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Balancing
Style and Function
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Architects
put clients’ needs before style.
By Peter Downs
Suttle Mindlin has a reputation for stylish architecture and
interior design. The firm won a design award for the avant garde
D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles headquarters, and also designed renovations
for Plaza Frontenac and Westwood Country Club. Yet, far from embracing
style, principal Michael Mindlin says he rejects it. Style plays
far too great a role in architecture today, he says. “We have to
fight against it at every level.”
The problem is that too much attention to style can get in the way
of solving the real needs of the client, and of the people who will
use the building. “In our studio, we won’t allow anyone to draw
an elevation until they’ve determined the strategic needs of the
clients and how to solve them,” he says. “The look has to come out
of service to clients’ needs, not the other way around.”
Other prominent St. Louis architects voice a similar perspective.
Reflecting time-honored Midwestern values, they insist that good
architecture is architecture that best serves the needs of client,
not architecture that makes a statement for the architect.
According to Raymond Maritz, style isn’t something he even thinks
about—it just emerges from the best building solutions for a client’s
needs. Maritz, who designed Maritz’ campus and A.G. Edward’s campus,
says: “The style is whatever it is after you’ve done your best to
solve a building problem in the best way and in meeting the preferences
of the owner.” Buildings on the Maritz campus are clad mainly in
brick, while on the Edwards campus exteriors mainly are tinted glass.
The focus on a client’s needs are the key, agrees Thomas Roof, president
and sole owner of TRi Architekts. “We provide a service, which happens
to be the implementation of architecture,” Roof says. “A good design
for us is one that responds to all of a client’s goals, as determined
by the client, and that includes esthetics.”
Architects who put clients’ needs ahead of style will create diverse
buildings to meet diverse needs. Their work won’t all look the same,
Mindlin says. TRi’s projects certainly pass that test.
For the Plaza in Clayton, TRi provided a neoclassical design with
a traditional red brick and stone accent exterior. The Plaza is
a high-rise development that includes a luxury condominium tower
and an office tower. But the functions of home and office didn’t
determine the traditional exterior, rather, it was marketing that
determined the exterior, Roof says. It was the need for the building
to sell itself to potential buyers. “St. Louis is a traditional
brick town,” Roof says. “We had to respond with a style that we
felt was more marketable to the client base.”
A different looking TRi project was at 8251 Maryland, where TRi
put a very modern curvilinear stainless steel facade on a regularly
shaped building constructed in the 1960s. The existing building
was “for the most part uninteresting,” Roof says. With a renovation
that involved expansion of the lower levels, “we wanted to create
a more interesting form. We chose a loose form to surround a rigid
box.” Again, the intended use as an office building didn’t dictate
that form. Instead,” it had to do more with individual taste of
the particular developer, who was more creatively inclined and not
a traditionalist,” he says.
“There is more than one good answer to a functional requirement,”
agrees Mark Duitsman, design partner at Holleran Duitsman Architects.
That means a good architect is more than an Auto Cad jockey. He
or she has to impart the right style to a building to project what
the client wants to say. “Most good architects can give three good
alternatives to a client that give him choices,” Duitsman says.
Holleran Duitsman designed the Magna Bank in Brentwood, the Timberlake
Corporate Center on Highway 40, and is designing the new office
building on Highway 40 in Chesterfield that Opus Development teamed
up with Alvin D. Vitt to develop.
Just as consumer tastes in clothes and cars evolve, so too do client
tastes in architecture, Duitsman says. The hallmark of today is
that a diversity of styles are acceptable.
“We’re seeing a mix of desires from clients now,”
he says. Some want a smooth-finished “high-tech” look
with shiny metallic panels and glass. Others want an “organic”
look with stone and wood. And some clients want a mix of the two.
Increasingly, he says, clients want architects to resurrect a style
of the past and reapply it with modern technology and materials.
Most
of the buildings on the A.G. Edwards campus sport
tinted glass (above left) while those at the Central
Institute for the Deaf (above right)
are brick. The latter
example was designed to tie together the new and
old sturctures. |
Mackey Mitchell Associates has two projects within a mile of each
other on Highway 40 that illustrate those contrasting themes: the
Central Institute for the Deaf and The Highlands@Forest Park. The
two very different styles of building “both came from our office,
but they address the goals and aspirations of each client and how
they relate to their sites,” says John Guenther, a principal
at Mackey Mitchell. “We try not to enter into any project with
a preconceived notion of fashion, because we don’t want to
short cut the process of discovery.”
At the Central Institute for the Deaf, Mackey Mitchell’s task was
to design a new school building and new research building and tie
them into a prominent historic building from 1929, designed by Wm.
B. Ittner. The historic building has a general Mediterranean style
with a red tile roof, well-proportioned windows, and a distinctive
loggia on top. Nearby buildings, the old Shriners Hospital across
Clayton Avenue and the old McMillan Maternity Hospital down the
street, also have a vaguely Mediterranean esthetic. On the other
end of the site is Barnes Lodge, which Mackey Mitchell designed
in 1989. “We picked up on the distinctive roof style, materials
and pitch [of the Ittner building],” Guenther says, and bay windows
like those on the neighboring Barnes Lodge. “It’s more pedestrian
friendly and deinstitutionalized. It’s all in the context of that
street. It is what makes sense.”
At the Highlands, the architects’ task was to create something new
and different, rather than fitting into a tradition. The developer
wanted a building “that speaks to the future, not to 1904, but to
2004 and beyond,” Guenther says. At the same time, the architects
wanted to pay homage to the site’s history as the site of the Arena
and part of the old Highlands Amusement Park. The result is a concrete
building with lots of glass, and a curved roof line. The eastern
wall inclines toward the east, and the bay windows angle out of
the building, more like prisms than traditional bays. All of it
is intended to send the message that the building and its occupants
are dynamic and forward-looking.
Whatever a building’s functions, which can include marketing itself
to customers and potential employees, “The important thing is to
understand that whatever strategy is undertaken is based on the
uniqueness of the project, fulfilling the client’s program, the
context, and what is a proper or comfortable fit,” Guenther says.
A look “is not good enough,” Mindlin says. “What is needed is something
more profound and transcendental. We need less emphasis on style,
and more on functionality, spirituality, and the needs of neighborhoods
and the culture.”
Other leading St. Louis architects agree, and the result, they say,
is good architecture that never goes out of style.
Peter Downs is a free-lance writer and editor of Construction
News & Review. |
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