A Collaborative Approach
by Jonathan McGaha | February 28, 2013 12:00 am
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Sebastian Schmaling, AIA, LEED AP, and Brian Johnsen, AIA, are about to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their Milwaukee-based architecture firm, Johnsen Schmaling Architects. But the partnership goes back much further than that: back to their days as undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin- Madison when they were both architecture students. “We worked together as students,” says Schmaling. “We worked together as students in competitions and got to know each other.”
For a while they worked together at a firm in Milwaukee, continuing their partnership on projects. The company, Schmaling explains, allowed its architects some autonomy and latitude in taking a direction, which suited both the men. That collaboration was interrupted when Schmaling returned to graduate school and completed a masters in Architecture and Urban Design from Harvard. When he returned to Wisconsin, they reconnected and decided to open their own firm.
The company
Johnsen Schmaling Architects is a smaller, five person firm with the two name principals, two registered architects and a part-time student. The company is managed in more collaborative effort, which extends to how the firm approaches design as well.
“We do it all together,” Schmaling says. “There’s no point person. We sit down together trying to conceptualize what we want to do and achieve.” This approach has its roots in their collaboration as students. “We build a lot of study models,” he says. “It’s our way of communicating with each other. We put form and content to our ideas, develop design.”
Johnsen Schmaling provides services in both residential and commercial construction. “We don’t do a lot of projects at the same time,” says Schmaling, so the percentage can vary considerably from year to year. Currently, it is about 70 percent residential, and traditionally the majority of the work at the company has been residential. “That’s not by choice,” Schmaling says. “The kind of projects that come our way are exciting, and we have to gladly accept them.”
When asked how the company gets its work, Schmaling laughs and says: “I don’t know. We have never advertised. We’re very fortunate. When we started our own firm, an architectural writer at the Milwaukee [Journal] Sentinel heard about it and featured us in a front-page article. That led to three projects.”
They never looked back, and collaboration has been the heart of their process. “We’ve done it for so long,” says Schmaling, “that we intuitively know what the other person can bring into design. A lot of times architects struggle with the idea that their own approach may be flawed. They don’t like to get input from another person who may claim authorship.” The joint effort at Johnsen Schmaling Architects gives both the principals an opportunity to improve.
The work
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One of the unique aspects of the kind of work the firm does is that their residential projects tend to be done in rural settings. They enjoy doing residential work. “Houses are a great testing ground,” Schmaling says. “You can experiment on a smaller scale, work directly with clients who might be open to ideas a corporate board may not be.”
That shows in the innovative approach to material selection. The company is generally agnostic in its material selection and finds unique and surprising ways to use metal in conjunction with concrete and wood and other materials.
“Materiality is very important to us,” Schmaling says. “Finding the right mix of materials is probably one of the more tricky parts of designing something. You can design the right form, but if you assign the wrong materials to that form, it falls apart.
“What we really love about metal is it has so many facets to it. It can be very precise and very milled and very sharp edged and treated to withstand the weather so it can retain its precision throughout its life span. And then it also has the ability to weather. It has the poetic quality to it that is almost at the opposite end of that more finished, anodized sharply fabricated piece of metal. That spectrum is interesting to us. That one type of material can be so different.”
There are many examples in the completed projects of Johnsen Schmaling Architects that show the full spectrum of metal, from the poetic interpretation of the “Studio for a Composer” to the precise use of metal in the “Stacked Cabin.” “These buildings can change their appearance over time,” Schmaling says, “without becoming obsolete.”
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Execution
Even though metal is a material with a vast spectrum from precision to poetry, it requires impeccable detailing, especially when placed in proximity to other materials that perform in very different manners. “One of our specialties,” says Schmaling, “is looking at how things come together. We don’t like caulk and try to avoid it where we can. We spend a lot of time trying to understand how materials work. Our goal is to put them together in a way that allows them to work for a long time.”
To facilitate that, Johnsen Schmaling does a lot of testing and building mockups to see how their designs perform. “We are very explicit in how things should be joined and put together and detailed,” he says.
Schmaling cautions against pushing the design envelope without doing the research. “That’s not a good recipe for enduring architecture,” he says. “It’s a recipe for failure.”
When designing with metal, Schmaling and his partner, Johnsen, have found a recipe that works and provides designs that will last and add substantially to the beauty of the built environment.
Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/a-collaborative-approach/