One of the pleasures of moving to a new city (I have lived in Philadelphia since the beginning of this year) is immersing yourself in its architecture. That means not just enjoying the history of the place’s built form in its relationship to both the natural setting and human culture (by biking down the tributaries of the Schuylkill River to the great acropolis of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for instance), but also finding out who is making good architecture out of and for that context today. It seems that there is always at least one firm in every major city that is doing so with particular skill, and in Philadelphia that is, in my opinion, DIGSAU.
That name, both somewhat cumbersome and evocative of excavating one’s site, is the corporate identifier for a team led by Jules Dingle, Jeff Goldstein, Mark Sanderson, and Jamie Unkefer (their initials can be found in the moniker). The work is eclectic, which is to say that the only common denominator I can find in reviewing many of their projects is that it is most interested in how to present well-organized boxes in a manner that responds to their sites, both immediate and broader in time and place, in ways that add texture, scale, and material invention. Even that is not always true: DIGSAU has, for instance, designed finely crafted interior renovations, such as the smooth-walled spaces of what used to be the Barnes Museum and is now the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum at St. Joseph’s University, separated by abstracted bronze arches. They have also placed what appear to be fragments of a lost ambulatory as concrete shading devices and pergolas around the pool area for a luxury housing development, Aqua Foro.
What interests me most about DIGSAU, however, is the firm’s core ability to hone the blocks they build in response to particular functional and site requirements (and sometimes existing structures they renovate) into shapes that seem right in their place and thoroughly new at the same time. A case in point that might stand for their general approach is their work at Swarthmore College, where they have designed a dormitory, a combination gym and rehearsal studio, and a storage shed for the campus’ sand trucks.
The dormitory, PPR Residence Hall, consists of three four-story blocks that dance around the edge of a softball field (DIGSAU incorporated a viewing deck and new outfield wall into their design) and are connected by three-story glass-enclosed bridges. The buildings are clad in slate, a material that you can find on the roofs of the adjacent, neo-Gothic buildings. As it happens, the cladding harmonizes beautifully with the mottled grey stone that is not only the main material of those existing structures, but also ubiquitous in Philadelphia. The architects used the slate both as thin cladding and as load-bearing elements, curving the overlapping shingles down to a (seemingly) random base of the same material in heavier chunks. For this move they used a skirt that evokes the architecture of local hero Frank Furness. The windows, set deep into metal frames, then punctuate the masses, indicating the varieties of living arrangements inside while breaking up the buildings’ masses. As abstractions in form and material of the surrounding buildings, the PPR Hall also acts as a castellated edge that echoes Louis Kahn’s nearby Erdman Hall Dormitories at Bryn Mawr University.
Across the baseball field, the so-called Matchbox’s base houses heavy strength-training equipment for the student-athletes and supports a second floor open to the rest of the campus to work out, while the third floor is a rehearsal space for those students more inclined to theatrical play than sports. The building’s foundations consist of Swarthmore’s old squash courts, and DIGSAU also used some of the wood walls and trusses in the new building. To clad the ground floor, they took a trip to a nearby dumping ground where the campus facility department had deposited stone and other building fragments left over from renovations and demolitions.
The architects incorporated as many of these cast-offs as they could in the first-floor façade, and then separated that solid foundation from a top clad with rust-colored cement panels evoking the red roofs of the adjacent athletic facilities with a continuous glass band that opens the gym up to the campus and vice versa.
Some of DIGSAU’s work is even tighter than these volumes: their building for The Study, an eight-story hotel rising over two floors of restaurant and event spaces at the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus, is a smoother and more reserved version of the Swarthmore dormitories. In less urban sites the architects tend towards an exploration of more expressive volumes. They were able to indulge their interest in dangling heavy volumes in midair and jutting forms out at diagonals, which shows up in moderation in much of their work, particularly in the two pavilions they built for a Boy Scout jamboree ground in Glen Jean, West Virginia. In Philadelphia itself, they balanced the horizontal reach of the Outward Bound Discovery Center at the edge of the East Park Reservoir, which they clad with untreated lumber that is weathering into its wooded area as a soft gray, with a tower housing an indoor climbing wall and a matching exterior scaffolding for climbing and zipping through the landscape. Seen from a distance, these twin vertical elements beckon towards the nearby skyline of downtown with the towers that long ago thrust up over the previous limit of William Penn’s hat on top of City Hall.
In recent years, DIGSAU has, like many firms who establish a secure base for themselves in a local setting, been reaching out beyond the region out of which their architecture has emerged. They built a large complex of apartments, broken into four large volumes surrounded by what appear to be houses, all clad in wood, in Bentonville, Arkansas, in a way that makes this new development fit into its mottled neighborhood of residential and commercial structures. They are currently designing a fitness center at Princeton University. DIGSAU is also branching out into different programs, from private homes to larger institutional projects. Most notably, they recently started working with Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates on the Forman Arts Initiative, which will transform a full block in the troubled Kensington community north of downtown Philadelphia into a community center, art space, museum, and public areas incorporating several existing buildings.
What interests me most about DIGSAU’s work is their continual search for ways to understand, learn from, and reinterpret not just what we traditionally think of as a built context, but, beyond that, the bits of pieces out of which that heritage was constructed, the culture it helped produce, and the larger landscape it has, together with the natural conditions, developed. They find ways to not just fit into this collection of found forms, images, and atmospheres, but to design shapes, facades, and, out of that, a clear contemporary character to anchor the further development of Philadelphia and other places in which they now work.
This is a strategy I have seen at work in other places and pursued by other architects –see my recent evaluation of the work Nova Scotia’s Peter Braithwaite, for instance. It is such a search in and through architecture that I must confess interests me a great deal more these days than the work of large practices working at an international level (including Philadelphia’s own Kieran Timberlake, for which several of DIGSAU’s principals worked) that plunk their well-honed responses down on disparate sites. I look forward to seeing DIGSAU as they continue to figure out Philadelphia and contribute to its future construction.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Art Biennales | B+ | William Morris's Red House | Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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