Since architecture is always required to accommodate a variety of functions and activities, one could describe every building as mixed-use. However, the term is typically used to describe that type of building which hosts a mixture of retail, commercial and residential uses. 360 Newbury Street, located in Boston’s Back Bay area belongs to this typology.
We refurbished the existing building to provide new live/work and retail spaces, adding a penthouse apartment on top for the developer client. With the aim of revitalizing the building’s public identity we created a new silhouette with the insertion of a projecting canopy (image on left). To distinguish the new from the old, the façade facing the Massachusetts Turnpike was clad with lead-coated copper panels (image on right).
The ‘Team Disney’ office building in Anaheim, California is home to Disneyland’s administrative staff. I was ambivalent about working on a project at Disneyland; but was intrigued by the challenge of designing the building’s half-mile long facade next to the Interstate 5 freeway.
We sought to animate the building’s façade by using anodized stainless steel panels, which reacts to fluctuating light conditions in a painterly way. When viewed from a car speeding along the Inter-State 5 freeway, its appearance would shift from green to blue spectrally (image on left). To better protect the offices inside from the constance presence of traffic noise generated by passing vehicles, we incorporated crenulations into the ground floor façade facing the freeway (image on right).
To better relate to a more human scale, the elevation facing Disneyland proper and the main employee entry for the building are articulated in a more playful and curvilinear way - finished with a bright yellow plaster. When we presented the design to Disney, the client fondly told us that our proposal reminded them of ‘Goofy’ - one of Disney’s most popular characters. I guess that meant we had succeeded in giving the project a sense of animation without succumbing to the pastiche of being literal!
For the project at One Times Square in New York City, our collective goal was to re-imagine the existing iconic building at One Times Square (and to maximize its potential for advertising) for its new owner - Time Warner Communications.
We suggested removing the building’s existing masonry façade - exposing its structural skeleton - then redressing this steel frame with a metallic fabric mesh, to create a sense of lightness and transparency. From beneath the new mesh, mechanically animated characters from the Time-Warner’s Looney Tunes universe were to appear on the hour every hour to mark time for visitors and other on-lookers in Times Square. Our proposal wasn’t taken forward after 9/11, but the project remained a unique solution that integrates architecture with branding in a coherent way.
In 1991, for the invited competition to design a new tower for the Rapid Transit District (RTD) in downtown Los Angeles, we aimed to reinterpret the conventional tripartite articulation (through the differentiation of its base, middle and top) that defines many corporate skyscrapers. Our design, clad in stainless steel, proposed a seamless transition between the rectilinear middle (with efficient floor plates) and the tower’s more exuberant base and top. These ideas from the RTD tower would be further developed in the competition for the new headquarters of New York Times a decade later.
The projects in this section were designed and executed during my time at Gehry Partners LLP (the office). I am grateful to Mr. Gehry and the team at the office for their generosity and support over the years. All intellectual property rights of these projects continue to be owned by the office unless otherwise mentioned. The narrative texts on the projects are entirely personal, they do not represent the views or opinions of the office, its clients or any other third party or organization.