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The new buzz words of the 21st century—“organic,” “ecofriendly,” “sustainable”—have inundated today’s architectural vocabulary despite their indifference to definition. When you get down to it, whether a work of architecture is “green” is usually a shade of gray.


Architect Charlotte Skene Catling, principal of the firm Skene Catling de la Peña, shrugs off any hard-and-fast characterization of the environmental principles that guided her renovation of and addition to a 1902 building in the historic, 850-acre Hadspen estate in Somerset, England. Although demolishing the old building and replacing it would have been much less expensive, she and her client saw the value in maintaining the integrity of the timeworn masonry structure and its role in the estate as a whole. Catling gutted and renovated the building from roof shingles to reclaimed wood floorboards, adding an extension clad in sheets of glass and oak that houses circulation space between the first and second floors, as well as three bathrooms. An attached, 215-square-foot pool acts as a heat sink for a biomass power source in the summer.

But more than just keep the house’s size small (just over 2,000 square feet) and minimize energy use, Catling sought to keep the project local. The oak, with matching layers of float glass that clad the extension’s second floor, come from cords stored in sheds opposite the Dairy House. Catling hired regional workers who live less than 20 miles from the site: a local cabinetmaker, who constructed the extension; a glass laminator responsible for joining the extension’s layers of glass; and a stonemason who restored the brick facades and fashioned pathways and the pool from locally quarried slate. These moves represent an equally important side of sustainabilty—what her architecture-savvy client, Niall Hobhouse, calls “social sustainability.”

Hobhouse—whose commissions of a Robert Smithson folly on the grounds and a design competition to reimagine the estate’s beloved Hadspen Parabola garden have created controversy in the landscape design field—was intrigued by the question of how to insert modern architecture in old houses. In England, where many old buildings are “listed,” or landmarked, the issue is particularly fraught. Often houses are either restored to look like period pieces, or modern extensions overwhelm and undermine the old structure. For this project, Catling proposed something in between—she discreetly inserted the addition, using transparency to dematerialize its bulk. ”

New Capitol Visitor Center: not a capital idea
From The Los Angeles Times February 1, 2009

When it comes to the aesthetic and financial perils of government-sponsored architecture, you could hardly invent a more perfect cautionary tale than the one embodied by this grandiose complex sunk into the east side of Capitol Hill.

Designed by RTKL Associates, the firm that produced the master plan and much of the architecture for L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles, the complex opened to the public last month. (RTKL developed the project in collaboration with the former architect of the Capitol, Alan M. Hantman, who filled that post from 1997 to 2007.) Stretching out its considerable bulk underground beneath the Senate and House chambers, the complex is meant to give the hordes of visiting school groups and other tourists a place to gather while they wait for official tours.

In theory, the visitors center was poised to solve a couple of significant problems in one architectural stroke: protecting the Capitol building while also smoothing access to it. An important urban-planning issue also was at stake. When the Capitol was new, the eastern facade served as its front door, but over time, as the National Mall to the west grew in architectural and civic prominence, that entrance began to be overlooked. The goal of the new building was to restore some sense of grandeur, or at least ceremony, to the east side of the Capitol without cluttering the above-ground landscape.

As the architecture of the complex took shape, members of Congress began to treat the project as if it were their own private basement clubhouse.(There is no earmark, after all, like an earmark on which congressmen can prop up their own feet.) They added recording studios, extra meeting rooms and even a tunnel to the Library of Congress. As the size of the project grew — settling finally at a massive 580,000 square feet — construction costs climbed from an early projection of $265 million to a final tally of $621 million.


Now, aboveground, protruding skylights and elevator shafts — none designed in a particularly self-effacing style — make it all too clear to pedestrians on the east side of the Capitol that they are walking atop a gigantic new bunker. Once inside, the effect is no more encouraging. Beginning with its central gathering place, Emancipation Hall, nearly every room in the complex is cavernously over-scaled — which is not easy or inexpensive to do when you are building underground — and draped in a range of buttery materials and colors seemingly more appropriate to a law firm or investment bank than a government complex. Where the building doesn’t glow, it shimmers, and where it doesn’t shimmer, it gleams.

The result is an architectural combination uniquely suited to Washington: marbled pork.

The architects also have taken the idea of symmetry to absurd extremes. To be sure, the existing Capitol Building is a model of axial symmetry, its dome sitting atop a House wing to the south and one for the Senate to the north. But, underground, the visitors center shows slavish dedication to a mirror-image ideal. Like Noah’s Ark, it makes a point of having two of everything.