Adrian Luchini,
is one of St. Louis' most distinguished architects
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Adrian Luchini, is one of St. Louis' most distinguished architects |
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Unexpected geometries,
bold angles But the architectural designs of Adrian Luchini are also committed to the functional needs of each project By Liam Otten Adrian Luchini designs buildings the way artists sketch or scientists run experiments: carefully observing, responding to conditions, and allowing explanations to fit results -- rather than the other way around.
Gesture and movement are communicated with draftsman-like clarity, yet Luchini remains committed to fundamental questions of site and program: Where is the building located? Who is it for? What activity does it house? Talk of personal "style" is dismissed as "missing the point altogether." "The phenomenology of a place, the experience of it É these principles inform what I do as an architect," Luchini observed. "The work, if it is genuinely universal and of its own time, will be autobiographical as well, so you don't need to worry about that -- you need to worry about everything else." Still, close observers have spotted certain underlying connective tissue. "Again and again in his drawings and built work, a nervous or taut bundle of individual lines coalesces into spatial figures and conjures spaces with ephemeral boundaries," wrote architect Lauren Kogod, introducing a 1999 monograph of Luchini's work for the Contemporary World Architects series. "One has the sense that Luchini attempts to draw in space and to create space by the physical act of drawing." Early years, education Luchini was born and raised in the Pampas region of Argentina, famous for its sweeping plains and home to some of the world's finest ranches. As a child, surrounded by horses and cattle, Adrian toyed with thoughts of becoming a veterinarian but also gained early acquaintance with architecture through a civil-engineer grandfather. "I remember when I was very little, going to his office -- I wasn't even as tall as the drafting board -- and playing with all the different pens and compasses," Luchini recalled. "To me, they were like toys." Luchini attended high school in Cordoba, the country's second-largest city, performing well but never committing to one particular subject. That all changed when he entered the School of Architecture at the Universidad Catolica de Cordoba. "All of a sudden the whole curriculum became really, really interesting, and that was very reassuring," he said. "I never doubted that I had landed in the right place. "Besides," he added dryly, "all-boys Catholic boarding school had not really been my idea of fun." Luchini's closest mentor at Universidad Catolica was the Rev. Osvaldo Pol, a renowned Argentine poet and still a close friend. "Father Pol was very inspiring -- not so much for architecture specifically, but for his own theology and philosophy in general. He helped me realize that as an architect, I could draw inspiration from other fields." After graduation, Luchini practiced for a year in Argentina but came to the United States in 1982, earning a master of science degree in architecture from the University of Cincinnati before enrolling in Harvard University's Graduate School of Design (GSD), where his professors included such "marquee" names as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman and Rafael Moneo. Luchini recalled the GSD of the mid-1980s as a place of great theoretical ferment "mainly because there wasn't a lot of work. I remember very well Frank (Gehry) saying that he was thinking about going to Europe." Still, "there was a very useful interest in the relationship between philosophy, linguistics, phenomenology and architecture" -- an inquiry that continues to shape Luchini's practice today. Early career Luchini came to Washington University in 1985, though he admits to being initially unsure about where exactly St. Louis was. "I knew that I wanted to teach," he recounted, adding with a smile that, "I was very excited and had a lot of radical, revolutionary ideas. I think it's fair to say my first semester was a disaster, in a way É "
International Competition and received, with Harvard classmate Dirk Denison, his first significant commission: the redesign of a large, three-story Boston apartment. The finished project -- mo bile and quick-witted, predicated on reverberating, curvilinear lines -- was a terrific success and published in several architectural journals. "That put me back into the world of practice, although my fundamental occupation was still teaching," Luchini remembered. "Practice was this sort of marginal thing on the side." Nevertheless, Luchini and Denison teamed again for the lakefront Piku Residence in Detroit -- which later won a Design Excellence Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) -- and in 1990, Luchini was named to Progressive Architecture's prestigious "Young Architects" list. In 1991, Luchini and St. Louis architect Tom Schwetye launched a string of notable projects -- the Maritz-Starek Residence in the Central West End; offices and production studios for KDNL-TV (Channel 30) downtown; renovations and a new exterior for the Sixth Church of Christ Scientist in north St. Louis (the latter winning AIA Design Excellence honors). In 1992, Luchini received an "Emerging Voices" citation from the Architectural League of New York. Still, he recalls that "it was very hard, being a small office -- a boutique-type practice, really -- to get bigger commissions," and in 1994 he accepted a position as senior designer with St. Louis-based giant Hellmuth Obata and Kassabuam. The result? "Urban design jobs, large planning commissions, international work É It was fantastic from that point of view." The only downside? "I don't think I did anything in the United States; all the work was in Southeast Asia or South America." Recent, current projects Today, Luchini serves as Principal of Design for Jacob's Facilities in St. Louis, the architectural wing of global engineering firm Sverdrup Inc. Major projects include the Constantini Museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the World Omni Building corporate facility in Earth City, Mo.; the new Jefferson City Water Treatment Plant; and the $28 million Southeast Missouri State University Performing Arts Center in Cape Girardeau. In addition to teaching duties, he also serves as the School of Architecture's director of global studies, recently overseeing the launch of semester-long studios in Buenos Aires and Helsinki, Finland. And he still accepts the occasional private commission, such as the addition and remodeling of the Montessori Children's House in Chesterfield, Mo. -- smaller-scaled sketches as opposed to full-sized paintings, you might say. Two recent projects, both in St. Louis, illustrate the breadth of Luchini's practice. The 6,400 square-foot Isabel House serves as headmaster's residence and reception hall for The Principia academy in suburban St. Louis County, and Luchini resolved this dual identity by shaping the building as a subtle, boomerang-like arc, the convex side an undulating wall of red brick that bows towards campus, the concave side faced in white stucco and sheltering a secluded family courtyard. Unifying these two vistas is an elegantly askew copper roof that gently suggests -- appropriately for a school -- a wing poised for flight. Meanwhile, Luchini's proposed $2.3 million, 22,000 square-foot Multimodal Transportation Center is a sleek array of glass and steel that resembles nothing so much as a bullet train readied for launch. Situated downtown near Union Station and Savvis Center, the structure -- part of a $29 million complex that also will include a new Greyhound/Amtrak terminal -- will link those services with MetroLink and Bi-State buses as well as taxis, rental cars and even an airline ticketing and baggage check. Somehow, Luchini's design manages to embrace all of this activity while floating gracefully above the surrounding tangle of train tracks, surface streets and highway viaducts. Different scales, different materials, different environments and different effects, yet Luchini's buildings share an attention to site and historical moment that never relinquishes -- indeed, that only amplifies -- the creative instinct for an appropriate gesture, a telling detail, a grander sense of meaning. Luchini's latest work, now under construction, is a $5.6 million, 25,000-square-foot police station for the city of Wentzville, Mo, and the graceful lines and protectively swooping roof clearly bespeak his architectural DNA. Yet the building is perhaps best characterized by its glass-enclosed dispatch area, perched over the main entranceway like a lookout's nest and plainly visible to officers in secure sections as well as visitors in the main lobby. In Luchini's hands, that small feature becomes an almost philosophical statement of democratic ideals: sightlines between the public and those who serve them are clear and transparent, an everyday reminder of the human faces on either side of authority's divide. "It's not philosophy in an abstract way, but the kind of conclusive feeling you have when you say 'this is a great meal,' or 'this was the right movie to see tonight,'" Luchini mused. "Hopefully, people can say, 'Well, I don't know what the architect intended, but this is a good building and I like being here.'"
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