Carol Ross Barney has built a practice that speaks to the importance of public architecture and how it engages our communities
Carol Ross Barney, FAIA, was the first woman to design a federal building, which is a nice accolade to the Chicago-based architect’s devotion to designing public buildings. But the building itself gives that recognition even more weight. The founder and design principal of Ross Barney Architects took on the task of designing the new Oklahoma City Federal Building, which replaced the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The Murrah building had been bombed in an act of domestic terrorism in 1995.
The Architect’s Client
Since its founding in 1981, Ross Barney Architects has focused on public buildings. “Almost all of our work is in the public realm,” says Ross Barney. “We don’t do any houses. We do the rare private office. That was a conscious move on my part because I like to be involved in projects where I’m the client as well as the architect. That’s the place where I think I can be most responsible.”
When asked what her goals were for entering architecture and founding her own firm, Ross Barney flashes her sense of humor. “Just world domination,” she says with a laugh. But there is a serious underpinning to her motivation. “When I was trying to determine my career and what I wanted to do for my life, I wanted to do something that would actually make the world better. That sounds a little naïve, but that’s what I wanted to do. I just found in architecture and planning that I had that opportunity. Space is so important to how people live, how comfortable they are and the quality of their life, which is ultimately, important to their happiness.”
Those were not unusual sentiments for a high school student during the late 1960s, but for Ross Barney, that idealism has been proved out in her actions. “Since then I think that it has become even more important,” she says. “Now, half the people of the world are living in cities. It seems like cities are part of the answer to the climate crisis we have, and I just think architecture and planning are important considerations. Design is important.”
Research Based
Idealistic architecture that isn’t leavened by reality can make for awkward spaces that express emotional ideals but don’t serve people. Ross Barney Architects works in a public realm that requires it be devoted to what the community wants and needs. “We’re heavily reliant on research,” says Ross Barney. “And heavily reliant on public input … There are all these nameless people who are going to use this space. I like to think that I’m responsible to them.”
Serving the client appropriately, though, is a balancing act. Ross Barney worries about architects, especially in public works, trying to make the client an agency rather than a partner. “The client is our society and our community,” she says. “For me the hardest things is balancing that effectively. I like to think that when someone hires an architect, they’re really interested in their expertise. … And if you have that relationship with a client, that’s when you can really make a difference.”
In public architecture, commissioned by elected officials who are beholden to an electorate, there is a real difficulty in developing that relationship. Ross Barney knows that the easiest way to manage a project is to look at the numbers, “but it may not be the most important thing. There are other requirements. Community requirements. Longevity requirements. Sustainability requirements that may even supersede the fiduciary ones. But even more important than that, they might not be in conflict. It’s not just the cost, it’s the quality.”
The example Ross Barney offers to illustrate this idea comes from her experience designing the Oklahoma City Federal Building. In surveys of workers the top concern was, understandably, that it be safe and nobody be allowed to park near the building since it was a fertilizer bomb-laden rental truck that caused the damage. The second highest concern was that the workers wanted convenient parking. “They seem diametrically opposed, but when you think about it, the underlying idea is they wanted to be safe and they wanted it to be convenient.”
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| The College of Dupage Early Childhood Education and Care Facility, takes advantage of the efficiencies of a metal building system. Photo: Kate Joyce, Hedrich Blessing Photographers |
Metal and Design
Meeting the needs of the client and serving the community through public building design requires a certain amount of flexibility, and that includes material selection. “I really select materials because they do the job they need to do,” says Ross Barney. “Most materials can be inherently beautiful. That’s what the designer needs to do.”
For metal building products, she sees huge advantages in their efficiency. The cost of hand making buildings in the field can be offset the by the panelization and modularization that are part and parcel of metal building products. “The way the metal products are inherently made,” she says, “puts them at an advantage. Immediately.”
For the College of DuPage Early Childhood Education and Care Facility, Glen Ellyn, Ill., Ross Barney selected a pre-engineered metal building system “because we knew that was the fastest way to make space.”
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| Morgan Street Station, Chicago, features perforated metal panels and glass. Photo: Kate Joyce Studios |
Morgan Street Station
The selection of metal building products for the Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA) new Morgan Street Station fulfilled a completely different role than the College of DuPage building, but of course, the two buildings serve very different purposes. At a CTA station, one of the driving forces is controlling graffiti, and for years new stations featured a lot of glass, which could be easily cleaned. After Chicago banned spray paint, though, people started etching the glass with engraving pens. “We worked with CTA to develop a palette of materials,” Ross Barney says.
The Morgan Street Station project took that design concept a step further and the combination of metal and glass “became the entire identity of the station,” Ross Barney says. “The entire station became this ethereal metal that you can look through. It’s perforated, and it almost feels like a shade instead of solid metal.” The glass is placed only for windbreaks. The computerized perforations replicate the shadows of from under the elevated tracks. “We couldn’t do that years ago,” Ross Barney says. “It’s manufacturing that’s way ahead. We’re really interested in that. To me, that’s one of the most exciting pieces of being an architect. Finding out how materials are made, and how you can enhance either their visual or performance qualities.”
The Morgan Street project exemplifies the kind of project Ross Barney likes to take on. It is at the crossroads of high design and practicality. “There are a lot of trophy buildings in the world,” she says, “but there are a lot of other beautiful buildings where the beauty comes out of the fact that they fit so well. And do their jobs so well. And that’s where I want to be.”
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| The Office Technical and Education Builder at Fermi National Accelerator Lab, Batavia, Ill., plays with the intersection of forms and the light moving across metal panels. Photo: Kate Joyce Studios |
Fermilab
The transit station in an urban environment has to serve as a kind of beacon so that people can find it easily. Any building on the Northern Illinois prairie where the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Batavia, Ill., is located is-by its mere existence-a beacon. The new Office Technical and Education Building
(OTE) is part of the Illinois Accelerator Research Center at Fermilab and, as is true with many scientific laboratories, metal is part of the equation. As Ross Barney says: “The entire vocabulary at the laboratory is metal buildings. It’s a favorite material. But we tried to relook at it. Physics buildings tend to brawny, muscular things.”
The solution in this instance was to adopt the vernacular material but take a uniquely different approach to the shape of the building. “We decided to keep the materiality,” Ross Barney says, “but give it a different shape.” The driving design factor was the need to accommodate utilities that were entering the building. The solution was to turn the building into a bridge. “Sometimes you take a disadvantage, and if you’re careful with it, you can turn it into an advantage.”
Challenge of a Lifetime
The Fermilab project is a LEED Gold-certified building, and Ross Barney has a strong feeling about the new need for sustainable design. “I don’t think it is just a trend,” she says. “This challenge, the one of making buildings and environments sustainable, is probably the single challenge of this generation. If we fail, it’s all over. We only do sustainable buildings.” Ross Barney Architects doesn’t necessarily get LEED ratings on all its projects, but it does work to build the most responsible building the owner can afford. “We’ll tell them, sometimes, unconventional things like they’re making the building too big, because the most sustainable building is the building you don’t build. It’s not just an approach to materials or systems. It has to be a holistic approach to space.”
Photo of Carol Ross Barney: Iffat Afsana