GAUTHIER ARCHITECTS

team: Kristina Kesler - Project Architect, Michela Chiavi, Lucia Eastman, Jeremy Edmiston, Kevin Field, Sara Goldsmith, JungMin Kim, Scott Nicholl
Location :SoHo
Specs: 6000 sq ft

The 168T townhouse project is the conversion and expansion of a 3-story, 4,500 sq ft, multi-family residence into a 5-story, 6,000 sq ft, single-family townhouse. The new design provides ample room for entertaining, family life, exercise, and work. Occupying the new basement level of the townhouse is a commercial space, a grandfathered condition from the original building.

The design of the townhouse aims to create a push-and-pull between the public space of the street and the private space of the home using the façade as a surface that negotiates the elements of domesticity and street, public and private, and structure and ornament through the use of terraces and setbacks. The resulting interior benefits from a great deal of natural light and private outdoor space overlooking the SoHo block.

The owner of the property is ultimately pragmatic and thus interested in maximizing occupiable space and in taking advantage of available tax exemptions. In order to utilize the maximum site FAR, we expanded the building footprint and created a variety of open spaces including balconies, terraces and a green roof. The last condition makes use of tax exemptions, minimizes the carbon footprint and expands oxygen production.

168T TOWNHOUSE – PROJECT CREDITS:

STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING: Severud Associates - Consulting Engineers

MEP ENGINEERING: DNV Associates

GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING: GZA GeoEnvironmental of New York

CONSTRUCTION: Pinnacle Construction Group, Inc.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Material Evidence; Arhitectura

team: Kristina Kesler - Project Architect, Skye Beach, Michela Chiavi, Lucia Eastman, Kevin Field, Craig Rosman
Location :SoHo
Specs: 2500 sq ft

The 168T Theater, The Scene Theater, was added to the program of the 168T Townhouse. In order to create room for a theater space without reducing the residential space, it was necessary to go underground beyond the existing foundation, requiring extensive excavation and underpinning. This work required careful study of geo-technical conditions, city transportation tunnels and existing structural situations of both the project and neighboring sites.

The Scene Theater was developed as an experimental, not-for-profit theater intended to foster and contribute to the cultural activity of the local neighborhood through an engagement with grassroots performance groups and with the world wide neighborhood through the online publication of its performances. The design of the space sought to reflect this local/global intent by weaving together digital and performance space in a marriage of technology and live acts.

The theater object itself is an integral part of the performance because the space itself is a mutable element. The milled-foam cellular walls allow a complete transformation of the space through sound and light changes. Each cell is programmed with individual laser-cut felt infill, high frequency speakers, and individual LED light fixtures. These technologies not only light the stage and deliver sound but also provide a programmable and changeable overall theater space that performs as a choreographed proscenium.

168T THEATER – PROJECT CREDITS:

STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING: Severud Associates - Consulting Engineers

MEP ENGINEERING: DNV Associates

GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING: GZA GeoEnvironmental of New York

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Material Evidence; Arhitectura

team: Kristina Kesler - Project Architect, Michela Chiavi - Project Architect, Lucia Eastman, Phillip Lee, Scott Nicholl, Craig Rosman
Location :Upper East Side
Specs: 4000 sq ft

This duplex apartment, which overlooks Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is in a 1926 building. The owners, who are historians and art collectors, wish to recreate the spirit of that time while adding prior- and post- historical elements as comments on the process of history and collecting. The apartment will be entirely gutted and rebuilt with historic details including artisanal plasterwork and reclaimed furniture, cabinetry, floors, fixtures, and stained glass panels.

One of the main features of the apartment is an enlarged, double-height space surrounding a sculptural staircase that includes individually artist-commissioned elements. This staircase will underscore the separation between the loft-like, public first floor and the individuated, private rooms of the second floor. The first floor will center on a chef-quality kitchen, designed in collaboration with one of the owners who is a former bakery owner. The apartment will house pieces from an important collection of Soviet propaganda art and will be outfitted with a state-of-the-art lighting and humidity controls to accommodate the collection.

969F Renovation – PROJECT CREDITS:

CONSTRUCTION MANAGER: James Kilkenny, Llc.

STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING: Severud Associates - Consulting Engineers

MEP ENGINEERING: DNV Associates

CONSTRUCTION: Ryan Construction, Inc.

team: ARCHITECTS: Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston
Location :Museum of Modern Art, New York
Specs: 1500 sq ft

BURST*008 was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and built there for the exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. Built in 10 weeks, 4 off-site and 6 on-site, the Home Delivery project demanded an evolution of the award winning project, BURST*003. At MoMA, the BURST* name took on more than its original semantic origin, derived from the surface-applied “sunburst” flower graphic, to become a skylight and, more significantly, to become a means of delivery in which the structural ribs literally burst open on site before being lowered onto the structural moment frames that connect the house to the ground. Additional project evolutions in BURST*008 include a prefabricated structural insulated panel (SIP) skin system that provides a highly insulated architectural structure.

BURST* is a prefabricated system of housing that uses sophisticated digital design tools to create a highly customizable, simple-to-assemble, environmentally conscious house. The system is adaptable and responsive to various sites, climates, owners, and programs using an algorithm to generate the form based on specific conditions like angle of summer sun and number of inhabitants. An alternative to mass-produced versions of domestic life that reduce prefab houses to differing arrangements of boxes, each BURST* has the potential for unique spaces, expanding the range of architectural form for domestic and inexpensive construction. The system functions like a kit of parts to produce homes that use small building pieces to achieve individually tailored spaces.

Made of plywood, steel and glass, the house is raised off the ground and uses strategically placed vents and overhangs in order to maximize natural heating and cooling systems and minimize environmental impact, using only passive means to maintain temperature comfort levels. The flexibility of the house derives from literally weaving two sections together- the natural ground plane and an artificial, manipulated plane. These two planes travel vertically and horizontally to comprise the ground, the floor and the walls. Depending on specific conditions for an individual house, the weave can open, close and reshape in order to allow or prevent warming sun and cooling breezes into the house.

The house’s structural system is a tensile structure, similar to a kite or an airplane wing. The interweaving ribs and SIPs are locked into place, and thus made structural, by the skin pieces. This tension system is both high-strength and lightweight, making transport to the site low impact and assembly easy to follow as the pieces pop into each other. Because the bulk of the construction process is achieved digitally, sizing and fitting issues are resolved before being cut and numbered and bursting onto site, helping to ensure less than 5% waste.

BURST*008– PROJECT CREDITS:

CLIENT: The Museum of Modern Art. Curators: Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen

DESIGN TEAM: Henry Grosman, Michela Chiavi, Kristina Kesler, Rob Baker, Franz Daniel, Maryana Grinshpun, Rebecca Hora, Malvin Hwee, Jung Min Kim, Edward Kim-Yujoong, Charles Kwan, Philip Lee, Brian Osborne, Vicente Quiroga, Seth Roye, Troy Thierren

CONSTRUCTION: Ryan Associates, Inc. Vincent Flegar, Greg Koch, Paul Moore, Craig Nadeau, Kyle Peed, Mike Schweitzberger, Ashley Simone, Molly Thorkelson;

Sciame Construction Company. Jay Gorman, Frank Sciame Jr.;

Budco Enterprises, Inc. Joe Vilardi

Student Construction Team: Kevin Field, Scott Nicholl, Tania Amodio, Lourd Galvez, Paul Hasty, Fidelma Hawney, Glen Ho, Mathew Kilivris, Alfie Koetter, Brian Manning-Spindt, Margaret Mockbee, Christian Prasch, Megan Pryor, Perry Randazzo, Craig Rosman, William Tucker, Bretaigne Walliser.

ENGINEERING: Buro Happold - Consulting Engineers. Craig Schwitter, Cristobal Correa, Alexandru Marin, Nathaniel Stanton

LIGHTING DESIGN: Clark Johnson Lighting Studio. Clark Johnson, Paul Neenos

SPONSORS: City College School of Architecture; Alan Costa, Stewart Title Insurance; Louis Dubin, The Athena Group; Carla Emil & Rich Silverstien; Jim Friedman, Ryan Associates; Rosalie Genevro, The Architectural League of New York; Helyn MacLean and Asher Waldfogel; New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture FABLAB; Daisy and Ross Newman; Anthony Rossello, Certain Pictures; Rotasa Foundation on behalf of Susan Cummins; Stewart and Lydia Stern, David and Marcie Tannenbaum, Jonathan and Catherine Bell, Rosemarie Halligan and Peter Van Alstyne, Stern Tannenbaum Bell LLP

MATERIAL SPONSORS: AF Supply Corporation; All-Boro Building Supply; Aluma Craft Products; Aspen Supply Corp.; Benjamin Moore Paints; Chilewich/Sultan LLC; Crate and Barrel; Designer Epoxy Finishes Inc.; F. W. Honerkamp Co. Inc.; LED Waves, Inc.; Lightolier; Leviton; Qantas Airways; Tremco Inc.

FABRICATORS & SUPPLIERS: Associated Fabrication LLC; Blaine Window Hardware Inc.; McMaster-Carr; Millenium Steel, The Murus Company, Inc.; P. C. Steck, Inc.

VIDEO: Certain Pictures. Anthony Rossello.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Material Evidence; TATLIN Magazine; Closing the Gap: AD vol.79; GreenHouse; Log15; Costriure; Domus: Special Green Ways; a+u: Architectural Transformation via BIM; Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling; Time Magazine; Modern Painters; Vanity Fair; Hauser; Dwell; The Flint Journal; TreeHugger; ARTnews, Art Forum; Architectural Record; Newsweek; Architectural Review; The Guardian; The New York Times; The New York Sun; Fast Company; The Financial Times; The Wall Street Journal; The New York Review of Books

team: Michela Chiavi, Lucia Eastman, Sara Goldsmith, Craig Rosman
Location :Brooklyn
Specs: 4500 sq ft

 The 1706 Townhouse was the renovation of a building from a single-family to a two-family townhouse – an owner’s duplex unit and a duplex rental apartment. Both units have private entrances and outdoor space. The project was a real hands-on collaboration between owner, architect and contractor and generated the generous, rough-hewn spaces that reflect the lifestyle and desires of the owners.

The original building was over 100 years old and constructed of wood; assuring stability and fire safety were crucial components of the renovation. The project required substantial structural interventions: rebuilding both façades, leveling all floors from as much as a 21” slope, rebuilding the party walls with fire-rated steel, and providing new stairs with roof access. Other additions included a rear-yard studio building and a new roof deck with Manhattan views. Despite major structural alterations, this project was built for less than $125/sf.

1706 TOWNHOUSE – PROJECT CREDITS:

STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING: ACL Engineers

CONSTRUCTION: Pinnacle Construction Group, Inc.

PHOTOGRAPHY: Fabian Birgfeld

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Arhitectura

team: ARCHITECTS: Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston
Location :North Haven, Australia
Specs: 1500 sq ft

BURST*003 was the first full-scale house built from the BURST* prefabricated method of building. The house sits on a narrow lot of 7,800 sq ft, three hours north of Sydney and five minutes from the ocean. The house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, covered parking for two cars, an informal public space for living/dining/kitchen/play area, grass fields for cricket and bocce ball, and a clay half-court for basketball.

The climate in North Haven is temporal coastal and the house strategically uses this climate to passively control the temperature in the house year-round. There are no artificial heating or cooling systems. In the summer, the high and strong northern sun is blocked by the angles of the roof overhangs and the window slits. Cooling breezes from the water arrive from the northeast and are re-circulated through the configuration of vents, windows, and slits in the house. In the winter, the low angle of the sun streams inside and serves to warm the house.

BURST* is a prefabricated system of housing that uses sophisticated digital design tools to create a highly customizable, simple-to-assemble, environmentally conscious house. The system is adaptable and responsive to various sites, climates, owners, and programs using an algorithm to generate the form based on specific conditions like angle of summer sun and number of inhabitants. An alternative to mass-produced versions of domestic life that reduce prefab houses to differing arrangements of boxes, each BURST* has the potential for unique spaces, expanding the range of architectural form for domestic and inexpensive construction. The system functions like a kit of parts to produce homes that use small building pieces to achieve individually tailored spaces.

Made of plywood, steel and glass, the house is raised off the ground and uses strategically placed vents and overhangs in order to maximize natural heating and cooling systems and minimize environmental impact, using only passive means to maintain temperature comfort levels. The flexibility of the house derives from literally weaving two sections together – the natural ground plane and the artificial, manipulated plane. These two planes travel vertically and horizontally to comprise the ground, the floor and the walls. Depending on specific conditions for an individual house, the weave can open, close and reshape in order to allow or prevent warming sun and cooling breezes into the house.

The house’s structural system is a tensile structure, similar to a kite or an airplane wing. The interweaving ribs are locked into place, and thus made structural, by the skin pieces. This tension system is both high-strength and lightweight, making transport to the site low impact and assembly easy to follow as the pieces pop into each other. Because the bulk of the construction process is achieved digitally, sizing and fitting issues are resolved before being cut and numbered, helping to ensure less than 5% waste.

BURST*003 – PROJECT CREDITS:

DESIGN TEAM: Sarkis Arakelyan, Amber Lynn Bard, Ayat Fadaifard, Sara Goldsmith, Henry Grosman, Kobi Jakov, Joseph Jelinek, Ginny Hyo-jin Kang, Gen Kato, Ioanna Karagiannakou, Yarek Karawczyk, Tony Su

FRAME ASSEMBLY TEAM: Sarkis Arakelyan, Newcastle University Architecture Students: David Arnott, Andrew Cavill, Justice Chengeta, Louisa Gee, Ned Haughton, Simon Hayward, John Jones, Jonathon Mentink, Shaun Purcell, Jo Redden, Justin Spraull, Ksenia Totoeva

ENGINEERING: Buro Happold - Consulting Engineers. Craig Schwitter, Cristobal Correa, Byron Stigge

SITE ARCHITECT: Robin Edmiston and Associates

SITE PROJECT ARCHITECT: Chris Knapp

SITE ENGINEERING: Peter Marcus

PHOTOGRAPHY: Jeremy Floto & Cassandra Warner

FABRICATION: P. C. Steck, Inc.; Grifco International, Inc.; Gunnersen Plywood Supply; STRING Nesting Solutions, Italy

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS: Digital Fabrication: Architectural and Material Techniques; P.S.1 Summer 2009 Newspaper, YAP; Bauwelt; Plenty; Abitare, No.468; FutureWood; Metropolis; Architecture Now; Pasajes Construcción 22; Aa, Architecture Australia, vol.95 no.5; Time Magazine: Housing: Forging the Future Innovators; Praxis7: untitled number seven; The HOMEhouse Project; projekt 04/04; Forum Architektury; Praxis 6: New Technologies/New Architectures; 306090, Teaching + Practice 05; Versioning: AD vol.72

AWARDS: 2006 RAIA Wilkison Award; 2003 BofA Design Award, SECCA Home House Project Competition

team:
Location :Postmasters Gallery
Specs: 7 sq ft

Laser-cut birdhouses for American Kestrels, a local bird of prey.

Gallery show and Permanent Installation at Postmasters.

team:
Location :Harlem
Specs: 30,000 sq ft

The Universal Housing is a, award winning proposal for low income, sustainable, urban housing. This housing block is twelve stories high and promotes community through a range of programs that exist along a series of ramps within the building, comprising a useful and necessary public space. These programs and the series of ramps creates a community infrastructure woven into the domestic environment and make social activity a part of the building circulation. The retail space, pool, communal kitchen, community center, and two garden zones serve an intergenerational population of residents - students, professionals, families, elderly. This  domestic diversity is further promoted by different unit types: assisted-living units, studios, dorm-style rooms, and one- and two-bedroom apartments.

The Universal Housing maximizes the buildings efficiency - ie. public and usable space of the housing - to 95%. Typically, a building loses 20% of its space to circulation elevators, stairs, etc. It achieves this through using the circulation of the building as functional space and through the split-level apartment which reduces the need for elevator corridors to every two and a half floors.

Universal Housing won Honorable Mention in the 2003 New Housing New York Competition and was commissioned for the cover of January 2004 Metropolis.

team:
Location :Prague
Specs: 6000 sq ft

The Prague.002 Villa was designed for a family of four in the Prague 6 District of the Czech Republic. Located on a .80 hectare site within a preservation forest, the house was subject to strict environemental controls - limited areas of construction, no run-off contaminants, erosion prevention conditions, protection of indigenous trees and fauna, and protection of exisiting views. Partially as a response to these restrictions and partly as a design choice, the house sits nestled into the hill, responding the the existing slope and creating its own slope. The house has four bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms, a guest apartment, a gourmet kitchen, rec-room, dining and living areas, two offices, a Kino room, and roof terraces. There is also a separate garage and poolhouse that are embedded into the lower slope of the hill.

In addition to serving as home to the family, the house also serves as a display space for a collection of Socialist posters. Because of the fragile nature of the posters, their sensitivity to light exposure was crucial in the material choices. While they need light to be seen, any direct sunlight would fade and slowly destroy them. The architect's solution, then, was to construct the walls from a translucent onyx which would bathe the house in a gentle and warm light but would prevent harsh sunlight from reaching the artworks.

team:
Location :The Architectural League of New York
Specs: 2000 sq ft

This is a built project for new New York 3, the Architectural League of New York's annual exhibition of current work around New York. The project was designed as both a structure in itself and a display space to highlight three current projects.

The installation is constructed from pre-cut, angle-notched pieces of three-inch thick foam. Each piece or rib locks into another, creating a tensile structure that is wholly self-supporting. The grid-like structure of ribs at once transforms the existing and supports itself so as not to damage the exititng gallery space.

team:
Location :East Village
Specs: 300 sq ft

The Fulcrum stair was built as an outdoor addition to a second floor, garden-facing apartment in New York's East Village. The deck and stair give outdoor living space and garden access to the second floor residents.

The deck structure is a painted steel frame with perforated metal cantilevered over columns. The counterweighted stair pivots about a steel support and is activated by the weight of a body descending the staircase.

team:
Location :Times Square
Specs: 200 sq ft

team:
Location :Indiana
Specs: 10,000 sq ft

team:
Location :
Specs: 200 sq ft

team: Frank Barkow, Regine Leibinger, Oliver Neumann
Location :Berlin
Specs: 10,000 sq ft

This Youth Center is a double-height circulation space that renders the entire second level corridor a balcony from which the geometry of the folding roof may be seen and experienced. Recalling both the glacier-etched landscapes of the Berlin basin and the marked landscapes of a war-torn and, for many, a politically separated Berlin, the ground plane of the green areas of the housing is cross-hatched into a matrix of children’s activity zones.

The roofs of the southern bands of the building have a planted green roof of indigenous grasses; the Northern bands have exposed wood beams under a standing-seam
aluminum clad roof. The north façade has unstained tongue-in-groove Larch siding, and the remaining façades are of vertically banded, multi-colored, stained concrete fiber or glass panels over insulation and structure.

team: Frank Barkow, Regine Leibinger, Oliver Neumann
Location :Berlin-Pankow
Specs: 11,000 sq ft

Built as a collaboration in Berlin from a firstplace competition entry, the school and day care center’s circulation space collapses in on itself into a taut corridor breaching
the space at either entrance with double height openings. The building is a concrete masonry frame building with a north façade of unstained tongue-in-groove Larch siding, and the east and west façades of horizontally banded, multi-colored, stained concrete fiber or glass panels over insulation and structure.