In 1963, by federal court ruling, South Carolina’s Clemson University was racially integrated. The ruling was regarding a 20 year-old Harvey Gantt, who despite excellent academics had been repeatedly barred from entering the university’s architecture program because of his skin color. Rather than accept the status quo, Gantt filed a suit which would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court before he was accepted. It was the first, but not the last time that Gantt would gain widespread attention for his talent, dedication, and ability to break racial barriers in pursuit of his goals.
Fifty years later, the AIA has selected Harvey Gantt to be honored with the 2013 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award for his long career as an architect, politician, and pioneer in civil rights. The award is named after the former head of the Urban League who in 1968, called attention to the Architectural League’s lack of social advocacy, and challenged women and minorities to become more actively involved in the profession of architecture.
Courtesy AIA.
Gantt’s groundbreaking entrance into Clemson University was just the beginning of his successful career, which has been marked with achievements in several fields. After graduating from Clemson, Gantt earned a masters degree in city planning from MIT and then returned to Charlotte, NC. A year later in 1971, he founded the successful firm, Gantt Huberman Architects, with his partner Jeffrey Huberman. Since then, the firm has designed many prominent buildings in the Charlotte area including museums, educational buildings, and rail and bus stations. (more…)
Paul Rudolph’s Claire T. Carney Library at UMass Dartmouth, Western facade during renovation
When I read Robert Campbell’s recent article in The Boston Globe on designLAB’s sensitive renovation of a significant Paul Rudolph building at UMass Dartmouth, I was intrigued to learn more. The word that got me going was “Brutalism”. For some time now we’ve been covering this experimental, some call it aggressive or even willful and arrogant, form making. Our story on the ongoing struggles to keep Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Chicago dates to 2009, our more recent blog on the last minute reprieve of Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center brightened my day even as I mourned the loss other important works from that optimistic period in our culture’s history. And so we welcomed Brunner/Cott & Associates’ ongoing blog series on the trials and tribulations of saving and adapting Brutalist buildings.
Eastern facade during renovation
It’s no surprise, then, that the Boston architecture firm, designLAB Architects’ success at the library at UMass Dartmouth re-awakened my evergreen curiosity about Rudolph, Brutalism, preservation, adaptation, research, and progress. So I went to the source and asked designLAB’s Robert J. Miklos, FAIA, to talk frankly about these and other issues swirling around one of the most controversial movements in architecture history. Here is what he said:
Susan S. Szenasy: Now that your renovation work on Paul Rudolph’s Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is nearing completion, it would be great to hear some of your reflections on the project. I believe that you and your firm, designLAB, consider Rudolph an architecture hero. That relationship can be intimidating to some architects. Did you struggle with Rudolph’s spirit? Or did his spirit seem to be at ease with your re-interpretation of his iconic building?
Robert J. Miklos: Truthfully, we don’t see him as a hero. His work is heroic, perhaps, but I am a product of 1970’s GSD and was conditioned to reject the work of Rudolph. At designLAB, our ‘courtship’ of the hero was a long process of research and analysis before we were able to find any true ‘affection’ for his work.
Rudolph with the library site model
It started with a talented young designer on the team who studied his early work at the University of Florida. There, Rudolph truly is a hero, if not a cult figure. I traveled to Florida to tour all his work in Sarasota–it was inspiring. His career is filled with contradictions: rationalism vs. expressionism, structural determinism vs. a personal obsession for hexagonal form. While we were continually trying to understand the original intentions and spirit of this project, we always recognized it as one of many experiments filled with successes and flaws. A radical approach to the interpretation and transformation was necessary, yet we believe our approach is rooted in the spirit of Rudolph.
It’s also important to note that at designLAB, we are invested in expanding the language of a specific context, whether natural or constructed. In this project, the existing building was that context, which we termed ‘Post-Utopian’. Our methodology is similar to what we have used in other contexts, determining when to push back, when to be deferential. Throughout our design process we immersed ourselves in Rudolph’s ideas and process developing a dialog between existing and new where the interventions might amplify the power of his original ideas and compositional themes. We also were not afraid to correct inconsistencies in his approach.
Library’s eastern facade during renovation
Image: Shanghai Expo
Imagine the bubble architecture students find themselves trapped in while pursuing higher education: long hours cradling a mouse demote food and sleep, much less investigations of non-disciplinary theory. How wonderful, then, that the Roth-Symonds Memorial Lecture Fund supports lectures and small-group meetings to expose Yale School of Architecture students to speakers outside architecture; past lecturers have included sociologist Loic Wacquant, urbanist Saskia Sassen, and media and cultural theorist Thomas Y. Levin. This spring, Neil Smith, distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at CUNY, delivered “Toxic Capitalism: Neoliberalism, City Building and Crisis.”
