 Paul Donnelly, the Rebecca and John Voyles Chair in the School of Architecture, and graduate student Zhang Ling of Beijing discuss Zhang's design for The Gateway Tower, a hypothetical mixed-use high-rise that was the focus of Donnelly's design studio last semester. |
In other words, how do you create architecture?
"It's an extremely intellectual, rigorous and creative exercise," said Paul Donnelly, AIA, PE, the Rebecca and John Voyles Chair in the School of Architecture. "A building is an artifact that represents the process of making."
And as that process evolves with the introduction of new methods and materials, so too must change the architect's compositional and aesthetic decisions.
It's a point that Donnelly, who holds professional credentials as an architect and as an engineer, is uniquely qualified to make. Over the last decade, he has developed an international reputation for exploring the relationship between architectural expression and emerging technologies.
"My father always told me that I was an architect because I was constantly making things --boats, treehouses, tunnels, you name it," Donnelly said. "At the time, though, I didn't really know what architecture was. I guess I thought it was engineering."
 For the Family Services of Greater Boston Headquarters, Donnelly created a contemporary addition to compliment a renovated mill building. The $6 million project opened last year. |
And so Donnelly set out to become an engineer, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in structural engineering from Northeastern University in 1968 and a Master of Science in engineering mechanics from Columbia University in 1970. At Columbia, however, he also developed an interest in art, creating large-scale paintings influenced by abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko and Kenneth Noland.
"I had a double life," Donnelly jokes. "By day I was studying engineering mechanics; at night all my friends were artists."
Donnelly's "eureka!" moment, as it were, occurred one morning as he walked past Columbia's Avery Hall, home to its School of Architecture.
"A light bulb just went off in my head," he said with a smile. "It suddenly dawned on me that I was in the wrong arena - that what I was, was an architect."
Donnelly enrolled in the School of Architecture at the Boston Architectural Center, supporting himself as a consulting structural engineer with Paul Weidlinger and Mario Salvadori, his professor and mentor at Columbia. Shortly after receiving his professional degree in architecture, he became co-founder and principal of The Associated Architects, and later founded his own practice, Paul J. Donnelly Architects and Engineers.
Over time he served as a consultant with several large Boston-based firms and taught at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.
Donnelly's engineering background remained integral to his work, particularly in his energy conservation, membrane technology, air structures, robotics and technology integration research. In 1994, for example, Donnelly's speculations on the potential of fiberglass membranes (a sort of banana-shaped pod that may one day become a basic unit of construction) made him the only American to receive an award in the Membrane Design Competition in Tokyo.
In 1996, he and collaborator Andrew Scott of MIT won a First Prize citation in the prestigious "Building Integrated Photovoltaics Competition," sponsored by the American Institute of Architects Research Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy. Their design, for a hypothetical sports museum, combined a clever system of natural ventilation with a dramatic free-floating solar roof to create a building so energy efficient that analysis showed it would generate a net power surplus. The design was subsequently displayed at several venues around the country, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.
Need for aesthetic integrity
In his built work, Donnelly reveals a similar concern for the interplay of technology and aesthetic expression. Last year, for instance, he completed a $6 million project for the Family Services of Greater Boston Headquarters, renovating and creating a new addition to a century-old mill/brewery. The key to the redevelopment, he said, was maintaining and reinforcing the original building's character while integrating contemporary construction practices and materials.
"People enjoy these old buildings for their honesty and integrity," Donnelly said. "You know that the faŤade is picking up the interior framing, you know it's multi-wythe because you see the headers of the bricks. It's a building in the most fundamental sense of piling one thing on top of another. It's not a picture of something else."
Any new construction, he explained, would have to display a similar aesthetic integrity. Thus, while Donnelly's addition also features a brick faŤade, it does not reproduce the running bond pattern of traditional masonry, nor does it mimic the look of a load-bearing wall. Instead, Donnelly stacked a thin, 12-inch-by-12-inch brick veneer in a forthright grid formation that gracefully "peels back" at the wall's edge to reveal the underlying steel-and-concrete framing.
"Fundamentally, this is what I've done for as long as I've studied architecture --explore the nature of building materials and systems and try to engage them in architecturally poetic ways," Donnelly said. "I'm not going to pretend that this building here is like that building there, given the fundamental differences in their tectonic characteristics."
"You develop confidence through hard work, there's no other way around it," he said. "But a funny thing happens as students become more accomplished. You notice that suddenly they're walking around the building a little differently. They've developed a belief in the process and in their own abilities. They know what it takes to do something."
Donnelly's courses on Building Systems I and II drill students in the basic underpinnings of structure, enclosure, climate and lighting. His Technology-Transfer seminar examines the often fascinating, if highly speculative, architectural potentials of cutting edge developments in other fields, from the auto and aerospace industries to the latest in fractal robotics.
Donnelly's design studios help students apply these lessons to real-world situations, creating detailed proposals for actual construction projects, from the Danforth Plant Science Center and Lambert International Airport in St. Louis to Logan Airport in Boston.
Last fall, Donnelly led a studio hypothesizing a new downtown mixed-use high-rise called The Gateway Tower, to be situated just northwest of the Gateway Arch. Students were given the client (an international e-commerce organization) and a few parameters --that the building be energy efficient, that it incorporate advanced technologies and provide its inhabitants with a maximum of natural light and ventilation. Most importantly, the overall design should symbolize the re-emergence of downtown St. Louis as a national and international hub for finance and commerce.
The final projects, on display in Givens Hall, reveal impressive polish and ambition. The striking, asymmetrical geometry of graduate student Joseph Vodicka's proposal, for example, is dramatically played against a sweeping wall of glass, while fellow graduate student Zhang Ling's elegant sheaf-like conception seems to double back upon itself like folded paper.
"I thought this project created an opportunity to provoke thought both on campus and on the part of civic leaders," Donnelly said, noting the current boom in downtown redevelopment. "I don't think there are students anywhere else in the world who are doing quite this level of work."
Yet along with confidence and technique, Donnelly also seeks to instill a sense of the architect's larger responsibilities, and even a certain degree of, well, humility.
"Ultimately, architecture is a social art, and the architect becomes a custodian of the public realm," he said. "I also believe that it is our fundamental responsibility to build a world that honestly reflects our time, culture and history."
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