Project Description
There was a time not long ago when a building such as TEN Arquitectos’
new business school for Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., might
have gotten by on its crisp good looks and structural exhibitionism
alone. As a taste for such things took hold overseas in years past—and
as an architecture of seductively picturesque risk increasingly became
the norm—aesthetically and fiscally conservative America lagged very far
behind.
We were deprived then, as the late Herbert Muschamp often noted, of
examples of this nascent architecture of “desire.” It followed that
desirous critics were often moved to give a pass to the few projects in
that contemporary mode that did get built here: A delight in a
building’s boldness and apparent novelty trumped any concerns about the
means deployed and sacrifices made to realize the desired effects.
Thankfully, that time has passed: We’ve all seen this stuff before.
So let’s ignore for the moment the wide, bent, road-spanning bridge of
Enrique Norten’s business school building; the 10 cheekily canted
columns that hold the top floor in place 60 feet in the air as it
travels between anchoring wings; the frank baring of its photo-white
bones through glass walls where the building faces the exurban satellite
campus for which it serves as icon and gate; the racy texturing of the
opaque skin and the resulting near-total blindness of the building where
it faces away.
Let’s ignore every camera-friendly move that, before we became inured
through overexposure, might have made us say “Wow” or “Cool” or even
“Gee whiz! I want that”—noting, however, that the greatest pressure on a
design to incorporate such features is, very often, the mercantile
drive to elicit those exact feelings of transient awe and desire. First
from clients, to secure the buy-in; then from donors, to secure the
funds; later to aid in capturing the attention of harried editors and
impressionable writers; eventually, perhaps, to dazzle colleagues; and,
always, to arrest the consuming gaze of civilians—future clients!—as
they flip through a magazine like this one.
By that standard, this is a job well done. And as such it is typical of
the work of Norten’s firm, which thoughtfully uses novel forms and
suites of effects. “We didn’t want another box in the landscape,” says
Norten, Hon. FAIA, of a landscape for which his firm began preparing the
master plan in 2009. And he didn’t give his clients a box, outside, or
in. To the architects’ great credit, the interior spaces of the building
are in fact very cool.
And functionally so. The trend among contemporary business schools is
to give precedence to spaces for collaborative work. Here, those
“non-programmed” spaces, as Norten calls them, generate the logic of the
whole. A series of open lounges and labs, and a stack of conference
rooms enclosed by fogged glass, inhabit a tall, narrow zone just behind
the fully glazed, amply fritted, campus-facing wall of the main wing.
Then—across a light-giving slot—offices and small classrooms are hung in
a second discrete volume, the exposed surfaces of which are wrapped in
shiny black-plastic sheets studded with little pyramids. That funky
material also marks one side of the main corridor in an abutting third
zone, where elevators, plumbing, larger classrooms, and the school’s
enormous main auditorium find their home, backing up to the building’s
great, blind wall facing the outside world.
It’s a smart organization of space, and one that is readily apparent
coming in the front door, past the sitting area and greeting desk, where
the gently sloped main stair—designed, and used, for gathering—takes
you up two levels to nearly meet the ceiling in an intelligently, even
lovingly, compressed lounge area. It’s the first of so many examples,
from the airy platforms opening off the suspended stairs that knit the
“non-programmed” zones together so well, to the more formal resting
nooks, with their carved Corian benches, that are to be found outside
the smaller classrooms within the carefully scaled, black-wrapped middle
zone.
“We were always trying to find little opportunities for people to just
sit and be there,” Norten says. And in that he and his team have
succeeded; the building is alive inside, and the students are taking the
architects’ cues and running with them.
There is always a “but” in this sort of building, where glamour has a
voice in the process of design, where the production of desire, the
ensorcelling of clients or donors or press, however useful in the early
stages of a project, is given shape and made permanent in the
construction itself. Now we return to the big move: that big bridge up
there on its big, beautiful columns. From the road, approaching, and
especially when rounding the traffic circle as one prepares to take the
turn in, and under, and through, that feature of the building does an
excellent job of signposting the campus—as it was intended to do,
serving here the broader purposes of TEN Arquitectos’ master plan.
But having carved that space out of the larger mass to give the
building such an eye-catching roadside presence, there must also have
been an incredible pressure to use that portico to aggrandize the
pedestrian entrance—placing it there even if parking is elsewhere and
not easily reached, and even if students will approach the building from
the opposite direction (toward the glazed elevations that face the
center of campus).
So we have here really two buildings, interpenetrating: A grandiose
one, its forms derived in part by the need to impress through images,
generating an architecture that has mostly served its purpose before the
groundbreaking. And living under the same roof—gaining little benefit
from the drama outside—a neat, bright, smart series of accommodating
spaces. It is a building that seems well-tempered to the needs of its
users, apart from the nagging suspicion that, after paying the price
charged for an architecture of desire, they will be inclined to sneak in
through the back door. —Philip Nobel