This Firm is Putting Amazing Architecture at the Service of Communities
Browse the Architizer Jobs Board and apply for architecture and design positions at some of the world’s best firms. Click here to sign up for our Jobs Newsletter.
Questions abound when architecture firms choose to undertake a project intended for community use. How can a building fulfill multiple client purposes in ever-more diverse communities? How will architects respect and contribute to a sense of identity for the people intending to use the place? How will a building incorporate sustainable design and technology given budgetary limitations? These questions constantly challenge architects because they require a different answer for every new context. Moreover, such projects require teams of architects and designers who have a rigorous understanding of the multi-faceted needs of a community but who are still willing to make bold architectural statements.
KSS Architects is one of those firms that regularly handle a high level of coordination between design teams, client interests and the built environment. It’s why for this week’s jobs newsletter, we want to highlight KSS, the award-winning firm designing new and adaptive reuse community-oriented projects across the United States.
The award-winning full-service architecture, planning, and interior design firm has offices in New York, Philadelphia, and Princeton. Founded in 1983, KSS has grown to a team of 80 design professionals, building a reputation for design projects that stimulate the intersections of learning, commerce, and community.
When completed, the Amy Gutmann Hall by KSS Architects will be Philadelphia’s tallest timber building; image by KSS Architects
KSS’s architects takes pride in the firm’s comprehensive design approach – a quality apparent in the dozens of projects the firm has developed over the past few years. Take for instance the Amy Gutmann Hall, the University of Pennsylvania’s future data science building. The university wanted a building that would bring the digital and natural worlds together but was unsure how this vision could materialize. After extensive consultation with the administration, members of faculty, students and other community groups, KSS developed a plan to achieve just that: their final design is not only the first mass timber project for UPenn, but also the first six-story mass timber building in the city of Philadelphia. The timber structure reduces the building’s carbon footprint by 52% relative to concrete and 41% relative to steel. The project, which is slated for completion in 2024, is bound to herald a new era for sustainable architecture at the university and beyond. It will also provide a new spacious, warm and tactile environment welcoming to students, instructors and visitors alike.
The Amy Gutmann Hall project illustrates well the design approach and work culture undertaken at KSS. The firm pairs extensive community research with deft consensus-building in which every member of the team has a voice — and a stake — in the collective success of the project. Thanks to its collaborative and transparent design process, KSS builds strong relationships of trust with clients, allowing the firm to make boldly imaginative designs to address the unique goals of clients and the environmental challenges of today.
The Foundation Collegiate Academy in Newark, NJ, is one of many renovation projects KSS Architects has undertaken on charter schools in underserved communities; photo by KSS Architects
Interested in working for one of the most dynamic architectural firms in the United States focusing on community and sustainability? Consider applying to KSS Architects through Architizer’s jobs board.
The firm is currently for eight new positions for their Philadelphia offices: including Project Architects with levels of experience ranging from 3 to 10 years for QA/QC and Industrial Markets, as well as Architectural Designers with 3-5 years’ experience.
Browse the Architizer Jobs Board and apply for architecture and design positions at some of the world’s best firms. Click here to sign up for our Jobs Newsletter.
In her preface, Kloter highlights a key disparity in numbers: “In its 2020 annual report, the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) revealed that 50% of the 26,977 students enrolled in NAAB-accredited architecture programs – B. Arch, M. Arch, and D. Arch– were female. This is a number that has been improving since the 1970s, yet the percentage of women who obtained their architect license, achieve upper management positions, become partners and own architectural firms have not increased at the same rate as men have. To date, data from the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) 2021 NCARB by the Numbers report shows that only 24% of the 121,997 registered architects in the United States are female.”
Kloter’s book contains a wealth of practical advice to balance home and work life, as well as powerful motivational tools to instill belief in women, encouraging them to embrace their capabilities to be renowned architects and incredible mothers. The following quotes provide a teaser for the words of wisdom that you can find throughout the book:
The Binhai Science Museum was designed to showcase artifacts from Tianjin’s industrial past through large-scale contemporary technology, including spectacular rockets for space research. The project is part of the city’s Binhai Cultural Center and contains facilities for cultural events and exhibitions as well as galleries, offices, and restaurant and retail spaces. The project was made to relate to the rich industrial history of the area, the site of high-volume manufacturing and research. A series of large-scale cones create major rooms throughout the museum. The central cone, lit from above, connects all three levels of the building.
The exterior of the museum is covered with aluminum rain screen over a sealed aluminum surface, giving the building a unified presence despite its large size and the disparate elements of the structure. Approximately 3,600 copper-colored panels in two sizes (4×7 ft and 4×11.5 ft) make up the flat portions of the building’s façade. The perforated metal panels also help reduce heat gain. The design team developed 52 different sizes of panels with each row of the cones corresponding to a unique width. Each panel is backed by two aluminum U-channels located between the perforations.
Completed in 2017, Brock Commons Tallwood House is an 18-story, LEED Gold certified, 404-bed student residence building located at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. It was the world’s tallest mass wood tower at the time of its completion. The timber structure and prefabricated facade also went up in only 66 days.
A CLT canopy runs the length of a curtain wall base, which reveals the warm wood finishes of amenity spaces within. Elevator lobbies are clad with the same material as the exterior. Hallway finishes include natural wood doors and a palette of rich umber and ochre accent finishes. Living unit interiors are bright white, spare and simple.
The Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center is the academic hub of the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. With the goal of becoming a net zero building, The Bloomberg Center forms the heart of the campus, bridging academia and industry while pioneering new standards in environmental sustainability through state-of-the-art design. T
Designed as a rain screen system, the outermost layer of the façade is composed of aluminum panels surfaced in an iridescent, PPG polymer coating. Designed in collaboration with Zahner, an architectural metal fabricator, the façade utilizes Zahner’s Louvered ZIRA™ system to create the image patterning.
Perched on an island’s edge in Georgian Bay, Ontario, the Grotto Sauna is a feat of old-world craftsmanship and new world sustainability made possible by cutting-edge software and fabrication technology. The selected concept for the Grotto prescribed a solid, simple presence on the exterior, while the interior followed dynamic air movements in curvature forms; requiring design solutions.
Partisans collaborated directly with their fabrication partner, MCM Inc., to develop new prototyping methods and with engineers and develop novel software patches for the toolpaths. The latter enabled the fabricators to override the automated limitations of the CNC machinery and ultimately use it as a sculpting tool to achieve the aesthetic vision, all the while maximizing the available wood and milling along the grain so that the pieces would match one another. The successful production of the panels also had to anticipate the method by which they would be sequentially assembled. This required the team to develop a sophisticated installation plan in tandem with the fabrication process.
When Bjarke Ingels Group and JDS Architects set out to create The Mountain residential project, it was the 2nd generation of the VM Houses: same client, same size and same street. The program, however, is 2/3 parking and 1/3 living. What if the parking area became the base upon which to place terraced housing, like a concrete hillside covered by a thin layer of housing cascading from the 11th floor to the street edge? Rather than doing two separate buildings next to each other — a parking and a housing block — the team decided to merge the two functions into a symbiotic relationship.
The parking floors are covered with a continuous perforated aluminum surface, folding into four parts from the southern to the eastern facades. This controls sunlight and air circulation. The folded surface makes reference to the name of the project, displaying a realistic image of Mount Everest.
Though many architectural enthusiasts around the world may only now be acquainting themselves with his larger body of work, they are likely already familiar with his design for the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion — a timber structure accented with indigo blue that ingeniously connected different times and spaces and reinterpreted form of the massive tree at the heart of his home town.