The Essential Part: substance architecture
by Paul Deffenbaugh | September 1, 2022 12:00 am
substance architecture uses multiple iterations to achieve simple elegance
Mankins founded the Des Moines, Iowa-based firm in 2005. He had been a partner in what was an iconic Iowa firm, Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck Architecture, and one of the motivations for naming the firm substance architecture was to avoid the awkwardness of being a partner in a firm that didn’t have your name on it.
“When I founded it,” he says, “I had a bunch of clients telling me that I needed to put my name on the door. Because people were hiring me, they wouldn’t know that substance was me. But I didn’t do that. I very consciously didn’t do that because even though I was a partner at Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck Architecture, I wasn’t Herbert, Lewis, Kruse or Blunck, so you were seen as kind of secondary.” Mankins didn’t want to do that with his firm.
substance: the real or essential part of anything; essence, reality or basic matter.
Creating architecture of substance requires searching for the essential—the essential character of a place, properties of a material, values of an institution and needs of a client. These characteristics transcend time and style to reflect more universal principles. By its nature, this search is reductive. It distills often complex and seemingly divergent desires into a unified, irreducible whole—the basic matter.
substance architecture has about 20 employees and works almost exclusively in Iowa with a heavy concentration on higher education work. There are two partners in addition to Mankins, whose title is founding and contributing principal: Todd Garner AIA, LEED AP, and Tim Hickman, AIA, LEED AP, both titled as principals.
Those titles reflect a transition that is happening at the firm and relates specifically to the decision on how to name the firm. As of July 26, 2022, Mankins is exiting the firm and taking up full-time teaching architecture at Iowa State University. “That’s one of the reasons why the firm isn’t named Mankins, Hickman Garner. So that the next generation, it’s their firm. It’s not the firm that used to be Paul’s.”
A Direct Style
Of course, the firm’s name carries so much more weight than just offering flexibility during generational transitions. It defines the firm. Architect Kevin Wagner has been with substance since 2010. “I think we’re driven strongly by simplistic rigor,” he says, “striving toward the best solution for the owner, the site and the community through the simplest form of architecture.”
The Jasper Winery features insulated metal panels that create a texture and rhythm for the exterior cladding, breaking up long façades and giving them more vitality. Using the panels unfinished on the interior allowed for a very efficient and cost-effective construction solution and expressed the material as itself. Photos: Farshid Assassi
Mankins elaborates: “I believe the best work is direct and focused. Part of this is a Midwestern sensibility. What that means is you edit things down to the essential. We like to talk a lot about Occam’s Razor, the simplest solution is generally the best. And I think that’s very applicable to architecture. The best work appears inevitable. Like, how could it be any other way? No one achieves that often, but there are times when the really best work appears inevitable because it’s such a clear response to the problem at hand.”
Working in Iowa may provide a context that allows that philosophy more readily than some other environments. “We’re not practicing in a dense urban environment,” says Mankins. “There’s not a clear contextual material palette that you want to respond to or against. So, those decisions are based on the efficiency of the systems. That’s one of the reasons we’ve used insulated metal panels so many times.”
Context goes beyond just placing a building in an environment and balancing or contrasting with the area. “Linking a building to its place is what tends to make work authentic,” says Mankins. “We are looking for a certain authenticity, but we find authenticity through finding a solution that reflects the essential nature of the problem and reflects the kind of cultural and physical context where it’s located. For us, that’s almost entirely Iowa, almost always has been Iowa.”
The Iterative Process
There’s a famous saying among writers, “It would have been shorter, but I didn’t have enough time.” In other words, making something simpler, clearer, more direct requires more effort. The same is absolutely true in architecture, and at substance there is an iterative process that achieves that.
Zinc-coated metal standing seam panels rise up the wall, create the roof and return to the ground. The repetition of the panels across the length of the buildings helps define their shape and gives them depth. Photos: Paul Crosby
Mankins elaborates: “I believe the best work is direct and focused. Part of this is a Midwestern sensibility. What that means is you edit things down to the essential. We like to talk a lot about Occam’s Razor, the simplest solution is generally the best. And I think that’s very applicable to architecture. The best work appears inevitable. Like, how could it be any other way? No one achieves that often, but there are times when the really best work appears inevitable because it’s such a clear response to the problem at hand.”
Working in Iowa may provide a context that allows that philosophy more readily than some other environments. “We’re not practicing in a dense urban environment,” says Mankins. “There’s not a clear contextual material palette that you want to respond to or against. So, those decisions are based on the efficiency of the systems. That’s one of the reasons we’ve used insulated metal panels so many times.”
Context goes beyond just placing a building in an environment and balancing or contrasting with the area. “Linking a building to its place is what tends to make work authentic,” says Mankins. “We are looking for a certain authenticity, but we find authenticity through finding a solution that reflects the essential nature of the problem and reflects the kind of cultural and physical context where it’s located. For us, that’s almost entirely Iowa, almost always has been Iowa.”
The Iterative Process
There’s a famous saying among writers, “It would have been shorter, but I didn’t have enough time.” In other words, making something simpler, clearer, more direct requires more effort. The same is absolutely true in architecture, and at substance there is an iterative process that achieves that.
“We’re not the Eureka! sketch people,” says Mankins.
“We talk a lot about iteration,” adds Wagner. “We go through lots and lots of options with the clients until we get to the best option. Usually, every time we iterate, it gets a little bit better, a little simpler. We start to align more things, spaces become simpler and more uniform.”
Wagner points to the Principal Riverwalk Pavilion as an example. “The shape of that metal panel starts on one side of the building and goes over the top, becomes the roof and then comes back down. The entire building is kind of based on a rhythm that is a linear progression of that panel.”
The firm completed its fourth project for Iowa State athletics, the Stark Performance Center. It features a pre-cast concrete, rectangular volume topped by a metal-and-glass-clad rectangular volume that cantilevers on three sides. The lower floor houses the weight rooms and locker rooms, while the lighter, airier upper levels hold the classrooms. “That general organizational strategy is immersed in that process,” says Mankins. “That was option K. We give things glamorous names like Option A, Option B, Option C. That was option K.”
Working with Owners
substance architecture does a lot of higher education work, in part, because that type of work fits its process. “Owners and users understand that its programmatically complex,” says Mankins. “So, they know they’re not going to be able to go home and draw it on the back of a napkin. The projects are complicated to the point where a solution isn’t just readily apparent. Then the iterative process, we’ve discovered, lets clients enter into it.”
Involving the clients in the process and keeping them engaged is enhanced by the iterative process. Much of the schematic design period is one of solving problems, and using multiple iterations helps bring the clients into providing solutions. “I think the flexibility that comes from an intuitive process is beneficial, not just to the design, it’s also beneficial to building a relation, a trusted relationship with clients,” explains Mankins.
Most of the firm’s clients are, what Mankins calls, owner/occupiers. The people making the decisions are the ones who will be using the building. “The people who own the building, occupy the building and that means we rarely do speculative work. We’ve just found that the priorities of an owner, somebody who has to live with the results, are they’re more invested in quality.”
Material Selection
A design philosophy that is focused on direct architecture that is authentic and uses a rigorous iteration process seems ideally suited for one that relies heavily on the use of metal building components, and that is true of substance architecture. The kind of rhythm Wagner describes with the Principal Riverwalk Pavilion is created by the repetition of metal panels.
When it comes to material selection, “there is an ingrained train of thought,” says Wagner, “from modernism or a basic material palette of steel, concrete, glass and wood. We like steel and metal as a material raw. Just as a base, we look at it. Metal has an infinite palette of how you can use it. Roofing, cladding, installation. It’s definitely one of the first things we look at.”
The material must, of course, fit in the context of the building. Starting with a broad look at the context and then narrowing it down, the firm always has metal on the list for consideration. “We can use metal do so many different things,” says Wagner. “Create texture, uniform surface. Insulated metal panels to create the vapor barrier and the thermal barrier.”
Mankins points to the selection of IMPs for the Jasper Winery project as an example of its versatility, flexibility and efficiency. “We didn’t even finish the inside. Once the things put in place, it’s finished inside and out,” he says. “There’s a kind of efficiency to that kind of directness. You understand how the thing went together.”
In comparison to the Principal Riverwalk Pavilion, selection of metal panels achieved very different ends but hold the same similarity of creating a rhythm. “They’re very different kinds of metal approaches,” says Mankins, “but they’re all making that decision for the same reason.” And the reason is it fits the philosophy of the firm. Direct. Rigorous. Substantive.
Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/the-essential-part-substance-architecture/