Designing beautiful homes for clients with enough money is (relatively) easy. Extending those skills to the design of cultural institutions, or even office buildings and stores with decent budgets, is perhaps more complicated, but also more rewarding in every sense of that word. Making architecture out of the places we have to use as citizens or students, that have little to no excess in their budget, and that are central to our society, is much more difficult. That is why I admire firms such as TSK Architects in Henderson, Nev., whose bread and butter is designing elementary and high schools, community colleges, state office buildings, and even those spaces where you spend endless hours waiting to have your driver’s license renewed.
Full disclosure: I have been following this firm since it was called Tate Snyder Architects, and recently traveled to Nevada on TSK’s dime in preparation for writing a longer piece on the firm’s work.
For decades, TSK (in its various forms) has been the go-to architect in the Las Vegas area for institutional architecture. While other firms have become wealthy and successful feeding off the many opportunities thrown up by the gaming industry (which has now morphed into the gaming-partying-eating-shopping-sports-events industry), Windom Kimsey, FAIA, the firm’s founding principal, has provided design services for the local educational system and various branches of local governments. While that has given them a chance to design a few high-profile structures, most notably the most recent expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center, you have to look for most of their work in the endless sprawl that is the day-to-day reality of an urban area with more than three million inhabitants.
Along the way, Kimsey and his offices have also been the spawning ground for the emerging architecture scene in Las Vegas, acting as a local version of Eero Saarinen’s office to the likes of Eric Strain, FAIA, Daniel Chenin, and Bunnyfish Studios. There is now actually an ecology of good firms in Las Vegas, and a good part of that scene is due to Kimsey’s support and training.
The tack Kimsey has taken also means that the buildings TSK designs are not always overwhelming in their beauty. The firm has to squeeze architecture out of cinder blocks and colored concrete, along with a few canopies and skylights. Their style, as a result, is what I might call a kind of Desert Postmodernism: functional structures organized tightly and efficiently using mass-produced and minimal materials—the Modernist part—with gateways, doors, shade structures, or interior atria becoming the site of gestures, colors, and sudden shifts in scale that create a sense of identity and community—the “Post” elements.
A good example of this approach is the recently opened George E. Harris Elementary School in Las Vegas. Serving a local population that is often economically challenged and ethnically diverse, the school is one of the many prototypes TSK has designed over the years: standardized buildings carried out in the cheapest materials possible that serve a population that has been growing and thus in need of new schools at a rapid rate since the Second World War (the Clark County school district is one of the fastest growing in the nation). They have taken these tasks on even if the various cities and communities in the area have few means to support such construction.
When I first saw Harris, my heart sank. From the outside, the school is, like almost all educational structures in Las Vegas, a bunker. Only a very few windows punctuate the concrete block walls. This is a shift as, especially in the 1970s, Kimsey explains, many Clark County schools were built without windows due to vandalism and replacement costs. And while TSK has attempted to alleviate the monotony of the structure with a few bands of color and overhangs, it pales in comparison to the sheer sweep of gray. There was no money for landscaping and so there barely is any. The school sits isolated from the surrounding residential neighborhood.
Walk inside and past security, however, and the school opens up. The corridors are surmounted by skylights that wash the airy volumes with daylight, and here the touches of blue, teal green, and orange pick out various sections or years while creating a rhythm in what is still a bare-bones environment. In the largest of these public spaces, a staircase becomes a secondary auditorium with broad wood steps, while the surrounding classrooms open up to the central corridor with garage doors so that learning can spill out from the confines of the rows of standardized rooms. The library is equally filled with light, spacious and open.
Just as surprising was the East Sahara campus of the NevadaDepartment of Motor Vehicles, which TSK designed in 2016. Although this is also a concrete block structure, the need to provide shaded waiting areas for the inevitable queues that line up every day for appointments—as well as the presence of various other booths and specialized service locations for tasks such as driving tests—means that the building has a second skin of brick overhangs, slender metal columns, and mesh metal scrims. Although the DMV facility is also isolated in the usual sea of parking lots, the architecture that accommodates its specialized function, and the people who come there, manages to meld a sense that you are at a place that is about cars (like garages) with elements that bring a human scale to the institution.
Walk inside, and the space truly opens up. Here you can wait for your appointment in a space suffused with light from clerestories under an arching metal roof. Sealed plywood lines the soffit over the counters, and the dividers between the help desks are covered in the same material. This is not exactly as luxurious as a fancy hotel lobby, but it is a truly civic space, and a oasis of public service in the middle of a city that still has few such moments.
In the early 2000s, Kimsey also designed one of the largest public structures in the area, the Regional Justice Center, the the county courthouse in downtown Las Vegas (it already is looking forward to a renovation). Here he broke the bulk of the building up into a composition of slabs and towers that combine terra cotta-colored concrete and stucco (the color being a demand of the client) with glass and metal blocks. Vertical fins and overhangs further reduce the bulk of the structure, which nonetheless remains somewhat ponderous. Inside, another atrium filled with light creates a civic respite from the building’s generally grim business.
Kimsey’s technique of creating efficient and affordable blocks, and then opening them up where he can, has stood him in good stead in the design of what by now is a large portfolio of schools, colleges, and government offices at various scales. That is not all the firm does, especially with a practice that is now also based in secondary office in Los Angeles and China, but it is the kind of design that interests me most. If architecture is going to be a relevant and even critical way in which we build community in our country and elsewhere, it has to find ways to wrest good space and place from what little our society is willing to spend on our vital institutions. That TSK is able to do so in a metropolis that is arid and difficult to inhabit, in both a physical and a social sense, which makes the firm'sachievements all the more remarkable
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
