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Donald Maurice Kreis
When Joram Samets of the advertising, public
relations and market research firm Kelliher Samets Volk (KSV) decided
that his growing business on the corner of Battery and Maple streets
needed some more space, he could have done what virtually every
other business in America does in such circumstances. He could have
built or leased yet another workplace calculated to oppress and
dishearten the organization's employees, leaving them to spend the
bulk of their waking hours in artless cubicle farms bathed in fluorescent
light and surrounded by ugliness.
Instead, Samets acquired the former ice house
behind the KSV offices and hired local architect John Anderson to
transform it into the most intriguing piece of architecture to hit
Burlington since the dinosaurs walked the earth.
Okay, maybe it's an exaggeration. There was
only one dinosaur - Henry Hobson Richardson - and, here and there,
Burlington has managed to grow an innovative and satisfying building
since the University of Vermont commissioned him to design the Billings
Library more than a century ago.
Still, Anderson has a point when he uses the
un-complimentary phrase "post-modern colonial-esque" to
describe the prevailing aesthetic in the Queen City. He alludes
to Burlington's turn-of-the-21st Century image as lakeside urban
theme park, shopping zone and backdrop for exuberant undergraduate
hijinks. Sometimes the seriousness of purpose conjured by the Richardson
Romanesque style seems to have melted away like so much Cherry Garcia
ice cream left on a Church Street bench by some kid in August.
Nothing is melting at the former ice house. "It's the high
point of my trying to integrate my art work and my architecture
in one project," Anderson proclaims. Like Michelangelo, Anderson
comes to architecture via a career as an artist.
A more recent phenomenon is that great American
architecture, on those rare occasions when it actually occurs, is
almost never created for businesses. Frank Gehry builds museums,
not office parks. If a truly innovative office space springs up,
it tends to be commissioned by a company that itself has creative
proclivities - say, an advertising and PR firm like KSV.
Samets doesn't buy that theory. In KSV's instance,
"it has more to do with a philosophy of business as a community,"
he insists. "I live my life here, basically. What I'm focused
on is creating an environment to be in that's enjoyable." He
figures that if he commissions spaces that he himself views as "awesome,"
he'll enhance not only his daily existence but also that of his
employees and city itself. His other theory is that if he spends
more than the minimum on work space, the real estate will be more
valuable in the long run. Look up from wherever you are sitting
right now and chances are you see abundant evidence of how radical
these commonsense notions are.The KSV annex is a revolt against
the quaint and the comfortable - a joint statement by architect
and client that beauty and grace can arise out of harsh industrial
materials like concrete and steel. "The owner just gave me
free reign to renovate and provide the tenant spaces," Anderson
says. "He understood the beauty of brutal surfaces - stuff
others would call ugly."
Seen from Maple Street, the KSV annex offers
up an inscrutable face in the form of a giant window cut out of
the concrete in the shape of a keystone. This gesture replaces Anderson's
original idea of a stylized representation of the word "ice,"
which Anderson credits Samets for rejecting. But why a huge keystone
with no arch?
"I don't really know," Anderson admits.
He was working on a series of drawings of full-size architectural
images when this "primal" and "powerful" image
came to him.
The hypothetical arch would be large enough
to support the soaring St. Louis gateway. Is Anderson implying that
in New England there is a welcome of grand proportions to be had,
embedded in the Vermont granite or even pounded into the earth under
the weight of New England history? There is no easy answer, no facile
references to familiar forms and styles.
Following Anderson's intervention, this site
remains avowedly industrial. Landscaping consists of the pavement
of the adjacent parking lot and a sign warning those in search of
public parking to look elsewhere. Above and around the sign, as
with nearly every surface here, inside and out, is a celebration
of concrete's sensual and tactile possibilities, painted and otherwise
artfully contrived to obscure the distinction between what Anderson
found and what he added.
Don't let the sign otherwise deter you from
wandering in and checking out the atrium/lobby - which might as
well be the main street of real, post-industrial Burlington. There's
a software outfit called Moeo; Burton Snowboards, Seventh Generation
(purveyor of non-toxic household products) and KSV's market research
subsidiary, known as Action Research. This microcosm of the real
Burlington economy opens onto a space that is an intergalactic leap
beyond mere skylit lobby.
There is nary a fern nor faux marble fixture
in sight. Instead, Anderson has crafted a complex space that dynamically
probes the connections between art, sculpture and architecture.
Stairs and steel superstructure are not merely unadorned and apparent;
they are vectors bouncing off the walls, which are covered by Anderson's
elegant and witty takeoff of an architectural drawing - the result
of the same artistic experiments that yielded the big keystone.
For all its virtues, this is a background building.
In a more perfect Burlington, challenging contemporary architecture
like Anderson's would assume its rightful place on Church or Main
streets. Instead, much of Burlington is lost in what Anderson calls
"the dangerous trend toward historic revisionism" - architecture
that seeks to evoke"ye olde days" that never really were.
For those who yearn for something else, as Anderson says, "you
gotta start on the fringes."
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