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

Residential Architect, August, 2003 by Cheryl Weber

inspirations

She has the gift that marks all great artists: the ability to see with a fresh eye and to make creative connections between disparate ideas. When Sorg inspects even the newest contemporary buildings, she sees the influences of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, all the way to Harry Weese and Richard Meier. These days, though, Sorg mostly looks inward for the muse. She says she sees new designs as a movie in her head. Her weekend house has an office in the loft overlooking the bay, but she works in silence, oblivious to the view. And while Sorg admires a lot of new architectural work, she doesn't study it in magazines. "It confuses me," she says, professing a loyalty to the legacies of Mies, Le Corbusier, and Wright. "I look always to the older architects. I told a developer, 'Don't talk to me about an architect unless they're dead.' But I do like Richard Meier."

A shadow, a reflection in a pond, a piece of music or clothing--all are inspirations for Sorg. Some of her current designs focus on courtyards and what it means to use buildings to break down outdoor space into smaller pieces. Those ideas are explored at the Eastern Shore houses, and on the U.S. embassy buildings in Kuwait, where housing units face each other across a sheltered green courtyard--the transplanted American lawn.

Another strand evident in the firm's current work is order vs. chaos. At the Materials Testing Lab, where objects are broken to test their properties, Sorg conceived an orthogonal building made of masonry with punched openings. Intersecting the rectangle are glass-and-metal, angular forms that are exciting and dissonant. Her design for an apartment building at 14th and P streets explores the same idea. The building, called Sign of the Lamb, will be marketed to young adults who are "working on ordering their disordered lives, like my daughter," who just graduated from Cornell.

Sorg's unflappable faith in her own instincts serves her well when it's time to argue the finer points of design in front of review boards and community groups. Behind her quietness and poise lurks a very tough woman. Says van Sweden, "She'll drift into a room full of people quietly without separating the air, sit down, and be in total command of the meeting. She comes in perfectly dressed and cool as a cucumber. And she's very flexible and has a good sense of humor, which is very important in this profession."

creative chaos

Sorg is like that with her staff, too. At the helm of an office of 40 people that is brimming with work, she thinks in broad strokes and allows others to follow through on the details--albeit with her mentoring oversight. With 10 to 12 senior project managers, the firm currently, has a dozen projects under way ranging from $25 million to $40 million--but she would like to trim the number of projects to eight. The firm owes much of its recession-proof stability to the mix of work Sorg seeks out--60 percent for the public sector, 40 percent for private interests.