Word: shopped
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Most of the SHoP team, the class of '94 part, started architecture school at a time when the profession was operating in the residue of the recession of the early '90s. With construction in a slump, not many architects were building much in the real world. But even when you can't construct, you can still deconstruct. So some, especially those in school, responded by burrowing deeper into architectural theory?sketching, thinking, devoting themselves to ever more radical, if not plainly buildable, design. It was one of those occasional eras of "paper architecture...
...thinking that, as it turns out, has transformed the built world over the past decade or so. Daniel Libeskind was once mostly a paper architect. So was Zaha Hadid. But it was a moment that didn't sit well with the partners who would come together as SHoP in 1996. "Theorizing about buildings had become more important than building them," says Coren Sharples. "If you actually built, you were selling out. It was very disheartening." Adds Pasquarelli: "There were the guardians of culture, and there were the architects who just served clients. There was nothing in between...
...people who follow architecture, SHoP first came seriously into view in 2000, when the firm won a competition to build an outdoor summer hangout in the courtyard of P.S. 1, in Queens, N.Y., an arts-space affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. It was at a moment when free-form, computer-assisted "blob" architecture was just breaking out of classrooms and professional journals. With a scheme called Dunescape, SHoP proved that blobs could be the basis for a structure both delightful and usable, stable but almost erotic in its waving surfaces. An undulating fabric of wood slats, it formed...
Dunescape became a sizable hit, drawing thousands of visitors over the summer to eat, drink, lounge and just caper around the thing. And that taught the SHoP team an interesting lesson in finances. "One day we did a quick calculation," says Pasquarelli. "Five dollars admission per museumgoer plus an average of two beers plus maybe a hot dog or a hamburger times 10 weekends. We had generated somewhere between half a million and a million dollars in revenue for the museum." Meanwhile, the firm's design fee had been only $10,000, with a $50,000 construction budget. "That really...
They found a way to do that with the Porter House. A SHoP-designed condo in Manhattan's ever more lustrous Meatpacking District, it consists of a 10-story zinc-clad upper portion with an irregular and eye-catching window pattern, which is built on top of and within an existing six-story masonry warehouse. It was the SHoP architects who discovered the old warehouse. Then they went to Jeffrey M. Brown Associates, a Philadelphia-based developer and former client, to broach the idea of partnering with him to purchase and transform the property. That architects-as-developers business model...