“It’s so fun to be on that carousel!” exclaims Alan Organschi. The carousel is the focal point of a sliver of parkway along the Mill River in Stamford, Connecticut. After winning a commission in open competition, Organschi and his wife and partner, Elizabeth Gray, designed what they consider an “urban porch” that leads to a classic carousel. The ride’s surrounding structure, in its use of materials and geometry, suggests an inviting woodland, but “what is really celebratory is the cupola above the merry-go-round itself,” says Organschi.

“It’s a big topography that cuts up into the ceiling and is capped by three skylight domes,” explains Gray. “So there’s this magic in the ceiling and the light.”

Alan Organschi and Elizabeth Gray. Photo by Tim Ireland

Born, bred, and based in Connecticut, New Haven architects Gray and Organschi have shown global reach in their interests, efforts, and influence. They met at Yale in 1985, a period when, Organschi remembers, “architects were interested in image and paper architecture, and there wasn’t a lot of building going on. We were hungry to learn about the relationship between building and construction and what our métier was really going to be. Our relationship started around that intense experience of architecture school. You’re in it and that’s how you think and talk.”

“I think when we got to know each other at Yale, we were loving the experience of being in buildings and understanding how they were made,” says Gray. “We really share a passion for experiencing buildings and materials.”

That passion, what Gray calls “the romance of architecture,” has colored their relationship and projects as they explore specific problems, always with a sense of a larger responsibility to the world.

The couple has traveled extensively, opening doors for each other. Gray did research in Asia, where, Organschi says, “I had my eyes blown open.” Organschi worked in Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, where Gray remembers “educating ourselves about how the city was organized and what was going on neighborhood by neighborhood in response to the wall coming down.”

They were impressed with the possibilities, and especially with the community’s involvement—a lesson that has stayed with them. “The manifestations of culture through architecture and politics and society has driven both of us,” says Organschi.

The disappointment of the Berlin building boom brought the bitter realization that, as Organschi puts it, “capital moves a lot more quickly than ideas.” That awareness, as well as the stratification of trades that didn’t allow for the integration of design and craft, brought them back to New Haven. “We were trying to decide what the perfect small, affordable, creative city was for us,” recalls Gray, “and we realized that we were here, and that this was a really good place.”

Gray Organschi: Calvin Hill Day Care Center, New Haven, Connecticut, 2004. Photo by Bo Crockett

It was a place where they could establish a family and a firm, Gray Organschi Architecture, as well as have an adjoining fabrication studio—and where they could attend to an intellectually adventurous practice, augmented by teaching opportunities, initially at Wesleyan and currently at Yale. “I think we were always inclined to be a design-build enterprise,” says Organschi, who was an accomplished cabinetmaker before becoming an architect.

Gray worked briefly as a carpenter, but was always sewing and making things, and has an abiding interest in material culture. “I think we come at the built environment from these different ends of things,”—her handiwork and his woodworking—“which are unfortunately gendered, but that’s just the way it happens to be,” she says thoughtfully.

“We did execute our own designs, and having that skill set allowed us to realize designs that were less conventional,” she continues. “It was that extra piece that felt essential to both of us,” Organschi agrees.

Most of their projects so far have been in New England. They have designed houses in challenging settings, made clever commercial adaptations, and constructed thoughtful institutional buildings. Bridges play a recurring role. They are currently working on a house for two artists in Kyoto, Japan, significantly extending their reach. But their signature strengths—their involvement with community, their concern for the environment, and their trust that what Gray calls “design love” can transform experience and change expectations—are evident in two schools at opposite ends of New Haven.

Calvin Hill, in the East Rock end of New Haven, was an early project for the firm. An addition to their son’s day-care facility, it was done on a tight budget within an even tighter time frame. It is a deceptively simple addition. “All it is is a big wooden box on a couple of trees,” says Organschi—those trees being two white oaks that he harvested, stripped, and made into columns holding up the cantilever.

“There’s a kind of theater and joy and whimsy to it,” says Gray.

The play of a rectilinear cantilevered volume seemingly held up on playful posts, the window as a lens on the landscape, the light-filled creative spaces, and the idea of architecture as a way of shaping experience—all present at Calvin Hill—were brought into a much more complex project: Common Ground.

Common Ground High School, New Haven, Connecticut, 2016. Photo by David Sundberg/Esto

Common Ground is a charter high school, urban farm, and environmental education center in New Haven, tucked against the base of West Rock. The school was founded 20 years ago with a mission of social and environmental justice. The discussion about its expansion engaged parents, students, teachers, and neighbors for years before Gray Organschi was brought in to design a new building. That meant making sense of the old building; embracing the site, which includes ridge, farm, forest, and wetland; incorporating the community’s needs; and creating a constructive example of environmental integrity—by addressing on-site energy production, stormwater treatment, natural illumination, and passive ventilation.

“There were a lot of criteria that were important to us,” says Melissa Spear, Common Ground’s executive director, “and they made that happen. It wasn’t just a building for them.”

The structure is lively yet solid, focusing on rather than dominating the bucolic, yet bustling, campus. The siding is simple, the roofing galvanized steel with sawtooth lighting to the north and solar panels to the south, which provide close to 70 percent of the electricity for the building and its geothermal heat pumps. The interior offers two science classrooms, an art studio, offices, gathering spaces, and an expansive multipurpose space that opens to the outdoors. It is a vibrant and welcoming place, allowing the widely varying activities, age groups, and agendas to flourish and cross-pollinate.

The building is a pioneering example of new mass timber products, “a term that the industry has taken on for different glue-laminated wood structural systems,” clarifies Organschi.

Gray Organschi has initiated a research project to explore the implications of these new products with the clear objective of replacing nonrenewable, energy-intensive materials, such as concrete and steel, with timber. Timber City, a collaboration with Yale’s School of Architecture and School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, as well as the New England Forestry Foundation and the City of New Haven, is bringing consciousness to the construction sector, and recognition of timber’s global consequences and possibilities.

The interdisciplinary investigations have been looking at construction techniques, a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions, to determine how to offset those emissions. Though counterintuitive, it is grounded in hard science as well as hope.

“We’re working to develop a series of projects that are basically biogenic material–based,” explains Organschi, “because the research shows these buildings are healthier in terms of interior air quality, and they’re certainly more environmentally healthy.

“I want my students and our colleagues here to think much more broadly about what it means to build a building,” he continues. “What resources did you draw upon—not just how much energy it uses, or how efficient the wall assembly is, but really, like, where did that stuff come from? What landscape did it transform and how much did it transform it, and how much energy did it consume in the process? All of this has a huge impact on the environment.”

“What forces are you calling into play when you design a building? When you specify materials? And how much responsibility do you have as an architect for taking those things into account?” asks Gray. Then she answers, “A lot, we think. For us, because we were always inclined toward making stuff, it was natural to be thinking about these issues from the beginning.”

“This thinking has always essentially informed our work, but now it’s starting to turn into an implemented practice,” adds Organschi.

At Common Ground, these thoughts are as much a part of the building’s armature as the actual glulam (glue-laminated timber) structural frame. And the building’s many messages have resonated. “We wanted to create a beautiful space for our students, something that was healthy, full of light, and that made them feel valued,” says Spear. “It has had an impact on how they view the world.”

Alan Organschi and Eizabeth Gray–founders, Gray Organschi Architecture
New Haven, Connecticut
Website

Top image: Carousel Pavilion (detail), Mill River Park, Stamford, Connecticut, 2017. Photo by David Sundberg/Esto

The post Making Space appeared first on Take Magazine.

Michael Madore is a naturalist—fascinated by details, taxonomies, and science—but one who can hardly bear to go out into the world.

Michael Madore, KONTAKT!!!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

His work is filled with nerve bundles, climbing tendrils, meticulously cross-hatched fortresses, densely rendered surfaces of swelling water, floral bursts, crystalline structures, careful lettering, birds, and systems of coils and whorls that link and blanket everything. His pieces are jam-packed, teeming, in a way, but with plenty of space and breathing room.

Seemingly conflicting signals and storylines get balanced out in Madore’s work and life. A bit of both outsider and insider, he has Asperger’s Syndrome. His work has an obsessive aspect to it; his artistic practice, he says, is a means of coping with the overload of distractions and information that bombard us, imposing order on a world that’s always unspooling. With an MFA from Yale, Madore also can talk about his work from a critical-historical perspective and make all kinds of connections to theory.

“It’s almost biological, just the need to make work,” says Madore. “It is my way of coping.”

Madore was born in Hartford, to a French-Canadian family. French—Quebecois French—was his first language. As a kid, he was embarrassed about his background and his mother tongue. The family moved to Maine and Quebec for a time, eventually settling back in Hartford. With an unpleasant home life and undiagnosed mental-health issues, Madore took to drawing schematics, using diagrams from household appliances and other sources as a means of creating coherence. “As a kid I always drew, but very secretly. I drew maps,” he says. “I grew up in a really chaotic household. My father was a really bad alcoholic. We were relatively poor.”

Michael Madore, Misfits 246-358 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Madore got a scholarship to Trinity College. He majored in English and minored in Art History before heading to New York City in 1977, where he worked in bookstores and as a proofreader for a time. With a day job in SoHo, he visited some galleries that featured outsider art and work by the Chicago Imagists, and Madore took an interest in it. “I was attracted because this was not the kind of art history and mainstream narrative that I learned at Trinity and kind of dismissed,” he says. He liked the fact that this was non-New York, non-minimalist art that didn’t have an overt meta-art quality. “It lit a light bulb in me,” says Madore. “I said, You don’t have to do art about art.”

His path to the academy led through the clinic. He moved back to Connecticut, this time to New Haven, in 1983. It was a psychiatrist at Yale—Madore says he’s had “an on-and-off relationship with psychiatry”—who encouraged him to apply to grad school after he was concluding time as a patient there. He got his MFA in painting in 1990.

Madore’s work is more engaged with the natural world, despite the fact that he says going outside is too much for him. He thinks about, reads about, and studies nature, but mostly from books, illustrated guides, movies, and online. “I’m not a nature person,” says Madore. “It’s just overwhelming, the detail. The idea of going into a forest is a nightmare.”

Michael Madore, Asset compromised!, 2016 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Travel, in general, is something Madore avoids. “I’m a horrible traveler,” he says. “I can’t stand arriving or departing.” But his work is a kind of time and space travel. It takes him to remote regions and imagines distant futures, when people and their peculiarities and depredation are maybe no longer a factor.

Madore is working on a series based on Labrador in the future. Labrador is the remote peninsular region in northeastern Canada, with forests and mountains, stretches of exposed bedrock, and plenty of mostly undisturbed wildlife. Envisioning the coming decades, a piece like Labrador 2088 imagines plant and animal species displaced by climate change and man-made environmental flux. “I hesitate to call it a metaphor for global warming, but it is a way for me to project what are some of the changes that will affect boreal forests. Birds begin to migrate, and plants as well,” says Madore. “For me, it’s just a kind of way to pursue my interests in flora and fauna and mutations.”

Michael Madore, Labrador 2088, 2017 | ink, pen, watercolor, paper, 19″x25”

Michael Madore – Artist
Hartford, CT
Website
Facebook

Top photo Madore in his studio | All photos courtesy the artist

The post The Insider Outsider appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally ran in our April/May 2016 print issue. 

The fickle haute monde of the fashion industry, where “one day you’re in and the next day you’re out,” as Heidi Klum famously warns on Project Runway, may tailor fame and fortune for anointed designers willing to edit their aesthetic to win and retain the idolization of tastemakers.

That arc of ambition doesn’t interest Neville Wisdom, the self-taught designer from Jamaica who can pull off dressing up his dreadlocks and a T-shirt with a tweed jacket that is rendered exuberant through an unexpected cascade of playful pockets.

Wisdom’s success as a womenswear designer with two spacious showrooms/retail stores in New Haven, Connecticut, is built on a signature style of architectural—”little bit more constructed,” as Wisdom puts it— dresses, skirts, sweaters, tops, coats, and more that are “classic with a bit of an edge.” That funky edge might mean turning up the volume with color, embracing bold patterns, or adding unexpected flourishes.

Making Neville Wisdom’s Fashion Design Studio work as a business model involves essentially delivering bespoke garments at wholesale prices by selling the clothing directly to customers, while also offering women a personal shopping experience that results in a perfect fit through complimentary custom alterations.

Neville Wisdom with pieces from his collection.

“We’re not trying to chase millions,” Wisdom says of his business and creative ethos. “We love what we do, and we love how people feel when they wear our clothes.” Where did his inspiration come from?

“I watched a lot of old movies, even as a kid,” Wisdom has said about the origins of his love for the vintage classicism in his designs. In his teens, he became serious about fashion and launched his first design shop in Jamaica while in his early twenties.

Jamaica didn’t seem like fertile ground for a fashion designer, at least compared to the United States, so Wisdom emigrated to Connecticut, where he transitioned into a position as a surgical technician at Yale- New Haven Hospital for seven years.

Design remained his primary aspiration, however, and when Wisdom made the leap of faith to open his first atelier and retail shop four years ago in the Elm City’s Ninth Square district, he gambled that New Haven’s status as an arts and culture hub—anchored by Yale University—would provide a steady stream of discerning clients.hat faith paid off, with the flagship location on Orange Street spawning a second, larger location in the hip Westville section of the city, home to antiques shops, galleries, cafés, and specialty shops. Launched a year ago, the new space on Whalley Avenue is nearly 5,000 square feet, with a street level showroom and a basement where the magic happens.

That faith paid off, with the flagship location on Orange Street spawning a second, larger location in the hip Westville section of the city, home to antiques shops, galleries, cafés, and specialty shops. Launched a year ago, the new space on Whalley Avenue is nearly 5,000 square feet, with a street level showroom and a basement where the magic happens.

The expansion was made possible in part from a Small Business Express Program grant from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, which matches between $20,000 and $100,000 in funds that a venture can show on its books.

In addition to allowing Wisdom to add a few jobs, the grant paid for equipment that has enabled digitization of the design and manufacturing process, the centerpiece of which is a massive Autometrix Advantage fabric-cutting table.

Detail of Neville Wisdom coat

“Once I’m satisfied with the pattern I digitize it,” says Wisdom. “All of our patterns become digital patterns.” The process has streamlined the number of sample patterns it takes to get to the final one, and has greatly reduced the amount of waste. When the final design is set, each piece of clothing is constructed by one individual.

Rather than designing fabrics and contracting to have them produced, Wisdom prefers to buy existing fabric of great quality. With it he produces between four and 14 pieces of any one design—usually around 12—and keeps the leftover fabric in case someone wants something custom-made. And now he has to make two sets of each design, one for each showroom.

The new spring line makes its debut in a runway show in early April. “Every year the building changes,” says Wisdom, who plans to include some menswear in his collection for the first time, and to feature men’s linen shirts and pants in his stores this season. For his womenswear, the designer favors raw silk and will feature a lot of “great cotton” in pieces that are thin and light for summer.

The designer, who previously sold clothing exclusively in his stores, has launched an online shop, making his fashions widely accessible.

Photos by Ireland Studios

Follow Neville Wisdom on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The post Neville’s Wearable Wisdom appeared first on Take Magazine.