The Miller | Hull Partnership

Public Works

Princeton Architectural Press

Foreword

 Architects endure all the difficulties involved in raising buildings—artifacts that perhaps at first can be said to reflect our intentions, express our desires and represent the problems we discuss in schools. For a time, we regard our buildings as mirrors; in their reflection we recognize who we are, and eventually who we were. We are tempted to think that a building is a personal statement within the ongoing process of history; but today I am certain that once the construction is finished, once the building assumes its own reality and its own role, all those concerns that occupied the architects and their efforts dissolve. . . . The building itself stands alone, in complete solitude—no more polemical statements, no more troubles. It has acquired its definitive condition and will remain alone forever, master of itself . . . . When architects realize that a building masters its own life, their approach to design is different. . . . Our personal concerns become secondary and the final reality of the building becomes the authentic aim of our work. It is the building’s materiality, its own being, that becomes the unique and exclusive concern. 

—Rafael Moneo, The Solitude of Buildings, 1986 

In the 1980s the influential thinker and educator Donald Schön used the environment of an architectural design studio to study educational methodology. He coined the term “reflective practice” to describe a practitioner (or group) who understands that his or her “expert” knowledge base is continuously changing from one circumstance to the next. The reflective practitioner therefore constantly reevaluates the process with the undertaking of each new enterprise. It must be understood that this is far removed from the ubiquitous corporate “mission statement,” which reconciles profits with customer satisfaction. Though much debated over the years, the essence of Schön’s idea is clear: in a society where a 

profession that serves the public (such as architecture) is subject to intense and sudden shifts in cultural ground, one must perpetually “reflect” on the status of the work and the means of its production. Thus the practitioner retains an awareness of such cultural shifts without being drawn into them. Schön referred to this as “reframing” a problem, suggesting it as the most successful means toward the realization of innovative attitudes and approaches. 

Kenneth Frampton first applied this notion to architects, when he suggested that such an architectural practice might successfully resist the pull of two antithetical poles currently dominating the profession: “celebrity” firms that consider architecture a means of personal expression akin to the fine arts and “service” firms that accommodate basic building needs for profit. The Pacific Northwest firm of Miller Hull is an archetypal example of a reflective practice, as evidenced not only by the body of work presented in this book—and the critical manner in which they chose to assemble it—but by the nature and structure of their office. Remarkably, in this age when narcissistic “starchitects” dominate the press, they achieve a poetic architecture that is both profound and comprehensible. By employing a vocabulary inclusive in character, they seamlessly close a gap frequently encountered in American public architecture, that between an inscrutable architectural syntax and the people it was created to serve. Thus a MillerHull building is comprehensible to its users yet uncompromisingly innovative in spirit and form. Because their values derive from fundamental design principles, advanced technologies in their work never dominate as stylistic 

effects. Instead, they are employed as part of a larger strategy to more deeply connect people to their place of work or home and—more importantly—to one another and the landscape/cityscape they inhabit. 

As MillerHull shifts its attention to the design of larger public buildings, the firm’s long-established skills at creating powerful and distinctive private spaces gives their public work qualities of scale and comfort so often lacking in projects of this size. For in some way, every successful building that accommodates humans contains attributes of the concept of “house.” Firms that produce public work without ever having mastered the making of houses all too often end up designing buildings that—though well-constructed and aesthetically orderly—lack scale, character, and a sense of well-being. MillerHull’s private residences of the past twenty-five years are recognized worldwide as masterpieces of regional modernism infusing tradition with contemporary design and technology. This prelude to the firm’s current focus on public buildings has clearly served them well. 

The buildings and projects included in this book reveal MillerHull’s skill and enthusiasm for making architecture in the public realm. Looking at them, one sees not only their strength of character and sense of belonging to the occupants, but also the excitement and promise of future public buildings and landscapes that will use them as lessons for reevaluation, enrichment, and growth. One is reminded of Picasso’s famous response when asked which of his paintings was his favorite (“the next one”), for in the tactile materiality of these buildings can be 

found the outlines of spaces yet to be made. Though grounded in certain idealistic principles, the promise of these forthcoming spaces is boundless, for this is a firm whose very essence is to continuously evolve with the opportunities each new project presents.

Thomas Hacker and Associates

Architecture as Art

l'Arca Edizioni

Woodstock Library

The design of this small corner public library is conceived as a neighborhood living room. Under the shelter of an enveloping roof , a single large room - almost an extension of the street - provides a place for reading, working, and meeting. At the intersection of two streets, one commercial and one residential, the room’s floor is level with the sidewalk, without the formal base or plinth that often lifts a public edifice, symbolically and literally, above the life of the city. This reinforces the library’s role as a constituent of the community’s daily life, rather than as a removed temple of knowledge. This is in contrast to the attitude of the many small Carnegie libraries, which remained so aloof from the streets of their neighborhoods. 

This building, like other public work of the office, is designed to be “both/and”; a place of the everyday and a place of the remarkable, for once inside, the main room skillfully blends the dignity of a temple with the scale and comfort of a pavilion. Six pair of graceful steel cruciform columns support a single flat roof plane, defining the main space of the room. The bundled columns gently slope upwards in a subtle modern reinterpretation of entasis, the precise curvature that appears in the classical orders. They in turn support a single large canopy of gridded steel beams and decking, that extends out past the columns cantilevering over clerestory windows below, for shade and protection, as natural light filters into the room from all four sides. The structure is painted white throughout, increasing the room’s lightweight feel and level of ambient natural light. 

At the street edge the building skin, a curtain wall with alternating stainless steel and aluminum panels, is outside the column line in its lower portion and inside the columns at the corner entry revealing at this place, the structure of the room to the street. The grid of steel beams extends beyond the glazing and forms, together with the vertical bracing within the continuous fascia beam, a reinterpretation of the triglyphs and metopes of a classical frieze, giving presence and scale to the line of the roof. The artwork and literature etched into the metal panels at the street are themselves in the grand tradition of urban public libraries and add to the civic quality of the building. 

Every piece of this building is meticulously detailed and sized to create a sense of loft inside the room and not overpower the residential scale of the surrounding neighborhood. The elements of construction - steel columns, intermediate beams above, “transfer” capitals above the columns, and the frame of the window wall with its infill panels of etched writing and artwork - recreate the scale of a classical building without use of historicist references. Such attention to detail, scale and proportion allows this building, constructed almost entirely of steel, to have a sense of comfort and ease normally achieved only with more traditional materials. 

The clustered cruciform steel columns continue a tradition of experimentation with structural steel expression that the office has evolved over the past decade. Recognizing that the column as a structural member carries loads only in its perimeter area, an outer ring is constructed of smaller elements welded together with the middle left hollow. This tradition, along with the slight upward taper is reminiscent of certain projects of Mies, particularly the Bacardi Building, where solid cruciform columns are so tapered, restating classical elements in modern rational terms. 

On the interior, nearest the busier commercial street, there is a lower band of space with its own small roof, a kind of extended bay window, fitted with cabinets of maple. These low wooden cabinets with their display of upright books are a contrapuntal ornament to the pattern behind them of frame, wall and the every-changing qualities of light. Within the cabinets are bookshelves and integrated ducts that supply air to the room through unobtrusive grilles. Apertures for supply and return air, detailed into the articulation of the opposite wall, allow the room’s steel roof structure to be free of all ductwork, thus maintaining the clarity and strength of its spatial and structural expression. 

At the rear of the library this neighborhood room is served by a modest masonry block of space containing support functions of the building in a flexible and inexpensive architectural vocabulary. In plan, this masonry element of walls holds in place as it were, the steel framed open room on its two closed or private sides. Facing the parking and loading area, it contains work rooms, bathrooms, and a small meeting room for the community. A smaller version of this element is on the boundary of the adjoining property and holds building service elements, except the very center where a kind of apse or niche opens to and extends the axial dimension of the main room. 

This library is able to combine the characteristics of exquisitely detailed public architecture with those of an unobtrusive intervention in a residential neighborhood. Such blending of seemingly opposite qualities is indicative of the office’s approach to providing public institutions with appropriate dignity and grandeur, while at the same time investing them with the warmth and scale needed to be comfortable and accessible to everyone.