Modern, historical, public, private, chaos, quiet: Suman Sorg spins elegant solutions among opposing forces - Biography

Residential Architect, August, 2003 by Cheryl Weber

Viewed from across a wind-swept cove on Maryland's Chesapeake Bay, the weekend residence Suman Sorg, FAIA, is completing looks like a cluster of Monopoly houses: three tall, grabled buildings with tin roofs and glass walls facing out over the water. The serene yet bold, contemporary forms are clad in marine plywood panels, limned in metal flashing that glints in the powerful sunlight. Up close, the retreat's logic reveals itself. Sorg detached the house's two bedrooms from the soaring living space. The house and twin pavilions are connected by a wood walkway, "so you're not sneaking around inside the house," she explains. Those scattered buildings--and two additional pool houses to be built this fall--surround a large entry courtyard, a pool, and a tangle of silvery grasses.

This is only the second custom home the Washington, D.C., architect has designed. The other house sits just across the way, part of a 25-acre soybean farm Sorg purchased with longtime friends James van Sweden, a well-known landscape architect, and Marilynn Melkonian, who heads a community-development company. While the buildings in Sorg's compound stand tall and vary in height, like those on surrounding farms, the other house, designed for van Sweden, has a low profile that floats on the land. Its flat roofs and utilitarian forms were inspired by boat sheds and chicken coops. "I was interested in the kind of Eastern Shore buildings that are not meant for human habitation," Sorg says, "agricultural buildings that aren't bombastic, aren't screaming out at you, and yet if you look closely are interesting and subtle."

Many architects start out building beach houses and move on to larger, more complex projects. Sorg, who founded Sorg and Associates in 1986, took the opposite route. Her passion has been institutional and public projects, not custom homes. But if the best architecture comes from an intimate understanding of culture, climate, and environment, Sorg is uniquely equipped to design a wide variety of projects.

Her search for a fulfilling career, in fact, takes her around the world. Now in her early 50s, Sorg has designed multimillion-dollar U.S. embassy housing in Kuwait, Uzbekistan, and Barbados, and is working on another U.S. embassy in a Central Asian country much in the news. Her portfolio ranges from award-winning historic preservation projects, such as the Lincoln Theatre and the Georgetown Post Office in Washington, D.C., to a Hope VI master-planned community in Bradenton, Fla.

Sorg's stylistic range is just as fluid. She values community-based projects that preserve the fabric of urban neighborhoods, but also seeks out eclectic work that frees her up from historical constraints. One of her current projects is a state-of-the-art Materials Testing Laboratory for the D.C. Department of Public Works, a clash of glass and masonry and deconstructed forms. "We like projects that are off the beaten track," she says. "These buildings below the radar screen can give architects freedom."

the doctor is in

If Sorg hadn't been an architect, she probably would have been a doctor. As a teenager in northern India, Sorg saw herself practicing medicine. But because she excelled at drawing and math, her father, a physicist and a diplomat, suggested that she study architecture. Sorg enrolled in the University of New Delhi's architecture program, and then transferred to Howard University when her family came to the U.S. in the late 1960s.

After graduation, she and her new husband, Scott Sorg, set out for Morocco and the Ivory Coast with the Peace Corps. They lived in small villages, where she built market stalls and other civic buildings--projects that explored the social aspects of design. "I realized how important it was to have things in pedestrian scale and neighbor-friendly," she says, "and to have a communal sense of the village. I got to know the mango vendor. That kind of connection to community stays with you."

Indeed, Sorg approaches her work as if she were the village doctor, even though she's lived most of her life in sophisticated urban settings. "My practice is like a doctor's office. You go where and when you're needed," she says, apologizing for an unexpected trip out of town. And she has a calm and gentle, unassuming surface--call it a bedside manner--that belies her intellectual intensity. Practicing something as culturally dependent as architecture, Sorg returned to academia to understand idiosyncrasies that weren't hers. In 1978 she enrolled in Cornell University's master of architecture program in historic preservation, never intending to do period architecture. "I wanted to figure out the real DNA of American architecture," she says. "When I came out of the program, I took restoration and preservation projects because I knew about them. But my intention was always to contribute to the continuum of architecture. Now the ball is in our hands. We have to pass it to the next generation."

Those diverging interests in modernism and restoration have made Sorg almost clinically aware of the delicate balance between preserving a building's history and contributing something new. Her restoration motto is "do no harm," meaning that if the historic context is fragile, one should avoid intruding with contemporary forms. On the other hand, it's permissible to introduce contrast when a strong historic vocabulary exists. "I always feel responsible for what is needed in terms of one thing or the other," she says. "Sometimes the historic fabric could be overpowered by a modern move. You have to make that judgment."