Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/380083
You can see that inspiration take shape in the courthouse's entry, where visitors pass through a 60-foot portal lined with a polished-steel surface that reflects the landscaped perimeter. It's a powerful, yet simple gesture that Phifer has used before. For a Fifth Avenue apartment in New York, he recently framed windows in a similar way to help redirect natural light onto a dining room with a polished concrete floor. This harnessing of light can also be found at the 136,000-square-foot NCMA, completed in 2010, which uses 360 elliptical skylights to greatly reduced the energy needs of the galleries. And at a glass-walled house on New York's Fishers Island, completed in 2009, skylights similar to the NCMA's make an appearance. There's even a analogous monumentality between his new courthouse and that of his 2007 rectangular Salt Point House in the Hudson Valley that was clad in a stainless-steel screen, complete with a wood-lined interior just like the courtrooms of Salt Lake. Phifer doesn't plan the types of projects he pursues, commercial or otherwise. "I don't really think that way," he says. "Opportunities come so randomly." Just as he switches scales with ease, he designs a visitor's journey to a courtroom in the same way he imagines a museumgoer finding a particular painting. "There's a sense of choreography," he says. "It's a bit of theater." Clockwise from above: Thomas Phifer designed a glass house for a private clients on Fishers Island, New York; a rendering of a velodrome designed for Brooklyn Bridge Park; the North Carolina Museum of Art; a rendering of the soon-to-be-completed expansion of the Corning Museum of Glass; and an expansion of Lee Hall at Clemson University's College of Architecture. 152 CULTURED