Perkins and Will are developing ideas to revolutionise skyscraper design through the use of timber.
This zooming in and out, from detail to the whole view, is what architects and interior designers and planners can do really well.įront facade of Canada’s Earth Tower Vancouver by Perkins and Will It’s good to “nerd out” into the specifics of technology, but we also need to remember that, at all times, we need to step back and look at the holistic view. We also pay attention to resources, energy, materials, carbon footprint and so forth. These are larger principles that include some of the details I mentioned but also get back to the fundamental ideas of human inspiration: restoring our environment on a larger scale, storytelling and the experience of the people occupying a building. The way we think about sustainability is encapsulated into an idea we call “living design”. But a bike rack doesn’t make a building a green building in a deeper sense. You can also miss the core principles along the way, because you’re focussing on providing things like bike racks. As you design a building, you’re adding on these other things, and eventually you have so much complexity – you’re adding systems, you’re adding processes, you’re adding design ideas – and you can overcomplicate design. One of the challenges of sustainable design is that it’s a checklist approach to designing a building. But you would agree there’s more to it than that? When we talk about sustainability in architecture, we often think of technological systems. Obviously, sustainability is important for your fi rm. In this case, you limit views and create a more soothing type of light.ĭetail of University of Cincinnati, the Gardner Neuroscience Institute building exterior There you have an architectural solution but you also have a specific solution for a particular group of people’s wellbeing, which is different than, let’s say, a paediatric facility, where you would want to open it up to views. Diffused daylight – rather than direct sunlight – is a better experience for people with post-traumatic injuries, so you’ll see that building has a scrim on the side, which is modulated. That led us to an innovative exterior expression on the building. The impact of light and glare is one of the things that would affect them, either unfavourably or favourably, depending how we designed the building. Is there a particular project that comes to mind that encapsulates that idea of wellbeing?Ī project that I really like is a building we did at the University of Cincinnati, the Gardner Neuroscience Institute building, an outpatient health facility to treat people with or recovering from neurological problems. It’s not simply about liking or disliking, but rather: do you feel healthy? What does air quality do to students’ learning? What does light quality and daylighting do to people’s healing processes? If you put all that together in multiple levels of design rigour – where you think about all of the qualitative dimensions of space, including acoustics, colour, the organisation of spaces – you create places that honour humanity. From the standpoint of human wellbeing, how you feel matters to us. We’ve always thought of architecture, interior design and planning as human-centric arts, and so ultimately we are designing places for people – we’re not designing objects to put in a museum. “Wellbeing” is a popular word these days, but what does it mean to your firm? University of Cincinnati, the Gardner Neuroscience Institute building exterior by Perkins and Will Their ethics are guided by sustainability but what sets them apart from other architecture firms is their desire to share knowledge within the industry, the tools they develop, the research they conduct and the intellectual production of their work.īearing in mind the scale of their work, Glass discusses with CEO Phil Harrison the impact it has on the environment as well as on the wellbeing of the communities they work with. Established in 1935 and with offices in nearly two dozen cities in North America, alongside South America, Europe, and Asia, Perkins and Will is an architecture firm organised around environmental and human wellbeing. THEIR mission seems simple: create “places that honour humanity”. A matter of scale – Glass speaks to Phil Harrison, CEO of Perkins and Will, one of the leading sustainable architecture firms in the world
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