Hidden transactions

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1994 by Penny McGuire

Claudio Silvestrin has transformed a warehouse into a workplace while maintaining the simplicity of its amorphous space.

Claudio Silvestrin's contemplative inclinations have been largely expressed in his designs of private apartments and art galleries. A degree of serenity is already implied in the idea of such projects, but Silvestrin is extreme and implacable in pursuit of its expression. Characteristically, he strips away all that is extraneous to function, and uses elemental forms and stark materials to enclose space, dissolving and shaping it with light or shadow. By such manoeuvres, the designer has invested cramped quarters with a numinous sense of space. It is the extreme that turns simplicity into the sensuous -- even the opulent.

Silvestrin's uncompromising skills have recently been employed on the design of busy, highly computerised offices, not a field one would have imagined suited to minimalist design. Silvestrin's answer, having analysed the functioning of the firm and ordered it coherently on plan, is simply to provide handsome and ample means of making technology and attendant clutter invisible, the means being made the bones of the design.

Starkmann Inc, the client, is an academic book supplier in Massachusetts, furnishing books to libraries in the USA, Canada and Europe. The firm required space for staff, a meeting room, reception and workstations, space for storing books (many of them valuable) and for the computerised technology controlling its operations. The scheme involved the transformation of a 1960s warehouse set in the countryside, about half an hour by car from Boston. A modest budget meant accepting the warehouse structure, (spanned by roof trusses), and its featureless interior, but part of Silvestrin's art lies precisely in this direction.

He has the ability to seize hold of the essential character of a place (long and narrow, large and amorphous, and so on), and by exaggeration transcend its limitations. In this case, an amorphous space has been given rigour by an orderly, not to say regimented plan, marked out and anchored down by solid dividing screens, counters and low walls.

The volume and simplicity of the space has been emphasised by furniture set in long lines down the building's length and enhanced by light -- by natural illumination from rooflights overhead or new openings cut into the elevation on to the green Massachusetts landscape. Artificial light is diffused upwards by inverted U-shaped reflectors overhead.

The building is organised into two parts; a new entrance and reception desk, secretarial and managerial accommodation are at one end on a new concrete screed floor; and book warehousing, storage and service entrance are on an existing floor at a lower level at the other.

A ramp between washrooms connects the two parts, the slight change in level signifying division of the firm's operations. In his search for an acceptable balance between visual purity and functional efficiency Silvestrin has hidden desks, computers, services, coats (and the receptionist from the neck down) behind screens. Only the operations manager, who wanted semi-privacy, has an angled office screen.

It was decided not to provide a reception area. Instead, while waiting, visitors can wander around looking at works of art exhibited on walls and screens. As usual with this architect, materials and finishes are extremely simple -- desks and screens of American oak, matt concrete floors and painted plaster.