Just Stepped Out

By Beth Herman

When a recent story on staircases from around the world piqued the interest and curiosity of readers, DCMud decided to explore what the District’s own native sons and daughters of architecture and design could offer to the mix, with results that ran the gamut from edgy to resourceful to sublime.

Using materials such as painted steel with Douglas fir, or maple, chestnut and etched glass, area architects have climbed up and stepped out way ahead of the pack, melding the practical with the magical, taking the concept of a necessary staircase to a whole new level.

Cabin (John) in the sky

For Principal Bob Wilkoff of Archaeon, Inc. Architects, the expanse of the firm’s office building in Cabin John, Md. was limited due to a tight lot. A structure designed to preserve and accommodate an existing 60-foot tall Sycamore tree and restrictive front yard setback demanded a spiral stair, but as it was an office with considerable traffic, the architect made the staircase 7-feet, 6-inches in diameter for comfort. Shop painted steel construction with helix handrails provides contrast to the grid of 49 18-by-18-inch windows. Treads are ribbed industrial rubber flooring.

Turret trumps all

When expanding a 1940s Tudor structure for a family in NW D.C., Wilkoff created a 6-foot diameter steel spiral stair that descends from the second floor master bedroom suite to the first floor family room. Located behind glass French doors to mitigate sound, carpeted treads in a fully glazed turret complete the airborne design.

Soaring solarium

For Principal Amy Gardner of Gardner Mohr Architects LLC, a uniquely renovated 21-foot high 1969 solarium—part of a D.C. residence—called for a staircase redolent of light and lightness. “The idea for the stair was to make a simple sculptural zigzag shape that appears to float,” Gardner said, noting the area under the stair blends into the floor, helping it appear to do so. Maple treads and risers with polished edges, and especially a translucent etched glass and steel handrail with stainless steel glass clips, add an additional lofty quality to the design.

Stairway to heaven

When renovating a Potomac, Md. residence—essentially a retreat for its occupants—a wooden tower with meditation and massage rooms and a lower level gym were included. McInturff Architects featured a staircase that connects the home’s three levels made of painted steel and Douglas fir, with maple stair treads, backed with Galvalume sheet steel.

Halo Linea low-voltage track lighting is built into a slot in the steel structure of the stair.

Cold at the top

In purchasing and reimagining their own “profoundly mediocre” 1960s standard developer-type home in Winchester, Va., architects Chuck Swartz and Beth Reader of Reader & Swartz Architects concede their staircase is the “most curious” on which they’ve ever worked.

“You can stand on top of the refrigerator that way, which seems like a ridiculous thing to do, except there are books up there,” Swartz said.

Addressing a technical problem with brick veneer on the sides of the building that just stopped at one point, the two gable ends were skeletonized so that they were just studs. Two-by-fours running horizontally were located every four feet, with structural insulated panels on the outside of the building. “We then over-windowed it,” Swartz said.

Left with a skeleton inside on the gable ends, shelves were created off of two-by-two’s that ran horizontally so the gable ends became large libraries. The end without the staircase is served by a rolling ladder from an old telephone building, as Swartz’s father worked for the telephone company.

At the other end, a very large refrigerator was obtained as Swartz loves to cook, encased in a birch veneer red-stained plywood box. An alternating tread staircase was positioned on the side of it, allowing the occupants to walk up and climb on top of the refrigerator to access all the books.

Additionally, the staircase becomes a kind of a sculpture in and of itself, featuring alternating treads and maple shelves as they ascend, held together by red oak that’s stained black. It also acts as a graduated display for art, artifacts and family objects.

A place for us

In Frederick County, Va., another singular Reader & Swartz staircase has several things going for it, among them bleachers made out of chestnut, which is the same as the floor, and which go up to the landing. “They stop so the children in the household can play or you can display things on them,” Swartz explained.

In addition, every other tread—the treads that are not the bleachers—are little maple rafts that sit on them and look like small crates. Once you get to the landing, the part that gets you all the way to the second floor is steel and open treads of the same maple. “It’s a way to think of a staircase as a little stage or amphitheater, or a place to sit and think about whether some of the pieces of the staircase can be different than others and still meet the building code,” Swartz quipped.

Some photos courtesy of Anice Hoachlander and Ron Blunt. 

Back to School: The ABC's of Architecture

By Beth Herman

It’s regarded the same way inhabitants of a European village might revere their cathedral, according to Principal Chuck Swartz of Reader & Swartz Architects, P.C.

Located on a 40-acre Olmsted Brothers-created site, inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia and emblematic of history’s Progressive Education Movement (PEM) in its open form and structure, iconic John Handley High School had been eroded by time and convention. On the National Register of Historic Places since 1998, the Winchester, Virginia school’s legacy was also tied up in an anomalous decision by Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art: For the duration of WWII, $1 million dollars’ worth of paintings had been secretly squired to a vault in the school’s basement— its Whistlers, Rembrandts and Degas’ under 24-hour armed guard to shield them from the possibility of a District attack. Opened in 1923 and renovated in the ‘70s, Handley’s programmatic mission, mechanical and electrical systems, fire safety resources and handicapped accessibility were increasingly marked by obsolescence and changing education models. In the case of a school-wide communications system, there was none.

With VMDO Architects as architect of record, Reader & Swartz Architects, P.C. collaborated in a seven-year, three-phase expansion, renovation and restoration of the original 122,000 s.f. structure (310,000 s.f. with later additions) that would, among other things, increase the number of classrooms for approximately 1,190 students. Aspects of the original Walter McCornack design—having undergone late 1970s incursions such as dropped ceilings (that impeded sunlight) and “hermetically sealed” windows that flailed at the energy conservation practices of the day—would be restored and/or reimagined into multi-functioning, aesthetically pleasing spaces. And, working with standards set forth by the Secretary of the Interior, essential tax credits available in restoring landmark buildings would accrue. “The building was literally a sacred cow,” Swartz said.

Sounds like school spirit

Affirming the community’s feverish support for the school, which translated into a $5 million to $8 million dollar local fundraising effort spearheaded by Sen. H. Russell Potts, Jr. to help defray some of its $63.9 million cost, Swartz, a Handley alumnus himself, said the redesign task was monumental on so many levels.

“We wanted to be true to Winchester, true to the historical vision of the school, true to the philosophy and spirit of the school,” he explained. But the architects also wanted to integrate 21^st Century educational ideals into the redesign. “We wanted to keep Handley’s soul but make it better than it was,” Swartz added, explaining their intention to make each space more than just a room, a passageway or a wall, but rather a teaching tool in itself—actually in the original style of the PEM.

According to VMDO Architects Principal Bob Moje, “Handley High School was a restoration but it wasn’t just putting it back the way it was. We rethought the whole educational process from top to bottom, reorganized where everything was in the school, and saw what the building’s existing assets were—what we could use and what we could reinterpret.”

Believing the school may be the only public high school of its kind to maintain extensive archives, of which the architects readily availed themselves, Swartz drew a parallel between early Handley/PEM design principles where students had access to natural light and the outdoors itself, and today’s education mandates for the same. Though a massive “nature study court” created in the original plans, conceived of as a greenhouse for observational purposes, was never realized in that its glass roof for some reason was never applied, the 1970s saw the application of a solid roof, but the empty court assumed no purpose, Swartz said. During the current renovation, the team exchanged the conventional roof not for glass but fiberglass, allowing light into the space below and turning it into a second cafeteria/cafe for socializing and meal options. Located just outside the school theatre (the largest in the city, according to Swartz), the space can also be utilized for special events like proms or après-theatre events. Busts of Founding Fathers and other historical elements lend a kind of dignity and education value to it.

In the next phase, a two-story trussed space—used as a gym in its original design—had received another floor during the ‘70s and had become levels of windowless classrooms. In the current renovation, part of the second floor was removed and a staircase was added to knit both levels together (access was previously gained through fire stairs), with the result a two-story gym and two-story state-of-the-art media center, where historical trusses were exposed and retained.

Of Picassos and partnerships

Originally created as a school for grades k-12, an arcade at one end of the building was designed to gild a kindergarten where children could go outdoors and play. For more than 80 years, it was never used in that or any way whatsoever, so the team closed off adjacent doors and created a brand new entrance into the school by using the entire arcade as a front portico.

The school’s main hallway had a previous, informal moniker where it was known simply as the wooden hallway. In the original Post WWI drawings, it was called the Gallery of Art and History: its intent to be filled with art or objects to provide students with a learning opportunity. Presently known as the James R. Wilkins Gallery (named for its current benefactor), or also as the school’s very own Corcoran Gallery, the space is now an arena—or teaching tool— of high quality art reproduced from Corcoran negatives, courtesy of a donor-sponsored partnership between Reader & Swartz, Water Street Design (graphics) and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. “Before we worked on it, it had some paintings of principals and random displays, but now it’s been elevated to gallery status,” Swartz said.

On the exterior, in addition to reconfiguring the arcade into the new main entrance, a balustrade across the top was rotting and had to be repaired and restored; cupolas and roofs needed repair and bricks repointing. Waterproofing was a huge component in the redesign, as among other things an esplanade had experienced structural problems over the years and was leaking substantially.

In the back of the building, a second floor was inserted and braced with steel, as the school had been built prior to lateral force requirements. “On the one hand you’re fixing caulk and rotten wood on windows and balustrades, and a leaky esplanade, but on the other you’re adding like a city block of modern classrooms that sit behind a parapet, making sure they aren’t seen from public areas so they are really quiet (and don’t intrude on the building’s historical integrity),” Swartz said. “It’s basically a new school inside an historic shell with as much history retained as possible.” The building was also reorganized to feature math and science classrooms on one side, with art and literature on the other, much like the left brain/right brain landscape of the human brain. Phase III of the redesign addressed the 1962 additions in the back, which were repaired and updated, though historic elements were not at issue.

“Architects make as many mistakes by doing too much as in not doing enough,” VMDO’s Moje said, “and this is a very interesting project in that regard. In some ways, it may be our best work but you cannot see a lot of it. It’s an amazing piece of sleight of hand to expand the school, but the front appearance has not changed at all,” he said, referencing the second floor that was stepped back considerably.

All in the family–and community

Citing choreography concerns in restoring and renovating a project of this magnitude, Swartz said the high school had to remain operational during construction, which took four years. “You had to meet all the education standards, help get kids into college—all those things while you’re tearing a building apart and putting it back together,” he said, adding the job was so extensive the first $30 million was just to tear things out and put in new systems—within the same walls.

“I went there, my mother went there and later worked there, my brother currently teaches there and my daughter goes there,” Swartz said of a project that resonated as much for him personally as it did professionally. “Clearly John Handley High School is an amazing edifice in this town.”

Said Moje, whose firm has designed many hundreds of educational environments in the past 35 years, “Probably the vast majority of articles you read in the news media are negative about public education. The fundraising efforts of the high school and its graduates show there is still an awful lot of good about it, and this building is representative in a lot of ways.”

Adventures in Chakra-tecture!

By Beth Herman

When a mold-ridden, baby blue, vinyl-sided 1970s “fake” farmhouse in Frederick County, Va., needed a total architectural alignment (translation: to raze or not to raze), Reader & Swartz Architects recruited the growing young family who lived there in a proactive design effort largely about lifestyle.

With yoga practice paramount among homeowners Stephen and Julie Pettler’s daily requisites, the original 2,858 s.f. home was reimagined “poetically,” according to Principal Chuck Swartz, to reach up and out, emulating a yoga pose. Appreciating the sun’s path in the course of the day with considerable length and glass added to the southern face, the ultimate 5,125 s.f. design included a soothing, cork-floored yoga room and library, and a dedicated school room for home schooled Zoe, now 14, Olivia, 11 and Sophia, 8.

Kapalabhati (breathing technique for cleansing breaths)

“When we started the project, there was really nothing in the house worth keeping because it was neither historic nor special,” Swartz said, recalling a kind of initial 911 call from the homeowners. “One of the things that had happened along the way was that with each improvement to the house (purchased in 2002), things got worse,” he continued, explaining that contractors had clogged or sealed crawl spaces and attic vents through the years. Project manager Kevin Walker called its walls “…a haven for mold.” Suffering serious respiratory ailments as a result and requiring mold abatement, the family had considered demolishing the property except for a conservation conscience that impelled it to investigate other options.

“In another situation, we might have bulldozed,” Swartz conceded, “but our client charged us with doing as good as we could environmentally, so that meant fixing the mold situation and not using toxic materials that might off-gas. Anything that was going into this house had to be thoughtful,” he said. Construction waste was sorted and recycled when possible. Additionally, Swartz recalled that the structure was situated perfectly–on a private road with mature trees and lots of land and vistas, and siting that utilized passive solar gain – making the decision to maintain the footprint of the house that much easier.

Surya Namaskara (sun salutation)

Building a 2,267 s.f. two-story addition to the East containing the yoga room, a library and master suite above it, and a one-story living room to the Southwest, the house went from being a “boxy piece of something to something that stretched up and out to the sun,” said Swartz. Sporting a gable roof made of trusses, the architects were able to remove them and create a simple shed roofline. “By putting a new hat on it and adding the two wings, we really changed the house’s sense of self,” he affirmed.

Retaining the existing box as the core of the new house, this became the kitchen with three children’s bedrooms, a laundry room and bathroom above it. While working within the structure’s traditional though limiting eight-foot ceilings, the architects decided to open up the second floor above the kitchen, creating a space that at its apogee is 28 feet high, and which fosters easy conversation between downstairs and upstairs occupants (Swartz quipped about waking up the kids from the kitchen). A light monitor – or vertical window with a tiny roof – at the top channels sunlight everywhere, and cedar trees a friend of the Pettler’s was cutting down anyway were reincarnated as columns that support steel used in some of the kitchen construction.

In the kitchen, which Swartz called the home’s spiritual center because its design connects everyone, cabinets of maple, crushed sunflower seeds, bamboo and sorghum can be seen, with towering wood structures which hold the oven and refrigerator shooting up through the open space with a skyscraper-like or sun worshipping quality. Topped with wells (not planters that can leak), house plants nest in self-watering pots so as not be over-watered. On the second floor, little doors open up to the wells for plant maintenance. The living room addition, in part defined by a soapstone structure that houses a woodstove and bookshelves, has a surprise tree leaning out from a corner of the structure. Deep shelves are lined with metal to hold firewood, and in a nod to nature, a boulder–unearthed during the construction process–now doubles as sculpture and seating. The space reaches up and out, toward the sun, with a ceiling trajectory of about eight feet to more than 15 feet.

Namaste (the soul in me acknowledges the soul in you)

“We wanted to make a modern house that was really wonderful, but not make it all about the architect,” Swartz explained, also speaking to the façade. To that end, a decision to personalize the home’s exterior was manifested in the expanded use of “tattoos,” wherein art panels were painted by family members, relatives, friends and even an artist in Japan where Julie Pettler had worked. “They had friends over, and had champagne and chocolate, telling people they couldn’t leave until they painted a panel,” Swartz recalled, noting a clear poly coating was applied in the end. “Now it’s like a time capsule on the outside of the building,” he said.

Skinned in cedar siding, the exterior material finds its way to the interior, framing the staircase and seen again outside the kitchen where the living room is. Unpainted plaster walls on the first floor and drywall for bedroom walls maintain the space’s clean simplicity, with downstairs flooring of reclaimed wormy chestnut. The stairs themselves, made of hickory, are each two risers high, essentially creating bleacher seating for the girls and/or platforms for pots and plants. Rafts between the bleachers facilitate climbing, with a flying staircase effect achieved beyond the landing.

With a high efficiency HVAC that includes ground-loop geothermal, radiant floor tubing and an on demand tank-less water heater, as well as other sustainable elements such as low or no-VOC stains and sealants, and high efficiency fixtures and fittings, the house meets the personal criteria of an environmentally- and health-conscious young family.

“It was important to me to see how a family could be that involved in the architecture,” Walker said, noting the process was more about the people living there than the architects. “They are so much more in tune with the results because of that. It was good to see them come back to their home, but with a whole different life.”

"After" photography by Judy Davis/HDPhoto

The House that Straddled Time

By Beth Herman

It's either in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley or in your wildest dreams, depending on how much Ketel One you've had to drink the night before, but for a noted NYC expat/physician, this place is really home.

For Winchester, Va.-based Chuck Swartz and Beth Reader of Reader & Swartz Architects, creating a place to retire for a client whose lifetime interests included opera and what some might consider colliding collections of pop art, rare books, skeletal remains, insects, an imposing statue of bad-boy Greek character Actaeon and antique scientific oddities presented a design challenge largely unparalleled in their 20 years in practice together, but one the firm truly embraced. Ultimately receiving an AIA D.C. merit award in the historic resources category, the architects’ efforts to integrate 300 years of art, objects, books and furniture, including a 1959 Eames chair and Mies van der Rohe daybed, into slightly more than 3,000 s.f. of a late 19^th century “street side farm house,” known as vernacular Victorian, resulted in a home that’s rich, tactile appeal rivaled its intellectual brio.

“When you see these things,” Swartz said of his client’s eclectic though erudite taste, “it’s not an ego collection for him. He actually reads these amazing books and knows all about them. And all of the objects – he knows who did them, who they were related to. He lives in the history of Western culture.”

Upstairs, Downstairs

Originally four apartments, Reader & Swartz Architects, who also credit Lodge Construction, Inc.’s craftspeople and project manager Earl Burroughs, began by converting the structure into two spaces: lower and loft. The smaller, bottom living space of 939 s.f. went to the homeowner’s caretaker who maintains the precisely landscaped, vibrant grounds and gardens that further define the space. Primarily a renovation, the only addition to the premises was the inclusion of another library, in fact a third library, commonly referred to as the “secret” library due to its windowless location, which houses some of the homeowner’s estimated 4,000-book collection under unusually creative circumstances.

“In this case, the library is the room and the room is the library,” Swartz explained, noting the shelves go from floor-to-ceiling on all four chocolate brown walls in the 13x13x13-ft space. When the door - which is backed by more shelving - is closed, it disappears, and a highly mobile library ladder runs the entire perimeter of all four walls to access any and all books. A 1920s art deco Murano glass light fixture hangs from a coffered ceiling, and isn’t electrified, holding candles instead. The room is actually lit by a minimalist fixture above this one, which shines down on the glass. “We’re taking an old light fixture and thinking of it as an object rather than a source of light," Swartz said, which is exemplary of other repurposed entities throughout the home. “Everything is looked at for its properties and thought about a lot,” Swartz noted. “So if something is beautiful and (the homeowner) loved it, we figured out how to have it make sense in the building.”

In the garden library, which overlooks a rather formal Karesansui rock garden, black Corian bookshelves are traversed by tapered, vertical, floor-to-ceiling pieces of wood, almost like airplane wings, which add precision and scale to that room’s collection of books. The remaining library, called the main salon, is a large, pale green room with floor-to-ceiling glass, a barrel-vaulted ceiling and mirrors at each end. On one wall is a changeable wooden apparatus, thought of as kinetic or interactive sculpture. “The verticals are set, but all the horizontal pieces can be unscrewed very quickly, almost in IKEA fashion,” Swartz explained, adding the whole composition can be moved around to accommodate the client’s glassware, antique medical objects, sea shells and more. “He calls it his Wundercamera,” Swartz quipped.

The Butler with the Candlestick in the Kitchen

In tandem with the home’s robust personality and old/new functionality, the kitchen needed to have its own voice. The last thing the team desired was to default to a “subdivision-type” kitchen with little dignity. “We wanted the space to be the way a really old kitchen would be, where it’s a room with things that are worthy,” Swartz explained. In this respect, plastic laminate “caskets” were designed to hold base cabinets and wall cabinets so that everything looks like built-in furniture. While the cabinets themselves are modern, they’re made of red oak providing a grain that, at closer look, permeates their black veneer. Visible joists were covered with black milk paint, with a floor on top of them so that the wood is visible. White subway tile on the walls flanks concrete countertops, and glass blocks from an old building in Tulsa, Oklahoma, separate the kitchen from a bathroom but allow light to shine through (as well as down the staircase when the bathroom is in use). A high-design Italian light fixture from the 1950s punctuates the space, with nearly all of the home’s light fixtures - such as the main salon’s Vassilakis Takis colored lights on stalks display - offering some kind of pedigree, according to Swartz. “The kitchen actually has an old feel without any particular reference to time,” he affirmed.

Lie Back and Think of England

Recalling the homeowner’s English roots and dry sense of humor, Swartz said a problem arose when the mechanical system had to be placed outside, up high, in plain sight of the bedroom. A resulting abstract steel pyramid design, in a kind of homage to artist Sol LeWitt whose actual work can be found in other places inside and outside the building, was cut by computer to form what is affectionately called “mechanical lingerie” or the “secular steeple.” In short, it camouflages the mechanical hardware and reflects the rooftops of Great Britain. And where the loft itself utilizes floor-to-ceiling glass to appreciate the view of the gardens below, the façade of the first floor caretaker’s unit - in a nod to history and for privacy - is clad in something resembling Victorian-era pressed metal, similar to what’s seen on ceilings in old stores or in restaurants.

The overall structure, which Swartz said is not a restoration but in sustainable terms a reuse of an old building, is compared, by the architect, to a chef who might find some less contemporary thought-of foods, such as venison or cornbread, and use them in a whole new way. “It doesn’t have a static view of either architecture or history,” Swartz said about the home. “It’s a serious building, done with an open-minded sense of humor. It’s not trying to be old or modern or opulent or minimalist or anything. It’s more of a celebration of life.”