We believe in an architecture that springs from the nature of people, places, and the way we make things: the particular individuals involved, the arc of the sun, the warp of the land, the breezes, and the spirit of all materials.
As our practice continues to evolve, the circumstances in which we work become more complex and varied, and this is one of our great fascinations.
Yet we have always recognized the nature of people as a primary influence: how we move, how we touch, how we see, our intellect and our emotions, our dreams, our memories, our aspirations, and how we interact with one another.
This book contains fourteen projects that encourage people to gather—working, learning, living, studying, meeting, or playing— together. Whether in a new civic green for the city of Newport Beach, a modest screened porch and studio for students and teachers at Fallingwater, a cascading and stepped stair in a workplace for Square, or the retail stores for Apple that have become urban centers, we believe it is important for us as humans to come together in exceptional places that foster connection and enhance our sense of shared community. This is Gathering
Each chapter begins with a sequence of photographs and sketches that give insight into our design process, revealing the inspiration and key ideas for the project. Our approach requires interacting, listening, and drawing, not only in the initial concept but throughout the shaping of the building. Our design culture is based in the intuitive and the rigorous, the conceptual and the technical. We do not have a rigid hierarchy, nor do we specialize in one building type. We believe it is far better to work on a diverse range of projects, ever open to new realities and possibilities, honing our senses, intuition, and skills.
We believe this is the way to make a richer, more nuanced, and powerfully human architecture.
One word can never sum up the work of an entire design practice. But if I had to choose one to describe Bohlin Cywinski Jackson it would be grace. The word has so many definitions, but at its essence, grace is the ability to make something extraordinary appear effortless when it is in fact anything but.
I’ve spent more than a year observing Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s process, buildings, and people, and the firm has proven itself to be one of the most thoughtful and tireless in the architecture profession, creating elegant, dexterous, and often breathtaking work. Yet their labor— combining diligent study with artful intuition—is subtly embedded in their projects. It’s not announced with easy gestures or brash gimmicks. This is grace
So how did Bohlin Cywinski Jackson get here? The seeds of this culture were sown more than five decades ago by the firm’s founders Peter Bohlin and Richard Powell, who from the beginning focused on the nature of circumstance—what Bohlin often refers to as “the nature of people, the spirit of places, and the way we make things.”
In other words, they embraced a layered, richly-investigated approach not superficially based on trends or gestures, but deeply rooted in human experience, place, and material. The firm would not become specialists in a particular building type, and they would not become known for a certain look or approach. Theirs would be a responsive, natural, and humane architecture carefully and intentionally growing out of its context and reflecting the humans it serves.
All these years later, this commitment is still the guiding force for a firm that has grown significantly, both in size and in the variety and scale of its work. Bohlin began by designing single-family residences and small civic projects in northeastern Pennsylvania. Bohlin Cywinski Jackson now has thriving offices in Wilkes-Barre, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, and is designing corporate headquarters, retail hubs, and university buildings, as well as housing at all scales, serving large, diverse groups of people, both creating and connecting thriving communities.
The projects in this book represent the evolution of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson into a firm that cherishes its core values, but has carried them into a new, more complex time and a radically new set of circumstances. The firm’s projects and programs have grown larger and more intricate, as our society’s need for collaboration has become more urgent. The practice is now led by a new generation of designers and thinkers who tend to the firm’s roots—maintaining that initial sense of richness, articulation and, yes, grace—while implementing them in new ways, bridging time and scale, and encouraging this carefully assembled group of dreamers to grow, thrive, and change together. And so Bohlin Cywinski Jackson continues to chart new territory, driven by a clear, shared compass, but eagerly exploring new realms and challenges.
For years High Meadow at Fallingwater has served as home base for students of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy Fallingwater Institute’s summer residency program in architecture, art, and design. Participants—ranging from high schoolers to teachers—study Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, and the 1,500 acres around it, at close range, taking part in classes, workshops, and on-site design studios.
Spectacularly sited along a rolling expanse of tall grass and golden wildflowers—about a half mile from Fallingwater—the new building is the perfect spot to inspire further exploration.
Location
A wood screen wall weaves together the existing cabin and the new screened porch and sleeping units. The tapestry is constructed of nonnative spruce trees, harvested and milled on site.
Through a series of selective cuts, the rough-sawn boards were divided into four distinct profiles, which provide a varied texture to the screen and offer composed openings at a variety of viewing heights. The wood is treated with a pine-pitch and organic linseed-oil mixture that acts as a natural wood preservative, a finish that has protected Nordic ships and structures for centuries.
The diagram below was created by the design team to guide the assembly process.
“It’s wonderful for any kind of convening,” adds Waggoner, who admires the structure’s simultaneous assertiveness and soft nuance. “You’re immediately relaxed and ready to work. You get energized by the breeze and the sounds.”
This elusive combination of calm and vigor, as well as the building’s display of organic modernity and compression and release, helps it effectively evoke the spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, which rightfully pervades this place. Yet it very much maintains a fresh, modern feel.
The sleeping units are compact, highly insulated boxes that are naturally ventilated in the summer and tempered with radiant floor heat in the spring and fall. The shrouds to the south of each unit are shaped to control the summer sun and provide privacy. The window wall contains both a low awning and a tall casement window that welcome the summer breezes.
Within the units, Pennsylvania slate, cork flooring, plywood built-ins, and furniture lend a minimalistic, unadorned quality to the space.
Williams College, a private, liberal arts school nestled in the heart of the Berkshires, prides itself on its focus on student interaction and personalized learning. But its 1972 library, located on the northeast edge of Williams’s eclectic, postcard-worthy campus, wasn’t contributing to that mission. The cramped, bunker-like facility impeded access through campus, and did not foster a sense of forward-thinking, communal purpose.
After careful study, and several meetings with students and faculty, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson proposed to demolish the building, clearing the way for what has become a popular new quadrangle. The firm located the new Sawyer Library—filled with advanced, diverse, collaborative spaces—on the sloping site behind Stetson Hall, a red brick, Georgian Revival structure, anchoring the new quadrangle. Stetson was once Williams’s main library and contains a renowned collection of rare books and artifacts.
Location Williamstown, MA
Dates 2005–2009, 2011–2014
Client Williams College Size
45,500 GSF (Existing); 131,700 GSF (Addition)
Campus sector plan “before”: The large rectangular building in the center is the College’s former 1970s library, surrounded on three sides by open lawn. Its east facade is aligned with Stetson Hall.
Designed by the nationallycelebrated architects, Cram and Ferguson, Stetson had been the Williams library since its construction in 1920. However, after 1975, it was downgraded to interim uses, including an awkward array of faculty offices and classrooms. Before
By now we’ve all bought products with Square, a hardware and software suite that helps entrepreneurs easily process credit card payments. Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s design of the company’s new San Francisco offices— necessitated by exponential growth—is as intuitive, clear, and usable as Square’s products.
Located in what was previously a Bank of America data center, the 300,000-square-foot, four-floor office has been transformed into just the opposite: an open, light-filled, and flexible workspace whose massive floorplates are organized by patterns of circulation and connection inspired by some of the world’s great urban spaces.
The firm bisected the structure’s asymmetrical floorplans with central “boulevards,” dotted with varied collaboration zones, like a library, galleries, cabanas, and a café. Edges are lined with diverse working spaces, including bench-style work desks, tables, conference rooms, and private and semiprivate cubbies. New windows were added along the perimeter, drawing muchneeded natural light into the deep floor plates.
The design ambitions were set against the backdrop of the project’s challenging context: the modest budget of a startup company in the business of financial transactions, and a vast building within a converted Bank of America data center riddled with complex building infrastructure that needed to remain in place for the bank’s dwindling, but continued, operations.
Square’s primary office floors were originally windowless spaces designed for data processing supercomputers and check-sorting devices.
The Gazelle Table was custom-designed to support a range of activities while also providing a delicate sculptural counterpoint to the grand gesture of the stair.
Perhaps no series of projects has showcased Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s approach as prominently as the dozens of worldwide stores it designed for Apple. The stores, which became international icons and played a major role in establishing the brand as a financial, technological, and cultural power, fused the firm’s values with Apple’s own to create projects that equally balanced technology and humanity.
Apple Founder, Steve Jobs and Head of Retail, Ron Johnson, invited the firm early on to hone its original store template, embodying the brand by merging sleek, futuristic materials with tactile, timeless ones, and creating bright, inviting community hubs that could provide tech support, educational programs, and personalized service.
Their first major collaboration was Apple’s Soho store, which relied heavily on the firm’s thoughtful approach to people, place, and materials. The design team transformed a neo-classical post office into a luminous, vibrant brand showcase with a local civic focus. They clearly organized the open space, dividing it between product display downstairs and personalized product support (including the game-changing genius bar tech support stations) and groupfocused learning upstairs. Rectangular maple tables and limestone floors dialogue with plate glass and stainless steel to create a feeling that is both “high tech and high touch,” points out Johnson. As its visual centerpiece they installed a dramatic structural, laminated glass stair, above which floats a glowing skylight.
Earliest Apple Store designs were based on axial progression, from entryway to a presentation theater with a product display and service area flanking the central space. In SoHo, the first two-story Apple Store introduced the specialized glass assemblies to the retail program, adding visual and technical energy to the space.
In 2014, the Colorado School of Mines selected Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, working in collaboration with Anderson Mason Dale, to design a new physics facility on the school’s main green, Kafadar Commons, that would become both a welcoming focus for campus life and an instigator of interdisciplinary learning. The firms’ study process included meetings with school administrators, faculty, staff, and students. As they gained familiarity, the team began suggesting inventive solutions that went far beyond the nuts-and-bolts needs of faculty.
“As scientists we were thinking pragmatically,” notes Jeff Squier, professor of Physics at the School of Mines. “We wanted classrooms and labs. They brought in a much more human element: suggesting ways for people to interact and flow.”
Initial sketches established the Center’s priorities as a transformative campus building: engagement with existing pedestrian pathways via multiple entries; a dialogue across 16th Street with Marquez Hall and the southeast campus; acknowledgment of scale and proportion with adjacent historic campus buildings such as Guggenheim and Berthoud Halls; and, most importantly, an uncompromised commitment to the Kafadar Commons as the emotional heart of Mines.
Study models early in the process helped develop the site diagram into three dimensions. The three-story vertical cut capped by a skylight (left, in yellow) connects departments, both figuratively and literally.
Stair cores anchor a sectional relationship—between offices and labs, which float above public spaces, and the Commons (foreground)—diagrammatically enhancing the building’s openness to the green. Models led the design team to prioritize the horizontal lengthening of these upper levels.
