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ArtGate: A parking garage, studios . . .

and that which, platonically speaking, never is.

aiaVT Newsletter, December 2005
Donald Maurice Kreis

Virtue is its own reward, which is good news for Burlington architect Michael Wisniewski.

As one of four honorees in the Vermont AIA’s recent ArtGate competition, Wisniewski pocketed a $1,000 prize for his design scheme. Entrants grappled with a quasi-hypothetical commission for a combination arts center and public parking garage on a vacant site in his home town, between the proposed South End Connector highway and a small neighborhood known as the Lakeside Community.

Specifically, Wisniewski grappled for 75 hours – a fact he somewhat sheepishly confessed when competition organizer John Anderson publicly asked the entrants to estimate how much time they had put into their efforts. That works out to slightly more than $13.33 an hour – plus virtue and any other inchoate emoluments.

By contrast, and even more sheepishly, Ted Montgomery admitted to whipping his winning entry into computer-assisted form in just a few hours in the days immediately preceding the deadline. Somewhere in the middle, presumably, were the other two winning entries: one by Jon Racek and the other a joint effort by Brian Mac and Brian Malley.

It might seem superficial, even insulting, to focus on hours of work rather than how the designers actually proposed to solve the architectural problem they confronted. In reality, the question of time goes right to the heart of things.

This was no mere competition, but a test of a longstanding design principle held by competition organizer, architect and artist John Anderson of Burlington. It is Anderson’s view that great design begins with the exercise of the unencumbered imagination, one not fettered by budget or skeptical evaluation by an architecturally conservative outside world. The way Anderson figures it, one should start with the whole universe of beauty and grandeur and let the irritating constraints impose themselves in due course.

Considered against that hypothesis, ArtGate seems to have proven two related and disheartening things: (1) Natural selection has leached the ability to disregard those constraints out of most Vermont architects, and (2) whatever the rewards of virtue, the prospect of a thousand bucks is inadequate to induce even the most brilliant Vermont architects to soar above practicality, given that such flight itself requires a prodigious output of energy and, most particularly, time. There were, after all, only nine designs competing for the four prizes.

Apart from those dreary realities, the competition must be deemed a success for having generated some ideas that could, if developed, qualify as both art and architecture. The four award-winners are indeed the most promising in that regard.

The two Brians took the counterintuitive path of burying the art spaces below grade, presumably yielding comfortable skylit lairs. They celebrate the lunacy of the automobile era by turning the parking garage into an iconic cantilever bridge-to-nowhere crowned with wind turbines. The turbines’ purpose is to recharge electric cars while their owners are out and about.

Racek wittily morphed ArtGate into AggreGate and literally treated the commission as an opportunity to aggregate cars and artists, the former untethered from the customary Cartesian parking grid and the latter mixed in via round studio towers. The top of the cake is decorated with an iconic winter garden, featuring (presumably only in cold-weather months) a skating pond that also eschews homage to Descartes (or, for that matter, to skaters and their pesky aversion to obstacles). The result is a compellingly stark beauty, somewhat like the roof garden at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno (well worth a look, by the way, since Will Bruder is to Reno what Frank Gehry is to Bilbao – see www.willbruder.com/workcultural_NMA.htm).

Montgomery was the only winner whose design offers a friendly face to the Lakeside Community, whose kids pass by or through the site on their way to school. This proposal beckons with a rolling hillside of structures in a forest of rotating photovoltaic panels designed to resemble trees. Montgomery took the cars and did what anyone who truly cares about the future of the planet would love to do: He buried them.

Which brings is back to Wisniewski’s entry, which he calls “Chora.” Prominent on the architect’s boards – indeed, upstaging the photographs of Wisniewski’s model, the creation of which surely accounts for most of his 75 hours – is this declaration: “I propose a building so industrial, regular, rational and boring, so unremittingly dull, that it can only serve as base matter for artists to weave their tawdry human passions into every element, surface and void. The building becomes the chora , from Plato’s Timaeus : unconscious matter from which arise the forms.”

This attracted the attention of the jury – itself not immune to human passions.

Because jurors were sensitive to the concerns of the adjoining residential neighborhood, Wisniewski’s apparent disregard for those needs loomed large. Chora rests on a two-story plinth comprised of a very conventional parking garage – a kind of acropolis for the automobile age but hardly friendly to kids passing by on their way to school.

In a sense, Chora seeks to reverse the course of history. Where ancient Greece created colorful buildings that have weathered to paleness over the centuries, Wisniewski proposes to start his acropolis out white and watch it gradually gain color year after year. Specifically, his unremitting dullness takes the form of translucent white Kalwall as the ubiquitous cladding, with the artists encouraged to cover or replace this material with colorful art and even design the railings in the garage. The only departure from plainness as the parti is a playful parody of the traditional sawtooth skylight roof, oriented southward to accommodate solar panels.

The Timaeus concerns itself with the formation of the universe, a discourse that begins with this query: What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is?

The insight ArtGate contributed to this quest for wisdom is that Vermont architecture, even as the state’s architects are invited to conjure it, lies mired in “is” and, indeed, has no becoming. The honored projects offer insight to those seeking to implement the program in reality, and a juror whose only qualification is enthusiasm could not fail to be grateful for the opportunity to discuss these designs volubly and evaluate them critically. But caution still binds all four proposals to the earth of Vermont, leaving unexplored the universe of architecture that is always becoming but, sadly, never is.