premises atelier

To the People of Warm Springs, stories are gifts, a repository of traditions, voices of the elders, a vessel of cultural wisdom passed from generation to generation. Lengthy discussions on what the Museum at Warm Springs might be yielded stories of stones. “Let me tell you what stones mean to us. We use stones to cook, stones to wash our clothes, stones for games and stones for our sweat lodges. We live on a bed of stone, a huge plain that came from within the earth as a hot liquid. When the liquid stone met the sky, it cooled and lay quietly beside the mountains. Water formed rivers and cut deep canyons in the stone plain and made a place for us to live, a gift from the earth."

 The Museum at Warm Springs lies deep within the Deschutes River Canyon where the Warm Springs People have lived for thousands of years; where the climate is milder, the light more diffused and life more bountiful. The museum building is located in a place of encampment —a cottonwood grove beside the river— where the tribes’ traditional possessions can live with meaning. The heirlooms and artifacts held in the Museum belong to the landscape as well as the Tribes. In the high desert they are alive and their color and texture flower in the clear desert air.

 The Museum at Warm Springs is constructed with a rich palette of materials comparable to the desert landscape. The museum’s form and materiality respond to the stories and work create a quiet fusion of culture and place.

The Museum at Warm Springs is the recipient of an American Institute of Architects Merit Award of Excellence.

The horizon is ever present in Montana, a datum that encircles “big sky country.” Beneath the big sky imagery is a landscape of tension between rugged beauty and the ravages of extractive industry. The Holter Museum of Art is dedicated to addressing such issues through the communicative power of contemporary art. The building reflects the landscape in its formal and spatial order: adding new space to its existing facility, overlapping and sharing educational, collections, and gallery space, and a formal vocabulary that borrows from the land forms and the historic mine shafts of the gold rush.

The Holter began in an abandoned automobile dealership that replaced a mining supply store, just off Helena’s Main Street: “Last Chance Gulch”. Over time, the Holter became a valuable community asset, partnering with the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts and the Myrna Loy Center for the Performing and Media Arts to add life and vitality to Helena.

The Holter retained Premises for strategic planning assistance to chart its future, followed by schematic design and design development services to implement a renovation and expansion of an existing building. Initial designs featured a rooftop sculpture deck accessible via a landscape ramp. Project consensus was established through a number of iterative workshops with museum board and staff, including a week-long on-site charrette, where key community stakeholders and the general public were invited to participate in the process through structured events. In addition to architectural design services, Premises provided capital campaign assistance, including public appearances, conceptual images, models and other graphic materials.

The Holter Museum of Art was completed in collaboration with Bjerke Architects of Helena, Montana.

Hardwoods — maple, beach, birch — are symbolic of regeneration in the northeast. In returning to forest, young hardwood groves spring up to fill cleared fields and pastures on land that has been in production.

The phenomenon of regeneration, and the space and light quality of second-growth hardwood groves is central to the additions to the Merriam Forge house. Out buildings, car shelter, and a studio were needed to support the old house that once accompanied the iron forge on the Boquet River.

A kit of parts (steel columns, insulated panels, roof trusses) is used to create cells or modules that can be flexibly assembled to satisfy program needs, accommodate existing site elements, and make indoor and outdoor space.

What remains today is the original Forge operator’s House, the river and the railroad. A steel structure and stone megalith now provide space for the recreational and educational activities of the family which now occupies the place.

The Hatzic Rock, a huge glacial erratic on the Fraser River in British Columbia, marks one of the oldest archaeological finds in North America. It is a place of the Sto:lo people, the Coast Salish, who have lived for centuries in the Fraser River Valley. Their villages of huge long houses were mobile, moved with the seasons and assembled at traditional sites. The Hatzic Rock site is the origin of the tribe’s oral tradition, where four elders were turned to stone for defiantly attempting to create a written language.

The oral tradition is sacred to the Sto:lo people who conduct public education sessions by telling stories about the found objects. The building, which supports both archaeology and education, incorporates traditional technology that is expandable and movable. It was built by Sto:lo people on huge log skids resting on a gravel pad to allow relocation for continued archaeological exploration.

Recovery from traumatic brain injury is based on re-learning skills and re-acquiring information lost as a result of the trauma. Learning Services corporation established regional centers across North America where the facilities play an active role in recovery. Each center includes an education building and a seqence of living environments of escalating independence, from a carefully supervised group home to off-site apartments. The facilities are configured to encourage re-acquisition of daily living skills and re-integration into community life. They are therefore built in small towns within walking distance of main street amenities such as library, movie theaters, and retail shops.

The functional program is identical for each center. However, varying site conditions and community identity require design approaches unique to each location. Recovery is highly dependent on environmental stimuli, placing great value on literal expression, visual order and organizational clarity and simplicity.

The Bear Creek Learning Center, located in Lakewood, Colorado received an American Institute of Architects Honor Award, cited for its “timelessness” and as “an example of exceptionally high quality... which not only integrates well with its surroundings..., but also enhances [the site] from every direction.”

Snow builds up to enormous depth in the Cascade Mountains, the first stop for winter storms from the Gulf of Alaska. It’s best to keep the snow on the roof or soon buildings are buried in snow banks of their own making.

To support the snow weight, the Academy’s roof borrows its geometry from the ski: a parabola. Ski coaches and makers have rediscovered what Menaechmus, mathematician and tutor to Alexander the Great, had studied in 350 B.C. When a skier turns, placing the ski on edge, the snow pushes back, deforming the ski into a curve that carves a parabola in the snow, first tightening to the apex then expanding back to straight. The static pressure of the snow on the roof is likewise supported by its parabolic curve. The roof’s configuration, though inspired by these geometric forces, results in a building form fitting with the mountain’s sloping terrain.

They want the FARM to tell their story. The farmers and ranchers of Morrow County are heirs to the settlers of the early nineteenth century. Land first acquired through the Land Donation Acts has been passed on from generation to generation, and their relationship to the landscape is deep and complex. Increasingly, that relationship is dominated by machines: tillers, harvesters, and mechanisms of storage and transportation. Agri-business, irrigation and digital technology now dominate the farmers story.

The new Town Hall and DPW facility was designed as enhancements and modifications to a manufactured steel building kit which had been pre-purchased by the Town. The kit included only the structural frame and exterior envelope. Major modifications were required to the structure to provide weather protection, appropriately proportioned assembly space, and additional space for mechanical systems. Also required were mixed use interior build-out, foundations and site design. Achieving the goals for the Combined Services Building required creative configuration of building systems, optimizing systems inter-connectivity, and resourceful interaction with the site environment.

Designing safe, healthy, functional and inspiring interior space included working with pre-fabricated building systems, responding to an extremely harsh winter climate, protecting and mitigating a fragile and previously damaged site, and imaginative use of the inherited missile silo as a valuable resource for fire protection and geothermal energy.

As designed, the economical yet innovative combined services building consolidates town activities in its geographic center, accommodates day to day and emergency shelter needs, and dramatically reduces annual operating costs, all with improved safety and a healthier occupant environment.

The Town of Dannemora is currently implementing geothermal energy heating and cooling for the Town’s Combined Services Building, dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. An innovative system will use ground source heat pumps to extract heating and cooling energy from the on-site former Atlas ICBM missile silo, and a new Photovoltaic solar array, supported by a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority grant, will offset the entire Combined Services Building electrical demand, making the CSB a Net-Zero electrical energy facility. Premises Architecture, in consultation with Salem Engineering and Engineering Ventures is providing system design and project management services for Dannemora’s ingenious response to New York State’s Climate Action Plan.

The Spring Glen House explores the use of prefabricated building systems (e.g. gas station canopy structures, storefront glazing) to connect with the unique character of a specific place, an abandoned foothills farm in the southern Catskills. The intent is to build a new house in Spring Glen and to connect in fundamental ways to this unique place, to become a part of its physical and cultural topography. The experiment is to do so with prefabricated systems, remotely manufactured, transported to Spring Glen and assembled on the site.

The house location is carefully chosen, not for its flat contours or vehicle accessibility, but for its southern exposure, sheltering topography and relationship to the humble stone walls which remain as the primary organizers of the landscape. Instead of flattening theland to accept the structure, the house is raised above the ground, allowing the land’s gentle slopes to pass beneath with minimum disturbance of up-slope and down-slope movement of air, water, flora and fauna. The house interior is organized in response to the sun’s daily path, with living spaces oriented to south light, work spaces to the north and sheltered sleeping spaces with east and west exposure. The prefabricated kit of parts from which the house is assembled knows nothing of the place. But the assembly of the disparate parts is carefully orchestrated to respond to the physical, cultural and spiritual surroundings.

digital rendering by lincoln brown illustrations

The site is a tiny link in the natural cycles of mountain river ecology. It is part of the AuSable River’s glacial valley, a steeply pitched gravel bank filtering forest rainfall and snow melt on its way to the river. Pine barrens are a unique presence in the AuSable watershed, and pines are the dominant species on the site. Generous setbacks to preserve the pines and the river leave a narrow sliver of and for house construction. Strict Adirondack Park height limitations protect the views to the valley and mountains beyond. The house integrates building and site protecting the fragile ecosystem and maintaining the vital up- and down-slope natural cycles with its low profile and green roof.

At 1750 sf, the Treehouse is no bigger than required to accommodate kitchen, living and dining centered on the wood stove, bedroom and bath, a studio and an office. Attention is directed outdoors with a roof deck, a screened porch and a small private deck off the bedroom. Clerestory windows bring natural light into the main living room from all directions. Basement storage provides safekeeping for outdoor gear and mechanical systems, and a carport shelters the cars.

The Adirondack Mountain climate presents demanding tests to building performance. Wall construction must maximize thermal resistance and mitigate moisture accumulation. Envelope components and systems must resist driving rain, snow and ice buildup, and dramatic seasonal variations in weather, temperature, and ultra-violet radiation. The challenge is both powerful and relentless, with time being as important a factor as severity.