http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/arts/design/the-arcus-center-for-social-justice-leadership-in-kalamazoo.html 2014-10-16 00:52:43 The Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership in Kalamazoo The design of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership in Kalamazoo, Mich., reflects the ideals behind the building’s creation. === KALAMAZOO, Mich. — At 10,000 square feet, the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, on the campus of All the more reason to make a pilgrimage. It’s a high-tech throwback by Studio Gang, the well-known Chicago architecture firm led by Imagine a log cabin the Jetsons ordered from the 2062 Whole Earth Catalog, and you start to get the picture. What makes the building special is partly the novel form, which grows straight out of the center’s ambitions. It’s also the element of handicraft (those cordwood masonry exteriors) when so much marquee architecture leans on high-tech materials and 3-D printing. Mostly the center’s design is laudable simply for being eloquent and humane. The project cost about $5 million. Its patron is Jon Stryker, an architect, Kalamazoo College graduate and billionaire heir to a medical supply company here. He founded the The building occupies a tricky, sloping lot. From a small circular driveway, you enter through a doorway cut in the middle of the most straightforward of the three concave facades. The design’s wishbone geometry — an inflected deltoid of unequal sides, to be exact — becomes complicated on closer inspection. One facade bulges to allow a vertical eyelet window; one wing cantilevers over the street where the site falls toward the campus. Wide exterior steps on two sides create mini-amphitheaters. The inside, mostly whitewashed, terraces gently toward a grove of oaks outside. Tables and chairs are scattered on tapered plateaus. Orange and chocolate accents warm the palette. Scalloped booths make nooks in the walls for intimate chats. That ’60s vibe dovetails with the center’s social justice agenda and can summon to mind the work of midcentury Modernists like Alvar Aalto and Lina Bo Bardi. At the same time, the design links to some of the shape-shifting architecture that firms like OMA, UNStudio and Neutelings Riedijk turned out when Ms. Gang emerged from Rem Koolhaas’s office in the Netherlands. But the building is very much its own thing, dynamic yet low-key, with the conversation pit, just beyond the front door, occupying the crossroad, at the nexus of the Y. The architects raise the ceiling above the pit, adding arched clerestories that don’t quite make a dome. Light filters down, bouncing off the terrazzo floor, as it also pours through huge picture windows on the building’s three ends. One end looks onto the neighborhood; another, the campus; the third, toward the grove: town, gown, nature. A few neighbors hostile to modern architecture petitioned for the president’s old brick house to stay put. “But the house was much smaller than our vision for the center,” as Ms. Gang and her team (including Todd Zima and Claire F. Halpin) looked at Quaker meeting houses and log barns for inspiration; they identified communal hearths and food preparation as leitmotifs across cultures. They wanted the building’s shape to evolve out of the question: How does social justice occupy a space? And to invent for Arcus “a new archetype, derived from its program and site,” as Mr. Zima put it. So they installed an open kitchen next to the conversation pit. Visitors seem to gravitate into the pit, which feels separate but in the middle of everything. There are few sharp corners or right angles. The building’s arms reach out to draw visitors in. The social justice implications are obvious. They reveal themselves, as well, in the masonry walls, made with white cedar logs harvested in northern Michigan. Cordwood masonry — which combines logs laid widthwise, instead of bricks, with mortar to build a wall —harks back to the area’s early homesteaders, whose barn raisings bound settlers together. That history, lending romance to traditions of participatory democracy, was one reason Ms. Gang inclined toward cordwood masonry, along with the beauty and performance of the wood, which, unprocessed, retains and collects carbon. This means the building ends up sequestering as much carbon a year as 10 cars produce on the highway, Ms. Gang calculates. So the construction technique isn’t just quaint; it’s forward-looking. The metaphor of diversity in the differences from one log to the next was an aesthetic dividend. Rob Morris, the construction superintendent, told me the project tested his crew’s patience in all sorts of unusual ways: Nothing was standard, nothing straightforward, no angle simple, no two steel elements the same, no margin for error, and every log had to be placed just so. “We really had to plan far ahead, talk everything through, collectively, cooperate in ways that, believe me, weren’t easy,” he said. “But it was the only way to get this right.” So even the process fit the mission.