The University of Arkansas formally opened the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Material Innovation, a 42,000 square foot building made primarily of timber on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fayetteville. The center, designed by Dublin-based Grafton Architects and Fayetteville's Modus Studio, serves as both an educational facility and civic landmark showcasing Arkansas wood species and timber construction techniques. Ozarks at Large's Kyle Kellams spoke with architects from both firms during yesterday's preview tour.
Kyle Kellams: On Aug. 28, Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, welcomed a dozen or so reporters to a preview tour of the Anthony Timberlands Center on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Fayetteville. This morning, Aug. 29, several hundred people are attending the formal opening. Yesterday, architects, designers and faculty toured the 42,000-square-foot center. It's a building with timber and wood at its construction core.
Peter MacKeith: And of course, it is to the fullest extent possible, a building made of wood. And to be honest, it is a storybook of timber. As Yvonne and Shelley have often said, one that is a member of our faculty in educating our students to Arkansas species, national species, international species, ways of working with wood, ways of understanding wood, which I hope you'll come to understand through their eyes as you take a tour through the building.
Kellams: The Yvonne and Shelly that dean Mackeith mentioned are Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, co-founders of Dublin based Grafton Architects. Grafton worked with Fayetteville based Moda Studios and landscape architects and ground control from Doylestown, Pennsylvania to bring the Timberland Center to life. It's the first building in the U.S. for the Pritzker Prize winning Grafton. Yesterday's tour took visitors up and down stairs, past studios, classrooms, fabricating labs and into the welcoming lobby.
McNamara: So we've just come in this main door, which is a beautiful white oak, which has been commissioned by the university, and it's a McClintock, a wonderful graduate of the university who's now specializing in aircraft of timber. So this door itself is an amazing feat of timber.
Kellams: Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects said the creative team wanted to make sure this new building perched along a busy Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard, just a few blocks away from the conventional campus, connected the academic and the civic.
McNamara: This project has two worlds, in a way. It has the world of the workshop, which is the heart of the project. And then it has the civic world, let's say how it presents itself to the city. And that's what this project is about. How do we bring those two worlds together, and how do you bring the stranger into a building where there's activity happening, which is active and there's health and safety issues where you can't just open it up immediately to the public. But this is a place where you get glimpses into the production workshop.
Kellams: Dean Mackeith says the timber first approach to the building and its mission also means a link between northwest Arkansas and the rest of the state.
MacKeith: We have a responsibility, we believe, to assisting the state's economy, the state's environment, the quality of life for all the citizens across the state. That might sound like rhetoric, but this is a built example, a material, tangible, hopefully palpable representation of the responsibility that we took so seriously as a school and I would say as a university as well.
Kellams: After yesterday's tour, there was a chance to talk with architects involved in the project, including Yvonne Farrell from Grafton Architects.
Farrell: We like to keep going back to our buildings because we learn not only about what it's like to make a building in different places, but we also like to watch how people use it, because architects are one level like public servants. We are very privileged to be architects. We try to interpret people's views, people's ideas, people's ambitions. And we like to see how they work because we do our best. To be an architect, you also have to listen. We try to listen to clients, to the users, to see what they need. We're not sculptors. Architects are people who provide space because of need. And if we make it better than just the need, if we achieve the need and then have something else, then sometimes it's called architecture. Sometimes it's just building, and sometimes it's architecture.And one of the wonderful things about this competition was that it really did describe Arkansas in a wonderful way. It described you as a pragmatic type of people, but that you also love the kind of sense of poetry. So what we were trying to do was to find meaning in the fact that the university needed, effectively, a big shed. And we looked at the fantastic history that you have here of these beautiful sections of your barns, which are no-nonsense containers, but they're very distinctive in this part of the world. So the building, the site, the section, the cut through from the west and from the east is, if you like, a contemporary interpretation of what it's like to build a big, not a barn, but possibly a barn, but a container that represents Northwest Arkansas, even though we're from another part of the world. We really appreciate local cultures, and we try to be architects that try and find that ingredient that maybe the general public can say, 'Oh yeah, I see what they mean, that it's not just a box, and it's not just a kind of a container. It's trying to be a cousin of something that might have been here historically'.
Kellams: I mean, you and I are sitting in this beautiful lecture room with wonderful furniture and high-tech equipment that students and faculty can use. But if we turn just slightly to our left, we see very busy five lanes of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a Walmart over here. So there's this academic element, but also very much right here a civic element.
Farrell: Yes. I mean, that's what cities are, bits of this and bits of that. That's what's wonderful. We hope that people going home after their day's work on MLK will say, oh, I wonder what they're building in the Anthony Timberland Center, that they'll be curious, that the building is saying, 'Just have a little peep in the window'. So I think it also might be for students, children who are young, their parents might say, 'Oh, look at those gorgeous pieces of furniture, or look at what's been made in the Anthony Timberland Center'. And it might spark kind of a love of timber for other possible students of the future. When we do a lot of universities, the amazing thing about a university is that it's a belief that the future is a positive thing, that education is the passport to having a good life, that you can be more than what you think. This is very practical. This is practical and intellectual, which is amazing. That's what the section, when we brought you up to the upper floors, we want students and their professors that every time they're having a thought about, wouldn't something be possible, that they're able to check it on the lower level. So it's really craft thinking. What's the material? What can it do? What could it possibly do? So yes, it has a civic presence. Maybe people when they go to Walmart and they're over there, they might cross over here and peep in and have a look. Cities are a mix and bag. So you might come shopping there and then say, well just have a little peep around here. Walk along the side. There's a lovely little space called the Anthony's Way on the western side. And that's got a loblolly pine, and they'll be growing over the next 100, 200 years. And there's a swale. A swale is a technique that is really like a sponge garden for excess water. And today we certainly saw the rainfall of Arkansas. But those swales absorb the water, slow it down before it goes into the public system. We've made it into a little kind of a waterfall as well, so when it reaches a certain amount. So it was wonderful for us to see the downpour. I know it was a terrible storm, but it was also a confirmation to us that what we had done in reading the weather of northwest Arkansas, the building would respond to that like a great creature, like an armadillo that would take the water off. Even this overhang, this little overhang, when you're standing down there, that projection also brings the studios just to step a little bit further out to MLK as a kind of a greeting. And you saw the lovely door. Please, when people walk along, touch the door handle. That's designed by one of the most important architects in the world, a man called Juhani Pallasmaa. He's a Finnish architect. He has written books that are unbelievably important, and he has designed the door handle out there. So anyone out for a stroll on a Sunday or wherever, touch the door handle and feel it. Close your eyes and feel the thought that's gone into the shape so that your hand is touching art. And the door, which is of oak, beautiful oak, is designed by an alumni of the university, who was commissioned by them to make this beautiful oak door. So there's oak on the front door. Then you have western cedar on the taller parts. You have a whole, what we call a storybook of timber in this building.
Kellams: Yvonne Farrell, co-founder and co-director of Grafton Architects in Dublin. The Grafton team worked with Modus Studio in Fayetteville on the creation of the Anthony Timberland Center for Design and Materials Innovation.
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Jason Wright, principal with Modus Studio in Fayetteville, was among those part of the tour, and I asked him if, with a project like this, if he ever really feels like it's over.
Wright: Absolutely not. In fact, I don't feel like we're done yet, but we've handed it over to the owner. It's been a long time in the making. Five years at least. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself, quite honestly. So yeah, it's been a process, a good one. Great relationships we've established. I'm going to miss those day-to-day conversations with our friends at Grafton disappear. But I feel like we've made friends for life, so that's really special.
Kellams: A project like this, which is about design and about architecture, it's sort of a meta process, right? You're creating something for people who will create something. Does that make it any different in the process?
Wright: Absolutely. First of all, our old professors are now our clients, so no pressure there, right? But no, really, it's been great to interact with them. I think they would agree that it's probably been good for them to sort of see the fruits of their labor come full circle around through us, in a sense. Now that we're out in the world, we're working and have been for 20-plus years at this point. It's been a great interaction with our old professors, folks within the discipline that we absolutely respect and love. And yeah, it's been a great journey.
Kellams: What I love about this building is that I like many buildings on the University of Arkansas campus, but many of them are inside the campus. Unless you're part of the campus community, you rarely see them. This is part of thousands of people's daily commute.
Wright: Yeah. What's interesting about this project specifically is sometimes when you try to describe to somebody in the community, like, let's say I'm in Crown Barbershop and I'm talking to somebody and they ask me, 'What are you working on?' Always a question somebody gets asked. I go, well, 'I'm working on this building, this part of town'. They're like, well, 'What's it by? What's it look like? How do I know?' With this project it's been hilariously simple. It's like, yeah, I'm working on that project that's made out of wood on MLK. And they're like, 'Oh yeah, the big timber one'. Like, yes, that's it. It's a two-second connection. So this building has really stood out to folks in the community as a standout moment. It's very noticeable. It's very unique. It's got a lot of character. We're extremely proud to be a part of it. I haven't met anybody in the community that is like, 'Well, what is that big box on the corner?' It's not that at all. So it's been very rewarding in that respect.
Kellams: It is a creation, but it has to be functional. It has to last. And as we've seen in the last seven days prior to today, there has been heavy rain, high heat, high humidity. So you have to design a building to withstand all that.
Wright: Yeah. This morning at 6:30, I was down here a little stressed out, admittedly. How is it handling the water? But the building didn't just happen. There was a lot of thought put into how to handle the environment, how to handle the elements, things about comfort inside, outside. All trying to manage that in a big volume while still at the same time being sustainable about it. Hence the natural ventilation scheme in the fabrication area. Things like that, just trying to be responsive to the needs of the program, but also responsible in terms of how we handle heating and cooling the facility as well.
Kellams: You're part of that full circle you were talking about now. There are going to be people in here learning and creating who 20, 40, 60 years from now will be creating themselves.
Wright: That's right. Yeah. I'm a little jealous, to be honest with you. I remember the days back in Vol Walker when I was in architecture studio. Those are some of the best memories I have in my life.
Kellams: Do you have a favorite part of this that is overlooked, or that a layperson like me might not notice right away?
Wright: I know every square inch, nook and cranny of this building. I've had a lot of time to spend in it, both virtually in terms of looking at a 3D model, but also through construction. It's not necessarily a space, but it's the small moments when I let my eyes relax and daydream and stare off into the distance, and I'll notice a detail that I labored over or my staff labored over or partners at Grafton labored over, and we looked at for so long in a virtual sense, and then just seeing it in reality. It might be a skill shift or material shift going from the end grain of cross-laminated timber to the white oak trim as it butts up and meets the concrete. Just small moments like that I would typically take for granted, kind of like the white noise of life, but just having a moment to settle in, appreciate it for what it is. To me, it represents a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of thought, care, collaboration, all of that.
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