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Centerbrook Success at Philips Exeter
Donald Maurice Kreis
An enduring question in the world of public architecture
is: Why do some institutions build so well, where others seem to
fare so poorly?
Financial resources are obviously necessary, but clearly
not sufficient. For every well-endowed institution like Wellesley
College - whose commissioning of Jose Rafael Moneo to design the
school's gorgeous Davis Museum - or the Portland Museum of Art,
whose Henry Cobb-designed building is the best 20th Century architecture
in the city - there are plenty of very wealthy citadels of enlightenment
that consistently commission architecture that is profoundly mediocre,
or worse.
Squarely within the Wellesley camp is New Hampshire's
renowned Philips Exeter Academy. This is not simply a prep school
with an endowment rivaling that of many an undergraduate college
or university. Philips Exeter is the school that had the audacity
and vision to bring Louis Kahn to New England in the 1960s, and
the self-confidence to trust Kahn when he insisted that the radically
modern library he was creating would resonate with all that was
right and true about the historic New Hampshire village surrounding
it.
The latest addition to the Philips Exeter campus -
Phelps Hall, the school's new science building, designed by Centerbrook
Architects - is a more modest achievement, in the sense that it
does not aspire to the status of signature building, conceding that
role to Kahn's masterpiece. Indeed, the exterior of Phelps Hall
is highly historicist, forming a background building in the positive
sense of the word and very much in the tradition of rich visual
pleasure established by Centerbrook.
Inside, Phelps Hall is like a perfectly returned tennis
serve.
Philips Exeter is renowned for employing what it calls
the Harkness Table in the classroom. This involves small classes
seated around an oval conference table with the teacher, an arrangement
that naturally compels students to participate actively. Prior to
Phelps Hall, the Harkness Table method had not been employed in
the sciences; making this possible was the key programmatic requirement
for the building.
Organizing the building's 20 classrooms around this
objective yielded results that are unique, functional, versatile
and architecturally interesting without seeming frivolous. There
are also elements designed simply to inspire and amuse, from bathroom
tiles executed in the form of the periodic table of the elements
and the double-helix DNA molecule, to the atrium space in which
a whale skeleton is hung. But nothing is wasted, and everything
about Phelps Hall exudes a sense of resources well spent.
How did they do this? How did Philips Exeter achieve
so much programmatic bang for its architectural buck?
According to Scott Saltman, the physics teacher who
served as the self-described "shepherd" of the project,
the school's trustees insisted that Exeter's science department
start by crafting mission statements, to describe "how we thought
we'd be teaching over the next 50 to 70 years." From that,
according to Saltman, the discussion turned to "what spaces
would enable us to teach that way." The key was conducting
a full and thoughtful exploration of curriculum first, before anyone
started thinking about what facilities to build, Saltman reports.
This hardly seems radical to anyone familiar with
rational project planning. But at other, similar, institutions,
project planning is too easily a top-down process, in which the
architects communicate primarily with trustees and other folks whose
contributions make the project possible but who are not immersed
in the curriculum. This could easily have been the case at Exeter.
The school's trustees personally contributed $11.2 million of the
undisclosed project budget and a $15 million lead gift from alumnus
Stanford Phelps, chairman of Commonwealth Oil Refining, accounts
for the building's name. At a less architecturally enlightened institution,
Phelps would have played the role that Saltman did.
When the New England regional conference of the AIA
gathered at Exeter and toured Phelps just after its opening in September,
Centerbrook principal William Grover FAIA joked that his firm designed
the building by convening a series of four intensive workshops,
inviting everyone from the school to take part, jotting down the
participants' ideas and then taking credit for them as Centerbrook
design proposals. In reality, of course, such workshops are only
effective if, as here, the participants are actually heard by the
designers.
Nor were these successful workshops the end of thoughtful
planning. Even more significant was the decision to have the school's
facilities department build a mock-up Phelps classroom, which Saltman
and other teachers tested with their students prior to design finalization.
According to Grover, the quest for the perfectly proportioned science
classroom employing the Harkness Table method would otherwise have
been much more costly because, without the experimental mock-up,
his firm would have designed much bigger learning spaces given the
program.
Saltman has some advice for architects who aspire
to the kind of success Centerbrook achieved at Phelps. "I think
the best word is 'interact,'" he reports. "This can be
taken in several ways. First of all, interact with educators to
find out what we really do on a daily basis, what we really want
to do, and how we want to do it. Second, it means that the design
process should be interactive. We don't want a design dropped in
front of us for one-time feedback. We also don't want to do the
design. Centerbrook worked best when they listened to us and questioned
us. It was a process of translating what we wanted to teach and
how we wanted to teach it into physical spaces."
There's also insight to be gleaned here about how
an architect can win jobs from terrific clients like Exeter. Four
firms were selected for interviews before a panel consisting of
Saltman, two teaching colleagues, the dean of faculty, the facilities
director, a development officer and a trustee. According to Saltman,
the three firms not chosen all arrived with sketches and proposals,
whereas Centerbrook "described their process, including the
workshop process."
"We thought that this was perfect for our school
and our faculty," he adds.
When Saltman and his colleagues chose Centerbrook
and began explaining what they wanted Phelps Hall to be, they spoke
of wanting students to be "surrounded by science." They
were clearly heard by those who built Phelps Hall. Maybe the difference
between institutions that build well and those that don't isn't
such a mystery after all.
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