Fusion: The Performance of Architecture - Hardcover

Payette; Sullivan, Kevin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1580935346 ISBN 13: 9781580935340

Publisher: The Monacelli Press, 2020

Synopsis

In this first monograph, award-winning firm Payette demonstrates its engagement with architecture that balances cutting-edge design, extraordinary efficiency, and humane values

Payette’s work embodies the integration of design and performance that is essential to the creation of humane and sustainable buildings of any type. To achieve this integration amidst the programmatic intricacy, technological complexity, and intense energy use of hospitals and laboratories, the firm draws on its almost ninety-year history of progressive innovation. It draws, as well, on an inclusive, collaborative, research-oriented culture that is a model for the profession.

Fusion presents Payette’s philosophy and traces the firm’s contributions through concise histories of laboratory and hospital design. It explores the core principles that underlie its work - Identity and Transformation, Materiality and Craft, Taming Complexity and Measuring Performance - and digs deeply into seven of the firm’s most recent projects. Other chapters describe the process of nurturing the design excellence and practice culture that earned Payette the 2019 AIA Architecture Firm Award.

The monograph’s 400 diagrams, drawings, and photographs reveal the firm’s principles and methods, along with the open-source tools it has developed to enable it to design, not “by the numbers,” but with the numbers. A gallery of architectural “fingerprints” presents plan views of more than 100 of Payette’s projects, drawn to a common scale.

With a preface by Z Smith, Director of Sustainability and Building Performance at EskewDumezRipple, and an introduction from Kevin Sullivan, President of Payette, Fusion includes essays by Sullivan and partners James Collins, George Marsh, Leon Drachman, Andrea Love and Peter Vieira, as well as a critical reflection by Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

About this title

About the Author

Kevin B. Sullivan, FAIA is the President of Payette. His work includes seminal healthcare, science and campus planning projects, recognized for their attention to detail, social geometry and integration of the landscape.

Z Smith, PhD, FAIA is a Principal and Director of Sustainability and Building Performance at EskewDumezRipple.

Mark Lee is the Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Principal and Founding Partner of the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

We are a collective of designers driven to create boldly original buildings for science and healthcare that are as profoundly humane in their accommodation of needs as they are pioneering in their pursuit of environmental performance.
These building types have a lot in common. They’re complex, loaded with constraints. In them, people do the same, precise things over and over—a scientist titrates a solution, a nurse adjusts an IV drip. It’s a challenge to make them places that enliven human experience. That challenge drives us. Individually, we’re drawn to designing hospitals, laboratories, and research centers for many reasons: some of us are gearheads at heart, driven to understand the inner workings of complex organisms; others have found ourselves in a hospital at a life-changing moment. Together, we cherish the close relationships we build with clients and collaborators—who include eight Nobel Prize–winning scientists—on the journey from design to reality. Perhaps our passion stems from the quiet awareness that many of these buildings are typically destined to become unassuming settings for some of life’s most momentous events: scientific discovery, illness and recovery, birth and death. We aim to elevate these spaces.
—Kevin Sullivan, from the Introduction

Edition details

• Publisher: The Monacelli Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1580935346
• ISBN 13: 9781580935340
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224