Designer Forum - June 2009

By Bruce Denzer

Imagine a corridor only six feet wide and eight feet high, and then imagine a project with nearly a mile of those corridors ranging from 100 feet to the length of a football field. Collaborating on the interior design of that project was the challenge William Rawn Associates, Architects recently gave LAB [3.2] Architecture.

While LAB [3.2] Architecture has worked with William Rawn Associates on over 20 projects since 2003, the interiors for a new 500-room graduate residence hall was certainly one of the riskiest design challenges. Without a dynamic design concept, the extensive network of very long corridors could result in dull or oppressive residential environment.

Fortunately, the initial design of Rawn’s residence hall also had great potential. The team of client representatives, architects, consultants and student representatives were genuinely committed to a building that fostered a sense of community among students. The project included a varied program of social spaces, fitness rooms, a shared kitchen on each of the five floors, and one faculty residence; and the building massing, expressed as seven connected “houses” arranged around two courtyards, allowed natural light into the corridors at regular intervals.

Process
LAB [3.2] began the design process with a series of diagrams of programmatic zones, circulation, structure, and figure/ground relationships, a process that is taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. This process is one of the methods used to establish a dialogue between the building architecture and the interior experience.

Preliminary diagrams, like the above sketch, quickly led to the initial concepts for floor material and pattern. Corridor ‘intersections’ and the locations of elevators and connecting stairs (all egress stairs were designed to make vertical connectivity as easy as possible) were identified with a dark grey neutral carpet. The ‘fields’ of corridors connecting each zone of residential units (single rooms as well as multi-bedroom suites with kitchens) were specified with an irregular linear/gridded pattern. Concurrently with the development of the carpet design concept, the wall colors and lighting concepts were being developed.

The architects built a series of large scale models of a typical floor and studied the interaction amongst the carpet design, wall colors and lighting concept, and the impact of alternative color schemes and color locations.

Against the neutral grey carpet pattern, a palette of off-white and five bold accent colors was developed. A pair of colors identifies each house; in each house off-white and two accent colors were arranged in a rhythmic way to create shifting planes of color, which somehow created the effect of a shorter, more dynamic corridor. Whiteboard and tackboards were integrated into the corridor design to announce local events and to create another venue for social and academic interaction.

Research and Design
In addition to an effective design relationship, William Rawn Associates and LAB [3.2] have, perhaps inevitably, collaborated on several product research efforts. During a series of university residence hall projects the two firms analyzed a variety of floor materials, including stone, slate, wood, porcelain tile, carpet (tile and broadloom), linoleum, and vinyl floors (tile, sheet goods and planks). Our research produced a matrix of comparative information pertaining to budget, sustainability, installation, maintenance, durability and aesthetics. This research has proven immensely valuable in our decision-making and in meeting end-users’ objectives.

In the graduate residence hall we proposed carpet tile throughout the corridors and residential suites. Based on our studies, carpet tile (from InterfaceFlor) was selected for reasons of sustainability, cost (lower labor cost and reduced waste during installation), durability, maintenance, appearance retention, and flexible installation scheduling. Carpet tile provided the patterns and textures that were appropriate to the building design.

Variety of Floor Materials
As the design teams developed the public areas of the building, an unusual variety of other floor materials was included, a reflection of the complexity of the building program.

Walk-off mats, which nearly matched the charcoal carpet tile, were integrated into all building entry vestibules and building lobbies. Terracotta slate (from Shep Brown) was used in the main entry corridor, which doubles as a café. The slate created a strong relationship to the adjacent landscaped courtyard and a rich counterpoint to the building’s facades of brick and aluminum panels. Sprung floors in maple were specified in the fitness rooms, while laminate floors were used in the main lounge and multi-purpose room.

The project also included a student pub, a site for regular trivia quiz nights and music performances. Vinyl plank floors became the basis of the pub design. The visual and textural qualities of the product (three shades of grey plus redwood), the scale of the planks—7” x 35” rather than the typical 12” square of most tile products—and the practicality of the product conveyed the relaxed and “gritty” quality the design team and the students were looking for.

A Place to Call Home
It is certainly emblematic of the project’s complexity that the design included one residence for a faculty member and family. A considerable effort was devoted to this two-bedroom apartment with two studies.

Of course, every effort was made to design and furnish a comfortable home. But the major focus of the design was the proposed pattern of use and how that could contribute to the welfare of students. The faculty residence is the site of weekly dinners for as many as 50 students, and for smaller groups of faculty and friends.

Given the high volume of use and the desire to create a comfortable social atmosphere for young students, engineered wood floors were used throughout the living/dining spaces with rugs used to identify seating groups and to soften the acoustics. Because the kitchen doubles as a food service buffet, the wood flooring was extended into that space as well.

The laminate floors unify the more public areas of the apartment where students gather. In the private areas of the building—the studies, bedrooms and connecting hallways—broadloom carpet was used for reasons of comfort and acoustics. In the bathrooms, porcelain tile in 14” squares were used on floors and some walls in order to keep the material palette as simple as possible.

Again, the success of this project was due to the commitment of the project team to create a great place for students to live. Part of the design process required methods to make a challenging building footprint and corridor network a pleasant and dynamic environment. Design decisions for every aspect of the project, and this certainly included floor materials, were made by carefully taking into account the technical and aesthetic properties of each building, studying a wide range of options, and gradually developing the most effective integrated design concept.