International Architecture Awards Tell a friend
ARCHIVE 2024
International Architecture Awards
Architects: Form4 Architecture
Lead Architect: John Marx
Client: Bauen Capital LLC.
Renderings: Form4 Architecture / Teapot Collective
Social engagement is one of the cornerstones of all architectural making. That architecture is inherently social is the first principle individuals realize as they go about with their lives. However, creating opportunities for civic discourse in suburbia is an inherently elusive goal since adding public spaces in low-density cities raises often controversial issues of who is given access to those physical and social outdoor areas.
To provide opportunities for human encounters, however, remains a top priority of the socially responsible architect. The starting point of this commercial development is as unusual as its architectural resolution. The site straddles two different municipalities: San Mateo County and Redwood City.
This alone imposes acrobatics in the bureaucracy of navigating uncoordinated zoning ordinances yielding different height limits. How to reconcile architecturally such unusual conditions? In every architectural approach, there is always an idea of, the city. This project is no exception. Its massing is suggestive of a citadel formed of different buildings with their own identity, a nuanced architectural order, and a coherent vision of these distinct masses forming a unified ensemble. The protagonist of this architecture is a central garden on a podium, a sort of great outdoor room. This is the Agora, a form of aspirational place, the place you want to be.
In Greek mythology, it represents the ideal setting where ideas are shared, and a sense of the collective comes to light. Equally important in this vision is the presence of a park from where the concept feeding the project appears in all its intelligibility. Tall, slender, and elegant columns supporting a quasi-continuous canopy constitute the visual and spatial hallmark of the project. It is a connective gesture that asserts mid-air the lot limit while establishing a strong visual datum near and afar. The public spaces beneath are layered and sequenced to serve as a broader framework for collective contacts in varying grouping arrangements.
The steps are the first layer of public space. These are generous, very inviting, big, set back from the street, and feature seating areas on them. The second is the podium itself, specifically the intermediate space, which offers a quiet and reflective oasis for the users. It stages the spectacle of the arrival from the steps and features generous planting. The third and last layer culminates in the Agora. Sitting on a generous podium, this new belvedere overlooking a public park built by Stanford Hospital works as a design unit, visually connected through the steps. The organic layout of the outdoor architecture affords varied ways for people to assemble.
The coexistence of these modes of connecting is a nuance of urban life. The realization that connecting in person is an existential necessity of the post-pandemic world is the driver for this architecture that is inherently porous, open, and generative of human contact, fostering both leisure and meditation. It is an active void where the architectural extrusions, in a subtle role reversal, take on a background role, this time to exalt the contained open-air space: the Agora.
