Vision building: Architecture for communities and their cultural centers

Vision building: Architecture for communities and their cultural centers

By WALTER SCHACHT
Walter Schacht Architects

Community-oriented design projects bring unique demands but they also present special opportunities for exceptional design.

Walter Schacht Architects has made a specialty of projects for communities: museums, religious buildings and educational facilities. These projects involve working hand-in-hand with groups to help them envision both the mission of their institutions and the architecture of their buildings.

The job is at once enormously rewarding and remarkably trying. The process engages many people and lots of different agendas. It tests the ability of the architect to fulfill many roles simultaneously and requires the skills of a facilitator, psychologist, artist and technician. At times it seems to consume all of one's energies.

But the rewards always outweigh the difficulties. In fact, the complex issues that community groups bring to the table are the source of content for meaningful design. The process of dealing with the community forces the architect to confront the real substance of cultural projects and provides the opportunity to synthesize conflicting needs and aspirations.

The effort to create consensus can inspire higher levels of design that capture the imagination of clients and bring them together around a common vision. Synthesis does not mean compromise. It means rallying a group around a concept that encompasses the potential of a project in a manner that will produce an extraordinary result.

Communities are effective partners if architects are willing to rise to the occasion by listening well, communicating effectively, thinking quickly on their feet and maintaining patience and resolve.

Working with a community involves a balance between freedom and responsibility, between opportunity and constraint. It is never uneventful.

We have found that groups respond well to concepts and that consensus can be formed more easily around values and precepts than around details.

It is remarkable but true that a group conscience can be created around a set of abstract design parameters. People without experience in the theory or language of design can comprehend the most complex and subtle of ideas -- if these ideas are presented clearly and established in response to the true nature of the community, the building program and the site.

We work hard to establish a common set of goals at the outset of the project and we keep these goals in front of the group as, together, we make decisions about the schematic concept for the project. As the project proceeds into details, we return to the common vision of the goals and the schematic concept time and again to help the group make decisions.

Evaluated on their own merits, decisions about materials, colors, textures, etc. are often hard for the group to make. Evaluated in relation to the big picture for the project, there is a rationale for making these decisions.

At some point, all community projects come to a halt when someone asks, "why are we building this design, anyway?" This often occurs late in the game -- when concrete has been poured and the walls are coming out of the ground. It is important to resist the temptation to respond by saying, "it's too late to ask that question."

It is better to reconstruct the common vision for the project and reestablish the parameters behind all the decisions that led up to the design -- these are as much the foundation for the project as the concrete, and a more effective way to convince an individual or the group that the project is moving along the right track.

In the end, we find that people value highly the product of community-built projects. They create places that we all visit and use, that mark our growth as regional culture. They are very satisfying, even if they almost always take a long time to build.

Our firm is currently working on four projects in which we are helping communities define themselves spiritually as well as physically: the African American Heritage Museum, the Burke Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum and Temple B'nai Torah.

The African American Heritage Museum

The African American Heritage Museum celebrates the genius and achievements of African American culture. The museum will provide a place for people to connect to their heritage.

Historic Colman School will be rehabilitated to house the new museum's programs. Sitting high above Interstate 90, the old school building is a symbol of the community's dreams and aspirations.

Our firm's work on this project, done in collaboration with Streeter & Associates, Architects, began in January of this year. Our charge is to help the museum develop its exhibits and architecture, and to partcipate in fashioning its mission and programs in the process.

The museum founders created the project by occupying the school over 10 years ago, and the project now includes community leaders, educators and supportive professionals from other museums in the region. The museum's vision was derived through a series of workshops and interviews that involved these people in the process of conceiving the role and scope of the museum.

The result is an institution which is uniquely related to the community and to the museum's prospective constituency.

Three major program areas define the character of the museum:

"Rites of Passage" deals with the legacy of African American culture and its seminal impact on America and the world-at-large. It provides a place for understanding the achievements of individuals and of the community.

"Each One Teach One" is the hands-on education component of the museum. It focuses on enabling children and youth to understand their inherent abilities and potential, and inspires individuals to pursue their goals.

"Get Together" is a program centered around community gathering, making the museum a center of social activity and drawing people in around the cultural achievements of African Americans including food, music, performance, art and literature.

As the vision for the museum's programs is refined, we are moving ahead with plans for the rehabilitation of Colman School. The 45,000-square-foot project is scheduled for completion just after the turn of the century.

The Burke Museum

Located on the University of Washington campus, The Burke Museum has been in operation for nearly 100 years, bringing a variety of meaningful programs and exhibits to the public. As the university and the region enter a new century, the museum has the potential to expand significantly and to attract an audience of 500,000 to one million annually.

The museum is nearly finished with its year-long effort to create a map for growth into a major regional institution. In addition to Walter Schacht Architects, the consultant team for the project includes museum planners Lord Cultural Resources and The Collins Group, fundraising counsel.

The future of the Burke began to take shape in a day-long workshop with a diverse group of supporters that included museum staff, university officials, directors and curators from other regional natural history museums, and members of the Burke Development Council.

In the course of this brainstorm, the group created a vision and consensus for the development of the museum's programs. Together we identified the important relationship between the museum's research activities and its exhibit activities -- leading to conclusion that these two aspects of the museum must be brought together if the museum was to realize its full potential.

The Burke Museum is unique in that it actively contributes to our understanding of the natural and cultural landscape in which we live. As a university-based research institution, it is in a class by itself. The museum's program for an expanded operation grows from its existing assets -- "Real stuff, real people, real life." The Burke displays significant artifacts (real stuff), creates opportunities for interaction with the work of its scientists (real people) and explores issues that impact our community (real life).

The museum expects to realize its vision for growth within the next 10 years. Through this process, it has committed itself to long-range development that will enable it to build and operate a 200,000-square-foot facility that provides space for exhibits and hands-on education as well as university based research.

Tacoma Art Museum

A conceptual model for the Tacoma Art Museum.
Photo courtesy Walter Schacht Architects.
The Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) is committed to making art accessible and meaningful to people through its exhibits and hands-on educational programs. TAM has led the way in the region's unique commitment to audience-related programming concepts. The museum connects art to life by putting the objects it presents into a broad social, political and aesthetic context.

The museum is completing a four-year effort to establish the vision, program, site and preliminary design concepts for the new building. In addition to our firm, the consultant team includes Lord Cultural Resources, museum planners.

Developing and siting the museum's building program is a project that involved working with the communities of Tacoma and Puget Sound as well as the community of the museum itself. Starting with audience surveys and continuing with a range of workshops that included the city's cultural community and the museum's site neighbors, the concept for the project was formed in response to the energy and initiatives of a wide range of partners. Our thinking about the museum and its building has come out of an open discussion that galvanized the support of key players in the community.

The preliminary design concept has played a significant role in securing the city's support for the project and securing commitments for funding from private, corporate and government contributors.

The design concept physically connects the museum to both its regional and civic contexts. Located adjacent to Union Station, the museum building will be visible from surrounding highways. On this side, the building has a monumental presence in keeping with its place in the regional cultural community.

On Pacific Avenue, the museum is across the street from the historic brick warehouses that are being converted for use as the University of Washington. On this side, the museum has a different scale, connected to its neighborhood and to the life of the street. Its active public spaces -- the community gallery, cafe, store, lobby and library -- open onto Pacific Avenue. Inside, the spatial sequence of the building reinforces the regional and local connections as it orients visitors inward to the museum's exhibits and programs and outward to views over the street and beyond to Mount Rainier. The museum will occupy its new 50,000-square-foot building shortly after the year 2000.

Temple B'nai Torah

Temple B'nai Torah is a Reform congregation building a new synagogue in Bellevue. The community values both the ancient traditions of the Jewish religion as well as the contemporary lifestyle of the Pacific Northwest. The architecture of the new building captures the qualities of both aspects of the community's spirit. It provides a foundation for the growth of the congregation over the next 30 years.

The design, funding and construction of the project has taken over seven years. Even as the walls for the building are going up we continue to meet with the building, design and worship committees to discuss the sanctuary furnishings, the landscape and many other details.

The synagogue building is formed by an L-shaped masonry volume that encompasses the temple's offices and lobby. The colored concrete masonry units have the soft, warm glow and timeless density of ancient religious structures -- connecting to the permanence of Judaism's ancient values.

Leaning on and against this mass is a lightweight steel structure of columns and trusses that covers a community gathering space that can be simultaneously configured for weekly worship services of 400 and social events of 600, or completely opened to accommodate High Holy Day gatherings of 1,100. It is the equivalent of a tent, hovering over the courtyard formed by the masonry 'L'.

Oriented to the surrounding woods of 100-foot-tall tall fir trees, this strongly articulated, 24-foot high volume is a completely modern in expression -- connecting to the contemporary environment of the congregants' lives and their love of the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The 18,500-square-foot building will be completed in late spring of 1998. It is the first phase of a development that will eventually grow to 48,000 square feet and include a permanent sanctuary and 10 classrooms.

Walter Schacht is founder and principal of Walter Schacht Architects, Seattle.

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