Believe less is more

The Office DA partners are not smart-ass kids on a roll. They are practical architects.

Skyline by Douglass Shand-Tucci

So often the only reasonable response to serious things is not to take them too seriously. Take the case of Office DA, which means -- in origin -- nothing.

I wonder if this is a really odd or an especially telling way to begin my new incarnation as the Phoenix's architecture critic? Never mind. Ever demanding, I will continue in other incarnations to trouble my muse, whether as architectural historian or New England studies guru or, now (thank God), best-selling biographer and controversial, even confessional, town crier generally!

All of which, by the way, will doubtless spill over from time to time into "Skyline"; already has, in fact, with this first column on Office DA.

And none too promising a beginning it may prove, I can hear my more-practical muse warning me. Unless you seek your architecture in windowless rooms full of heating and ventilating ducts, you may well agree.

My muse, you should know, a young architect to whom I am devoted in no small measure because I know his judgment in such matters to be hard-boiled, consistent, and sometimes, when pushed, inspiring, also likes a good fight. Like me, he is very Socratic.

You should also know that the windowless room with all the ductwork of which I write is to be found at the end of a long, fluorescent-lit, linoleum-clad corridor on an upper floor of the Ell Student Center, one of those boxy white-brick Northeastern University buildings that anonymously line Huntington Avenue.

Behold, however, once the corridor is left behind, the first built space of Office DA -- which, however lacking in meaning as a phrase, is fast accumulating a great deal of meaning as the name of a new architectural office in Boston. Its thirtysomething partners are Mónica Ponce de Leon and Nadir Tehrani, friends of unusual talent whose fledgling architectural practice I think I could talk anyone into celebrating after just one beer with either of them and a look at their numerous designs.

A graduate in architecture of the University of Miami, the Venezuela-born Ponce de Leon is the more scholarly of the two; she has a degree in urban planning from Harvard and is an assistant professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Recently she was instrumental in organizing an exhibition at the GSD on the work of the important Milanese modernist architect Gio Ponti.

Tehrani, a naturalized American citizen and the son of an Iranian diplomat, has pursued his studies from Hotchkiss to the Rhode Island School of Design to Harvard, where he, too, is an assistant professor in the design school. More of a theorist, he is an ardent admirer of the thought and work of Boston's hottest architects today, Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti.

The built space -- the windowless room -- is Northeastern University's multifaith spiritual center.

No more problematic a program ever was: to design a college chapel that would privilege no one religion, that would enhance both worship and meditation whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. And to do so in said windowless room (its 11-foot-high ceiling a mass of ductwork) off said workaday corridor -- somewhere, so to speak, between the Coke machine and the broom closet.

Ponce de Leon and Tehrani began by effectively obscuring the shell of this banal space with an imaginative wall system: a series of lustrous wooden uprights that frame floor-to-ceiling panels of frosted glass lapped over each other rather like clapboards, all the panels lit from either front or back.

Then, to hide the heating and ventilating ducts on the ceiling, they contrived three shallow inverted domes, covered in elegantly lapped sheets of golden-hued aluminum that are perforated so as to filter the air. Some light comes through the domes, but most of the light is reflected on them, and mostly from the glass wall panels.

And it is this unobtrusive but all-encompassing (and variable) light that, finally, pervades this once-cheerless space in which there are no religious symbols at all: neither cross nor crescent nor star. The result is an exceptional -- indeed, ethereal -- serenity for all.

No idea is ever entirely new, of course. Nearly a century ago, America's foremost religious architect, Ralph Adams Cram, did something similar in a not dissimilar situation. Asked to make a barn into a church in rural Massachusetts, Cram cut square-headed windows, filled them with clear (rather than stained) glass, and controlled the incoming light by installing Venetian blinds.

A century later, in an even less promising situation, Office DA has taken advantage of the way architectural lighting has developed since Cram's early days -- when it was a matter of light and shade by day, gas jets or candles at night. By not allowing a dismal site to dull their nerve, these young architects have scored an even more imaginative triumph in our own day.

Ponce de Leon, who is Roman Catholic, and Tehrani, who is Muslim, responded to a university committee on which the Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim traditions were all represented. The architects have designed movable liturgical objects -- a Christian altar, for example, and a Muslim "minbar" or pulpit -- that come and go as needed. In each case, these elements are appropriate to the chapel's aesthetic. So, too, are the chairs designed by Philippe Starck.

The result is transforming. The refined minimalist aesthetic of this spiritual place fills the mind's eye so aptly that it empties the mind itself -- the first necessity for meditation in all religions.

Of Office DA, meanwhile, it is safe to say more will be heard. Theirs is an artistry that Boston needs, oppressed as we are -- in both city and suburbs -- by banal red-brick-and-white-trim "infill" architecture. Such buildings are the work of tired, humdrum architects whose "contextualism" is as intellectually lazy as it is aesthetically soul-destroying.

The Office DA partners, understand, are not smart-ass kids on a roll. They are practical enough architects to be hard at work right now master-planning the town center of suburban Wayland. Both are also as well-mentored as their ideas are well thought out.

I chose them for this first column because theirs was a first work too -- though each has designed projects before. In the past seven years, for example, they have won three prestigious Progressive Architecture Awards for unbuilt projects. And two years ago they conceived a remarkable and widely admired steel sculptural form -- something like a grotto under a staircase -- for the 1997 Fabrications exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Creative people, even critics and historians, not to say rock stars and novelists, if they are to play at the top of the game, need a muse and mentor like mine to give focus and direction -- and, of course, to talk back to! But we also need -- we all need -- form-givers, visionaries, to whose work the tired eye or the jaded ear suddenly turns, gratefully, critically -- and the weary heart, too.

There are as "many mansions" in architecture as in religion. Office DA's young partners promise much; they are two bright lights on our otherwise conventional skyline.

Historian and critic Douglass Shand-Tucci is the author of several books on American art and architecture and New England studies. His column appears biweekly in the Phoenix.