
PBN Staff Writer

3six0 Architecture and Design in Providence has had good years before, but this year the firm pulled in all five honor awards given by the American Institute of Architects Rhode Island Chapter at its annual award ceremony. One of the awards was for the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge Design, created jointly with Architect Friedrich St. Florian as Studio Providence LLC, which came in second in an international design competition. In an email interview, company principals Kyna Leski and Chris Bardt spoke about the bridge competition a year later and their other projects.

PBN: What was your reaction when you learned 3six0 had won five AIA honor awards this year?

LESKI AND BARDT: A quiet sense of gratitude. The AIA awards are an anonymous acknowledgement of a job well done. This means a lot to us.

PBN: Did it take some of the sting out of coming in second in the Providence River pedestrian bridge competition to see that design honored, or did it make it that much more frustrating that your bridge will not be built?

LESKI AND BARDT: Many people felt stung by the end game of the process for the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge competition. Having nowhere to turn, they came to us. We were told stories from other designers, businessmen, politicians, prominent figures in the community and other individuals who share a love and concern for Providence. This award doesn’t change the process or what will be built on the river. But it confirms what we [and others] think would be best for Providence.

PBN: Aside from the pedestrian bridge, what design that won this year are you most proud of?

LESKI AND BARDT: That’s like having to name a favorite child. We are especially proud of the Rhode Island-based projects. Each had really challenging, unusual issues and modest budgets. These awards celebrate that good design can happen, even under highly constrained circumstances.

PBN: When you look at all the projects that won awards this year, specifically yours, do you see any common ideas or threads running through them?

LESKI AND BARDT: It seems to us that the judging didn’t fall along stylistic or other simplistic lines but recognized designs that were tailored to the specific situation of each project. Any threads that ran through the winning projects have more to do with economic trends or environmental conditions of our region.

Specific to our projects, we arrive at each through a search for something essential, which for us is spatial in nature, a way of making relations cohere in a fundamental way.

PBN: What exciting projects does 3six0 have in the pipeline now that may turn up at future award ceremonies?

LESKI AND BARDT: We’re working on really diverse projects, from a house on the water in South County, to a little cottage in Foster, to a new building for a growing non-profit in Providence, and yes they are all challenging, that’s what makes them so exciting.

Share/Save

Pettaquamscutt River Residence for BEST RESIDENTIAL

Wildflour Vegan Bakery for BEST COMMERCIAL/INDUSTRIAL

Paschke Danskin Loft for BEST INTERIOR

Yeosu World's Fair Pavillion for BEST UNBUILT PROJECT

Providence Pedestrian Bridge for BEST UNBUILT PROJECT (done in conjunction with Friedrich St.Florian, Architect)

Share/Save

That is what the cookie said.

Friedrich St. Florian made the observation that considering the length of human existence, fifty years here and there without architecture is barely noteworthy. The way he put it was, “The world can do without architecture for fifty years.”

This seems to be no big deal, really, when you think of it.

Building goes on, governed by substitutes for architecture: pseudo sociological programming, realty logic or developer logic.

That is the literal interpretation of my fortune…with building referring to “bricks and mortar.” But with the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Eygpt, more significant world building comes to mind.

Social Media played a role as a tool chest for the necessary gathering of outrage, intent and action, but the will to define change and a sustained commitment of action had to have been there in the first place.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, by William Hutchinson Murray:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.

This makes me ask, was our president’s campaign slogan “yes we can” fitting for our country’s people and times?

Share/Save

Dr. Downtown (David Brussat) has long deserved to be sued for malpractice, and the last few of his missives warrants this “J’accuse.” His constant attack on modernism is wearying, and not due to whining alone, but because it is unjustifiable as an intellectual stance. I recall his railing against Schoenberg, whom he’s obviously never listened to or read in depth, unaware of his carrying on traditions established by “classical” composers such as Bruckner and Mahler. Should Faulkner be deprived of his Nobel Prize because of his non-linear time-frames and polyphonic voicings? Would their equivalents in the visual arts be summarily dismissed?

All the buildings in Providence that Mr. Brussat condemns are those that offer the edgy pleasure of being harmoniously jarring within the urban context they help create: the Chace Center at RISD; Classical High School [Editor's note: replacing the writer's "Central" with "Classical" is the only editing change. Central High is in classical style; Classical High is modernist; I'm sure he meant that I condemn Classical High]; the recent Wheeler Gallery and Art Club additions. He has even solicited snide responses to the as yet unfinished Granoff Center at Brown, putting once again his bandwagon before the horses.

His campaign for the pretty as opposed to the beautiful (which engages and can redefine “the ugly”) coupled with his apparent fear of diversity and risk comes dangerously close to that supremacist ideal of blond blue-eyed sameness, championing the status quo at all costs. The 11/10/10 article concerning the foot-bridge contest is filled with misinformation and smug opinion. Friends differently wired than I have shared comments written on the blogosphere, mostly instructing Mr. Brussat about his business; these should be reprinted in a series of columns devoted to this important civic issue.

The column from 11/18/10, second paragraph, transposes what should be arising from your columnist’s mouth into the cry from a character enmeshed in a Reagan-era scandal. “Where do I go to get my reputation back?” could be a new beginning, unless this would be considered too modernistic a departure from entrenched mediocrity. Until this mea culpa is expressed, Mr. Brussat will be taken about as seriously as a cigar-store Indian.

Style is said by some to be the man. Mr. Brussat should be obliged to appear in public in a kind of personalized stock and pillory consisting of wide-brimmed hat and oversized buckled shoes (set off by yellow cross-gartered stocking) so he can follow his bliss undisguised, our roving Sturbridge village idiot, doomed to historical re-enactment.

Stuart Blazer
Providence

Stuart Blazer has been invited to work as occasional poet/critic in the RISD Department of Architecture since the 1990s.

David Brussat’s blog post containing this letter can be seen here.

Additional unpublished letters to the editor can be found in the blog post below.

Share/Save

On December 10, the Rhode Island chapter of the American Institute of Architects held its annual awards ceremony at the Narragansett Towers in southern Rhode Island. This year we submitted East Side Addition (Residential), Old Stone House Inn (Adaptive Reuse), Old Stone House Spa and Restaurant (Interior), and Au Bon Pain (Commercial/Industrial) –all four received Merit Awards in their respective categories. Take a look at our submissions and view other winners on AIA/RI’s website.

Share/Save

It blew my mind.

I also got the opportunity to make a presentation, that I call, “Cohering Entropy: Navigating the Creative Process.” You can read my entire lecture notes here. Some notes from parts of my talk:

A strange thing happened about 20 years ago, very early on in my career as a teacher. I gave a group of students this painting by Paul Klee, called Polyphonically Enclosed White, and I asked them to build the third dimension using only white glue and white museum board.

One of the students, John Schroeder, decided that he would assign different heights to each colored rectangle. He couldn’t tell me why he was doing this…but there was something about his sense of purpose that made me step aside and watch. He worked through the night and built this object and when he was done he held it up to the indirect sunlight coming from the north side of the building.
This is what he saw. He had somehow osmotically channeled the work of Paul Klee.

I am showing you this, not to mystify things… in fact….there is a good explanation of why the light is refracted in this way given the differing sizes and heights of this cluster of tubes. But there isn’t an easy explanation of how John arrived at this idea. This is what interests me: how we get there…or how we navigate the creative process.

I have been surprised and awed by the imagination many times since then. It has made me think I am an atheist and believe I am not. This dilemma draws me into the creative process in my teaching and my work.

How an artist gets to a discovery or invention is mystified in our culture…it’s outside the umbrella of words like “talent” or “genius.” These words keep us from seeing what is at work and keeps it in the periphery and not to be depended upon. I like to call talent or creative abilities, intelligences. One of the most important intelligences for an artist is sensibility. “Sensibility”—keen intellectual perception—not the optics of the eye or capacity of the sensory organs—but how we take this information and form a concept of the world and our place it. Sensibility is on the cusp between percept and concept…which is at the heart of intelligence.

. . .

Search engines gather for us. The founders of Google, stated that “if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, you’d be better off.” And that he and his partner’s ambition for “perfect search engine” would be one that could understand exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

My ambition is the opposite: Creativity….is not in knowledge but in the way towards knowing. Discovery is about arriving somewhere other than where you wanted or expected. And invention is moving outside of what is known.

. . .

Dwelling in uncertainty is key to growth and moving beyond the known through the imagination.

Creative, process are two words neither of which are creative and both are more processed than process.I think of it as cohering entropy. A creative work makes its own necessity by cohering what wasn’t before and now we don’t want undone. Cohering by recognizing connections from the astronomical to the metabolic, by putting together what precedes, follows and is next to: coherence gathered, and meaning made.

Share/Save

A new video of the Biltmore Hotel Porte Cochère project has been posted on 3six0’s YouTube channel. The evolution of the project is condensed into a 30 second animation that illustrates material reasoning driven by the net-like matrix of the hotel’s lobby ceiling, and the canopy’s function as a sheltering entry-marker that reverberates with the historic architecture of the Biltmore Hotel and the city of Providence.

Share/Save

[all references and images are taken from Cadwell, Michael.  Strange Details.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007.]

The Querini Stampalia Foundation by Carlo Scarpa is a powerful reminder of architecture’s capacity to embody particular qualities without necessarily being literal.  Querini Stampalia was originally a family palace built in Venice during the 16th that was converted into a small foundation devoted to “promote study of useful disciplines and nation and foreign knowledge” (12).  After a series of damaging floods in the early 1900’s, Carlo Scarpa was commissioned to renovate the ground floor in anticipation of future flooding.

exterior of the Querini Stampalia Foundation

What’s exiting in this work is Scarpa’s understanding of water as an unsettling force – as a medium caught between the solidity of the earth and the volatility of the sky.  Water is at once dependable and volatile – it is present like the earth, but in constant flux like the sky.  And as Cadwell points out, Venice embodies this precariousness.  “In Venice, buildings do not spring from the earth – they tether themselves to the mud below, or they hover above it” (8-9).  This aquatic quality, this precariousness, pervades Querini Stampalia through details that unsettle and keep us on edge.

ground floor plan

For instance, the main entrance to Querini Stampalia is a small footbridge leading from the adjacent campiello directly into the ground floor foyer.  Seemingly simple, the bridge is slightly eccentric so that the entrance to Querini Stampalia lies slightly below the campiello.  So even before entering the building, Scarpa calls into question the solidity of the ground that is so precarious in Venice.  The bridge drops us below the established ground line and brings us closer to the water below.

entrance bridge

Inside the main gallery, we find a similar articulation of conflicting levels and an unsettling ambiguity regarding the location of water and ground.  First, the gallery steps down from the entrance foyer, bringing the floor even further below the ground line outside.  There are three columns in the space, but none of them align to establish a firm ground line.  Finally, the floor is detailed for floods and wraps up the sides of the wall to define a waterline.  Without being explicit, Scarpa places the visitor somewhere beneath the water, but where exactly is unclear. “So we are up to our ankles.  The grass outside [in the courtyard] is above this line, but no matter, the water rises to our shins” (25).  These waterlines all undermine any sense of a solid ground, but instead locate the room somewhere between the ebb of the tide.  And though the gallery anticipates water and its presence can be felt throughout, the most unsettling part is the lack water and the lack of any reference to establish where that waterline actually lies.  The gallery gives hints and suggests possibilities but provides no assurance.  Instead it lies somewhere in the middle.  Water is absent, but its presence is felt throughout.

Main Gallery Looking Towards Garden

conflicting levels within the gallery

Share/Save

A decade ago , the dream of virtual space  was about to be realized, or so it seemed. Videoconferencing promised to eliminate the need for travel; the “glove” and VR  glasses were ubiquitous features at malls as were  elaborate 3D simulation pods. I remember architecture students at the time speculating about the end of architecture–who needs  spaces for conferences,meetings, social interaction when all that can be done virtually. Oddly enough as the web has grown , virtual reality has become less about hardware and  more about software ie  social media 2.0. Seems virtual reality is getting more virtual. One major exception is the military use of  virtual reality to wage combat at a distance.

Unexpected consequences are emerging :

Although these studies were limited, it does conform to our sense that seeing is not being. By working with concepts, plans, sections  and other instruments, Architects are constantly looking at the third dimension as an equivalent of the other two. We move around, through designs, we make models, hold materials in our hands, look at architecture spatially. This effort to “be” in the world to inhabit “the flesh of the world” as Merleau-Ponty famously wrote about the third dimension,  joins the haptic with  the visual, or so we hope.

Over the past decade the explosion of design publications, print and digital, and the advances in 3D rendering have placed a premium on the image. One hallmark of our times is architecture as a spectacle; if it looks spectacular it will get press, regarless of it’s virtues or weaknesses. This creeping emphasis on the visual brings us back to the virtual. If pilots are losing their minds because of the loss of the environment and architecture is reduced to image–at least in publications, shouldn’t we give pause to how we consume and produce architecture.

It’s interesting that computer models, as wonderful a tool as they are, do not replace physical models. Could the touch, texture, light qualities and spatial nuance of physical models be what allows us to “grasp the environment’ in a way those pilots can’t? And as abstract as a plan or section is could it be that at a fundamental level these kinds of drawings allow  metrics and order of the environment to be cognated, something the drone pilots were missing.

Image by sklathill

Share/Save

Share/Save