Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/566702
202 CULTURED lmost since the day it opened in 1996, SHoP has been the figurative college-radio hero of the architecture world. Whereas the typical emerging talent may pursue one experimental approach to design, SHoP pioneered many of the innovations that have since emerged as new industry standards. The New York-based studio has also taken stances that are still edging their way into mainstream thinking. While SHoP's multidimensional point of view defies an easy elevator pitch, it prepared the practice for superstardom in 2012. That is the year when rockers came calling at the arena SHoP helped complete near downtown Brooklyn. Taking over as the creative force of Barclays Center from Frank Gehry three years earlier, the firm produced a vision for the sports and entertainment venue that strikes remarkable balances—between a delicate arabesque form and reptilian-tough skin, for example, or between the pulsating media spectacle of 21st-century entertainment and the quiet amenities that make everyday urban life a little more gracious. A powerful spotlight had good reason to shine at that moment. "We were able to take all of our design knowledge and apply it to a major piece of architecture," says Christopher Sharples, a founding principal of the firm. Consider the brute sheathing: It culminates many years in which SHoP led the movement in digital design and fabrication. This highly textured building skin contains 12,000 panels of weathering steel, each of them unique. SHoP created this paragon of complexity in a computer model, and handed the CNC machine instructions to its façade contractor on a USB stick. While the Barclays job channeled deep experience in technology, Sharples adds that something epiphanic happened there, too. "What we learned was that Barclays really had to be a civic moment in the city, and that the public realm is generally one of the most critical parts of making a place." That architecture is the most public of arts dawned on Sharples and his partners long ago. As far back as 2000, the studio completed Dunescape—the first outdoor installation for MoMA PS1 in Long Island City as part of the institution's Young Architects Program—precisely to remake the museum courtyard into an extension of New York street life. Meanwhile, Mitchell Park, one of SHoP's inaugural commissions, is still transforming downtown Greenport, New York, from a sleepy Long Island village into a sophisticated coastal destination. Yet with Barclays Center, a corner has indeed been turned. The project deftly serves regular folks, relying almost completely on transit access instead of clogging Brooklyn with extra cars, as well as disguising security barriers with lush landscape and generous seating, among other contributions to the local fabric. Perhaps more important, Sharples says that improving a city's quality of life has become a priority for SHoP's subsequent work. He points to two on-the-boards projects to illustrate the point. The Miami Innovation District, a 10-acre campus for technology companies slotted for the Magic City's Park West Neighborhood, "moves away from the idea that Miami is just the place you go to recreate, but a place where people actually work and live, and want to do so in a 24/7, pedestrian-friendly way." Besides taking on city-scale projects, SHoP is trying to make its individual building commissions more urbanistic, of which the forthcoming headquarters of Uber is a case in point. Because the taxi app's employees spend half of their workdays moving among their colleagues, SHoP is weaving this energy into the fabric of San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood, by placing circulation inside the so-called Commons—a naturally ventilated 20-foot-deep space between the building's two glass façades. In addition to creating what Sharples calls an "extroverted office experience," the Uber design breaks down public and private spheres, by inviting everyday users into a series of ground-floor retail experiences. Amping up its commitment to the health of cities does not mean ignoring the other passions that launched SHoP's notoriety. Just as SHoP applied silicon thinking to plebeian cedar and rusted steel to make Dunescape or Barclays Center, so the sinuous terracotta cladding on the forthcoming 111 West 57th Street tower catapults another traditional material into this century. Nor does SHoP's recently earned major-player status equate disinterest in less visible assignments. In fact, one such small project could explain why the firm feels so emphatically about civic service in this next phase of its trajectory. With Talk Box, SHoP fashioned a vintage pay phone into a sound booth that the public radio station WNYC installed on Staten Island and at which it invited residents to record comments on police brutality and race on the first anniversary of Eric Garner's death. "A project like this asked us to give people a platform to engage and give their opinion," Sharples says, taking a moment to pause in reflection. If the most public of arts is the stage of a democratic society, then SHoP plans to fulfill that responsibility with heartfelt sincerity. A