Here are open offices organized within a light steel frame between lofty wooden floor and roof decks.
“What is it like?”
This is the question we ask ourselves when confronting something new. Answering it is how we learn, comparing the new thing, the new idea, to what we already know and understand. This is how designers design something new, too; how they situate new designs in our consciousness, how they bring us along, making their journeys of discovery ours: they ask us to compare what is new to what we already know and are comfortable with knowing.
New architecture, when it is really good, when it is absolutely telling a story of place and materials and relationships, explains itself by recalling other buildings, older buildings, to mind. This is not the same as copying those other building, we should note; and it is not always buildings that are recalled.
Asking for comparison, recalling something we already know, is how designLAB Architects have approached creating a new world headquarters for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The IFAW is located in Yarmouthport, in the middle of Cape Cod. It has pursued its good work there, nearly invisibly, for thirty years. Its new home is essentially an office building for an international organization that employs nearly 200 people on the Cape.
Sailing On
The new IFAW headquarters contains 54,000 square feet of space in three connected buildings. The space is used for research, public relations, meetings, conferences, a worldwide network data center, planning for wildlife and habitat protection in 16 countries. It is space that is full of sunlight and fresh air, space that fosters collaboration. It is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certified, and it is new space that cost just $220 per square foot.
So, what is it like?
The new IFAW building is like a racing sailboat laid on its side. To be specific: designLAB partner Robert Miklos describes the new IFAW as being like a Herreshoff “12 ½”, a sailboat you might see in waters off Cape Cod. (You could see one on land at the Herreshoff museum in Bristol, R.I.) Actually, it’s like three of these boats, laid bow-to-stern, in a U-shape plan, their hulls facing outward.
The Herreshoff is an interesting precedent on which to model a Cape Cod office building. The boat’s hull is all smooth, tight boarding, painted white; while on its other side, the inside, graceful space is created by the rhythm of varnished mahogany ribs, each doing serious work while showing how the boat is held together. And then there are the sails, billowing, canvas, white, sun-catching sails.
This is designLAB’s model for IFAW: the building’s low exterior, facing Summer Street, Willow Street and its own parking lot, is covered in white vertical wood siding. But just over its gunwales – a two-level, slightly sloping shed roof with the hint of a horizontal clerestory window halfway up its incline, comes the dramatic interior: glass walls with louvered sunshades made of Jarrah wood are designed to block too much summer sun while admitting loads of low winter sunlight. Here are open offices organized within a light steel frame between lofty wooden floor and roof decks. And below the ribbed ceilings, billowing acoustic sails – courtesy of a local Cape Cod awning fabricator – act to reflect light and sound.
Practical Concerns
And also: here is design creativity harnessed to budget and performance. IFAW’s light steel frame was meant to include a row of thick columns embedded in the glass wall of the building. During the complex design process, consultants Odeh engineers devised a way to remove that entire row of columns and instead cantilever floors and roof to meet the glass wall. The result is a building designed the way boat designer Herreshoff would have done it – solved for lightness, efficiency, and significant budget savings.
Herreshoff is not the only Cape Cod story that IFAW is designed to tell. The project’s landscape architect Stephen Stimson looked to 18th century Bartlett farm in nearby Barnstable as a model of landscape preservation. The resulting layout of the three connected buildings on the IFAW site is in the tradition of Cape Cod rural development. A half-acre courtyard of native grasses, open to the south, centers the building complex, whose flexible architecture is then located at the north, east and west edges of the site.
Designed within a tight budget, constructed of sustainable materials, developed with the buy-in of the employees it was intended to serve, the new IFAW world headquarters is a good place to work. It is also a building project whose very construction is good for Cape Cod.
It is good because the location of the new IFAW is a 5-acre “brownfields” site. There are several such places on Cape Cod, areas that have suffered serious soil contamination and now are mostly abandoned, posing threats to groundwater and the Cape’s ecology in general. The IFAW’s land appears to have been – though no one on Cape Cod will say so – the Yarmouthport town dump. Early soil tests uncovered truck chassis, wrecked motorcycles, car batteries, tons of trash; all have been excavated, removed, recycled, and the land reclaimed.
The new landscape includes an amphrodome septic system, bio-swales that filter all water runoff from the buildings and parking lot, native plants Â… the designers have replaced a dead landfill with a living Bartlett farm meadow.
IFAW’s global mission is to “provide a better world for animals and people.” They’re doing so right here at their new world headquarters in Yarmouthport.
