Airing Renovations: The Atmosphere of Paul Rudolph

Increasingly, adaptive reuse has become an innovative practice, meeting newchallenges with economically feasible and inherently sustainable solutions.Now, schools of design need to become leaders in this shift of attention, finallyembracing our existing building stock as a valuable and renewable resource.Traditionally, renovations update and renew, adding amenities while uncoveringa past. Renovations ground us in a tumultuous world of change. Lookingto the future or anticipating change—proliferating new potentials—is stillthe privilege of new construction. New ideas need new structures. In fact,methods and motivations for adaptive reuse are largely absent from discussionsof design innovation, especially in schools of architecture. For over thirtyyears, however, design in urban centers has privileged context through increasinglysophisticated techniques of analysis, assessment and intervention. Thecomplexity of cities demands such a bold and prudent investment. Couldrenovations, likewise, be seen as interventions in a complex field of relations?Entirely new experiential potentials lie in maximizing effects with a minimumof resources: more chΔnge for less ¢hange. This new sensibility may assumeless formal invention and more careful consideration of small but profoundenvironmental effects.This paper will present a 10-week undergraduate studio that repositions therenovation of a little known building by Paul Rudolph as an innovative solutionto a new fraternity house. Rudolph completed the building precisely ashe shifted attention from a climatically responsive ephemerality to an increasinglymonumental spatial complexity. Air conditioning powers this change. Asthis generation of buildings, the first to abandon passive heating and cooling,requires renovation, new strategies are needed to reimagine their possibilities.Here, air is proposed as an aesthetic and performative medium. It is alsointroduced as a pedagogical tool to structure research, analysis, programmaticdistribution, formal invention, material choice and visualization. Initial studiesfocused attention on the mutable pleasures of air as an inherently reactivebut precise set of synesthetic phenomena. In addition to field surveys of otherRudolph buildings, the studio installed full-scale interventions in the existingbuilding to test information in the air including internal pressure, velocity atopenings, acoustic transmission and ambient light. The interventions alsoproved drastic changes in effect can result from decisions that show few tracesin typical architectural drawings. Visualization tools including computationalfluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were introduced during the design processto help visualize the possible atmospheric effects of each proposal. As a result,architectural solutions include carefully considered openings, curtains andventilation to create meaningful thermal variety. In some cases, activities areproposed to occur in thermal zones rather than rooms. In many cases, materialsincluding lighting are proposed to engage additional sensory potentials ofair. The attempt to understand a building as a complex immersive vessel defiesclear distinctions between visible and invisible realms and complicates whatcan be drawn with confidence. But this challenge may restore renovation as aninnovative design practice in schools, one that promises to transform existingstructures into sensitive containers—buildings to look with rather than look at.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1