Design Vault Ep. 9 PA State Archives with Paul Neuhaus

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Doug Patt (DP)

Let's go inside the vault. The design vault.

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Paul Neuhaus (PN)

They wanted a full archive with plenty of space for growth into the future. The storage has different requirements depending on the kinds of documents. So, we needed to create spaces that allow them to continue to collect. And a lot of the people who come in to do research, which is another big part of what they do, they collect and preserve. But they also provide these documents to the public for access, for research, or just for curiosity and to learn.

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DP

This is my guest, Paul Neuhaus. I'll share more about him shortly. In this episode from the Design Vault, we’ll highlight Paul's project, the PA State Archives. The new Pennsylvania State Archives Facility collects and preserves valuable paper documents while making them available to the public for viewing and research. The building is a state-of-the-art archival facility with an enhanced building envelope and HVAC system for the optimal environment to preserve historical paper documents.

The street facade features a linear, steel framed louver structure which surrounds a two-story high glass enclosed pavilion. The pavilion is connected to the main building, which accommodates the two public research rooms and staff spaces. While much of the building requires a windowless approach. A wide assortment of colored Norman size bricks were used to give the facade a varied and playful appearance.

The building used 350,000 brick equivalents in a blend of five different glazed brick colors. The building is three city blocks in size on three acres of land. The total storage area on three floors is 50,000 square feet and includes oversized, cool, cold, secure, and digital archives.

Hi, I'm Doug Pat and this is Design Vault.

Today we're talking to Paul Neuhaus, AIA, LEED AP. Paul has a bachelor's degree in art from California Lutheran University and a master's degree in architecture from UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Paul is a Senior designer for HGA. Paul is in their Minneapolis office and has been practicing for 30 years, working in their arts community and education practice group. Paul's project work includes studio arts and performing arts facilities, science labs, student centers and life science classrooms for higher ed, as well as libraries, a church and very recently, the building we will be talking about today, a paper archive for the State of Pennsylvania.

Paul strives to engender a sense of community and belonging for those who visit and work in the buildings his teams design. So welcome, Paul.

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PN

Thank you. It's great to be here.

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DP

It's great to have you with us today. So, before we get started, tell us a little bit about HGA architects. We know you're in the Minneapolis area. What's the size of the firm, the type of work you guys do?

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PN

HGA is a national interdisciplinary design firm committed to making a positive, lasting impact for our clients and communities through research based holistic solutions. We’re a collective of over a thousand professionals in 12 offices nationwide.

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DP

Wow. That's incredible. So how long has HGA been around?

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PN

Oh, boy. We go back to the fifties. The office here in Minneapolis was the first office and Hamel Green and Abramson, the founders, started the firm. They were a well-known firm in the state for many years and grew over the years and became a dominant force here in the state. And today, they're the largest firm in the state.

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DP

Do you have any other locations outside the state?

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PN

Yeah, we have 11 other offices, so East Coast and West Coast mostly. We also have two offices in Wisconsin.

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DP

That's a really big architecture firm. Tell me a little bit about the role that you play at HGA. How did you end up there and what are you doing now?

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PN

I've been in the city practicing since 1992. As a matter of fact, I wanted to work for HGA when I first moved to the city from Los Angeles. Interviewed here a couple of times, and it just worked out that I got an offer from another firm in town and work for them. That was back in 92. And then I didn't end up working for HGA until 2014.

I was really attracted to the firm because of the high quality of the design they do. Even though they're a large firm, they really practice like a small boutique firm. There's a lot of collaboration and independent thinking here. They allow architects to really pursue individually on each project what they think the vision of that project should be. So, when you look at HGA’s work, you don't see a pattern of design that looks a certain way. Buildings and projects can go in a lot of different directions, and there really isn't a style for our firm, which is really the way it should be.

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DP

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty unique. Most offices, you look at their work and you can spot the thread that works its way through all of the architecture, and I'm sure that's the same way with your office. And yet many offices, stylistically they're just churning out the same thing, one building after another. So that's interesting.

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PN

There definitely is a commitment to modernism and contemporary architecture. We do that well, but we also do historical preservation. And so, we have people who are working on buildings that are hundreds of years old - that occurs too - where we have to tie into historical buildings quite often with the new additions.

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DP

So, what is your role in the office?

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PN

I'm a senior designer. I lead projects, teams that can be anywhere from just me to four or five architects, depending on the size of the project. And then we have interior design. HGA really is a full-service firm. We have architecture, interior design, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, security, and AV. So, we can do it all, but we often will team up with other architecture firms around the country because we have an expertise that we can bring, which is in this case, museums and archives. So, we'll team up with locals and go after projects together, and that's what we did here in Pennsylvania.

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DP

So, are you guys the architects of record or the design architects, or do you switch roles?

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PN

Vitetta Architects is the executive architect, and we were the design architect. So, we had the upfront part of the project. We team together. We were always together working together, but we emphasized the front end of the project, and they were construction drawings and CA.

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DP

All right, so let's jump into the building here. So, could you tell us a little bit about how your office got the project?

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PN

You know, I wasn't there when we went after the project, but it's a typical story, I'm sure, which is there is a proposal out from an owner. They want a building, so they publish a proposal that anybody can submit to. And we looked for someone to team up with locally or they approached us, perhaps the local architect, Vitetta, and we've teamed up as a team and submitted a proposal. And then we were shortlisted, interviewed for it, and we were selected as the team to do it. We had experience doing museums and archives very recently before that, so that made a big impact on our selection.

I think it goes back to 2014 when we were selected for the project there initially was a different site. They went all the way through schematic on a site that was a green site on the edge of town. After schematic, they decided, no, we want to have a site that's closer to our capital complex in town. So, they found a different site and started design over, and that's when I joined the team.

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DP

Wow. There's an original archive building, right? And that is done, I think in the brutalist style.

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PN

Yeah, you could say that. It doesn't have many windows, so I could see how that would feel Brutalist. It's limestone, however, it's got a concrete structure, but the structure isn't expressed on the outside like you would typically see for brutalist architecture. It's at the Capitol grounds. It's 21 stories tall. And the problem with it is it's a low floor to floor, by today's standards. They considered upgrading it and expanding it, but they determined that the low floor to floor wouldn't allow them to create the updates they need for mechanical systems. Plus, there just wasn't enough space around it to move laterally. So, they decided the thing to do was to find a new site.

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DP

So, I'm curious, when they came to you and this was their original building, did they talk at all about style? Clearly the floor heights were an issue. Did they say, “Hey, we don't want to do this again. We want something that's a little more contemporary”?

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PN

Good question. Yes, they wanted a contemporary building. They wanted something that reflected today and the way we think about architecture today, which is great. The building that was built originally was a modern building, too. It was of its time. The History Museum is right next to it that will continue to be used. It was great that they wanted to look forward and be progressive about style, and I don't know if we ever talked style per se.

We just had already gone through schematic design. Like I said on this other site with another team. So, I think there was some sort of way of working that had already been established so that when I started on the new site as the lead designer, they had already had some confidence in us and were on board with the way we work.

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DP

So, tell us a little bit about the programmatic requirements they came to you guys with.

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PN

They wanted a full archive with plenty of space for growth into the future. So, of 146,000 square feet of this building, about 50,000 square feet is the archive storage spaces. The storage has different requirements depending on the kinds of documents it might be worth saying that the Pennsylvania State Archives collects, preserves, and makes available for study the permanently valuable public records of the Commonwealth, with particular attention given to the records of state government.

And as the Archives director, David Carmichael, once said, “they collect everything from parchment to pixels.” As a matter of fact, William Penn, who founded the Commonwealth in 1681, used a charter that gave him the right to establish the Commonwealth. And that charter is at the archives in Pennsylvania and as well as hundreds of millions of other documents that are important to the Commonwealth.

So, we needed to create spaces that allow them to continue to collect. So, it's important the whole process of how documents arrive at the site are brought in, brought into processing rooms, and then eventually put into storage. Quite often they're also photographed so that they can have a digital record of the document and a lot of the people who come in to do research, which is another big part of what they do, they collect and preserve, but they also provide these documents to the public for access, for research or just for curiosity and to learn.

So, there is this whole system of how documents are moving in and how they're being brought to the public to use and then put back into storage. The documents can be anything from large documents in flat files like maps. They can be eight and a half by eleven size. Some of the rooms need to be cool or even cold. So, there are different climates, let's say, in some of these rooms based on the type of media it is. For instance, film that they'll collect needs to be in a very cool environment. So, they have different climates in each space.

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DP

Well, that's really interesting. So, let's go back a little bit. Tell us a little bit about the site. Are there any unique topographic features? Is it completely flat? Was it a pretty simple thing to put a building on it?

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PN

Yeah, it's a three-acre site and there are two main streets on the west and east side. Sixth Street on the west is about one story above Seventh Street, which is on the East. And Seventh Street is a main feeder artery that comes into town, while sixth is more of a residential neighborhood or semi commercial residential. So, we put the public entry on Sixth Street, which is up a level which means of the four level building, there's a lower level that's a walk out, let's say on the east side.

And then the public enters on what we call first floor, which is one level up from the lower level. The site is also L-shaped, which sounds like it could be a problem, but it really isn't because it's a large enough site that it provides for the building and public space. So, we were able to create a nice plaza out front and lots of landscaping in front of the building to provide a public amenity, let's say, to the people who live in the community and anyone who's visiting.

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DP

Did you guys have any challenging restrictions, in terms of zoning?

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PN

There were challenges with infrastructure. We had some issues needing to connect the archive with the state capital complex with fiber optics. So, there was a fiber optic line that had to come underground all the way to our site and that was done on a different contract. But we also had a lot of flexibility. For instance, there were streetlights and so on around the site and in some cases, especially on the front where we met the public, we were able to move the streetlights across the street from us because we just didn't think it would be nice having all the lights and lines right out in front of the building.

So, there was some infrastructural work that was done more on a urban scale level to help accommodate this building. Also add that at the same time that we were doing this building, there was a federal courthouse being put in, which is just about completed now too, at the same time. So, these two large buildings that are within a couple of blocks from each other going in at the same time was interesting.

And we actually worked – we had one meeting with the local architect, the design architects of that building, so that we could coordinate a little bit on what some of the public lighting would look like.

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DP

The building stylistically, you've got this large glass atrium space and you've got this metal framed armature that wraps that. And then I'm assuming going off in the other direction, you've got a very large block that is made out of masonry. Is that correct?

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PN

That's right. We took that stated purpose, the mission statement of the archive, which is the archive collects, preserves, and makes available for study. We took those three ideas, and we turned them into form and gave each form its own material. So, for instance, “collects” is the storage of the archives. That became a form that you just described as masonry.

They preserve, and mechanical systems are an important part of preservation. We have the unique situation of all of the mechanical systems needing to be off to the side of the archive that couldn't be on top of the archive because we couldn't risk any sort of liquids leaking out of mechanical systems into the archives. So, all of the mechanical systems are in their own bay off to the side. That's the preservation part. And we use metal panels to describe that bay.

And then finally, “making available to the public,” there was a public element of it, and in this case, we made it a glass pavilion and we used an aluminum extruded solar shade custom made to protect people from direct sunlight but provide lots of daylight. So, it's very open, very visible. You drive by it on Sixth Street and great views in and out to the street and from the road in. But it's got its own expression from the other elements. And so those three elements look very different from each other. They each really have a different personality, but they're all neutral in color. They're grays from white to medium gray, nothing - it's a very tight range of neutral tones.

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DP

Yeah, for a storage facility, it's pretty welcoming. The elevation with the glass and this metal armature is really quite lovely.

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PN

Thank you.

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DP

So, I saw some really interesting studies in your emails back and forth with Glen-Gery in regard to the colors that you ultimately chose for the facades. There's really a lot there. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

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PN

That's a great part of the story. We knew that the archive wing would be enveloped by a long expanse of wall. Archives don't want to have windows, so there were not going to be many windows and this building was going to be up to four stories tall. So, we wanted to make sure that what we put on the building would be something that would be out of the ordinary. And we didn't have the budget for limestone. The Capitol complex is limestone. The original building was that way, but we wanted something durable and where we could allude in some way to what was going on at the Capitol. We thought brick is durable. It's a good candidate for an archive because of that, and we wanted to make some connection to the limestone.

We began looking for a light-colored brick, very neutral, something that could echo that limestone. But clay doesn't come in neutrals like we wanted it. You know, Clay typically is in the Browns, yellow reds. You can get it to be black or very close to black. But everything we found seemed to be a little bit too warm. The closest we could get was a very light-yellow brick, and even then, it just felt a little too warm. So, we started considering clay slip coatings that are available on the market for bricks that could be applied to the brick to get a lighter and more neutral look. And that's when we came across Glen-Gery. We found some buildings on the Internet that traced us back to Glen-Gery. I don't remember how, but we were able to find them. And then Glen-Gery could make custom colors in the matte, but they also could make glossy glazed finishes. So that's when we started to consider that. And from there we began a conversation with them about brick colors and finishes.

Eventually I took a trip to their plant up in northern Pennsylvania. One time I landed in Pittsburgh, rented a car, drove up to their plant, and then from there I went to a client meeting in Harrisburg. It was really a fun visit just to see that plant work and meet with the artist. They had like an artist lab or chem lab where they can mix custom colors. And we had really good conversations and that really convinced me that this had a lot of potential. It wasn't a shoe in, it wasn't sure yet that we could go this route, but I just felt like there was a path to get there.

And eventually we went the route of glazed brick over the matte finish. We found the shine and reflectance of the wall surface potentially very appealing, especially on a large building with so few windows. Second, there was a side benefit with the glazed brick, and we believe that it would help resist graffiti and make it easier to clean because we were in an area where graffiti could be an issue. So that was another selling point for going that direction. It certainly worked in terms of getting the state to back that idea of going with a glazed brick, because I think it just seemed very unusual that a building would be entirely covered with glazed brick, and it helped that we were using very subdued colors like grays. We have five colors. It's a range of grays. And when you stand back, they kind of blend together. It creates what I like to call a heathered look. You know, if this were a knit sweater, it would be using heathered gray yarn and it kind of all blends together.

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DP

Well, when the bricks glaze, does it reflect images or light or is there anything special about the facade when you stand back and look at it, other than the color?

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PN

In a surprising way, that was very pleasant, once it got put up – especially on that north side where it's a long wall of brick – we were really surprised and pleased to see that on a cloudy day as the clouds are going over, it reflects the sky and the clouds, enough really to - it's not like a mirror, but it gives you a nice feeling that this building is somehow relating to the sky. So we really like that part of it.

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DP

It all sounds really cool. Before we wrap this part of the conversation up, tell me about the mockups you guys did for the colors of the brick. They're really cool. It was a great idea.

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PN

Yeah. Thanks. We started just by getting Sherwin-Williams paint chips. They make eight by ten paint samples. We pulled out a whole bunch of neutral colors with little bits of warm and cool associated with them and had them sent to us. Then we took the ones that we found most appealing, and we created a brick shape with using chipboard, glued them down, and then we started to assemble different quantities and proportions of different colors and just started mixing things until we saw something that looked appealing.

So, we created this mockup model where we could try different proportions. We kept records of how many of this color, how many of that on each set up that we did. And we created a whole series of these that we could first show ourselves and figure out which ones we liked the best. And then we took them to the client and showed them to them and tried to find where the sweet spot was for this blend.

From there we started to work with Glen-Gery to actually come up with samples, glazed brick samples. They weren't full bricks right away. They were just pieces of clay, small, maybe four by three inches, for starters, until we could come up with something closer to the actual colors we'd want to consider.

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DP

You know, what's so surprising to me is you take five colors, put them together on a board. You've got 30 or 40 bricks. Each one of these samples, you stand back, and you look at, I'm just blown away that you can do that on a facade, and it never looks busy. You stand back and it becomes like another color. It becomes the color in-between all the colors. How did you even know that was going to happen?

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PN

That's a good question. You're digging into the way we had to think about this. You know, some of our mockups had more contrast. Some of them had less contrast. And I think you need to find that point where the contrast is enough to give some variety and not make it look homogenous. But you don't want it to be so contrasty that it starts to look speckled. We didn't want to speckled looking, building, so it was just a matter of setting things up, looking at them close and then walking away and looking at them from, you know, 100 feet away and just see how well they blend together. It's like pixels, right, on your computer. These were really just physical pixels. And the farther you get back, the more they blend.

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DP

So, at the end of the day, when you guys were all done with the job, was there anything that you learned that was really interesting about the design or the construction process? Again, as an aside, being the designer architects, it's got to be interesting handing a job over and then coming back to it as it nears completion, right?

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PN

Yeah. And fortunately, we had a great working relationship with Vitetta, Daniel Wasik, the architect who led the team at Vitetta, who did a wonderful job. We had a good relationship and all the way through construction drawings, we were actively reviewing the drawings with them and participating in meetings. They were leading that process at that point from there on out but we were still involved. And even during construction administration, I didn't get to go to the site until late in the game. However, we were getting pictures from them monthly, lots of pictures. They were really good about it. They would tell us if there were any issues, we'd work it through together. So, it really worked well. And I have to say, I've never worked with a local architect that well before. It was a wonderful relationship and I’d love to work with them again sometime.

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DP

That's really cool. Did the GC have any trouble finding a good mason?

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PN

I know that there were issues.

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DP

It's always an issue.

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PN

Yeah. I mean, when I look at the building, it was well done overall.

You know, we had some complicated pieces to it too. For instance, we had an overhang at the front entry with brick hanging ten feet out, cantilever out over the entryway, and we designed it so that the brick at the bottom was not supported by an angle. We hid the structure and hung those two courses at the bottom from a structure up inside the wall. So, we were able to glaze even the underside of the brick hanging out over that cantilever, which wasn't an easy thing to accomplish.

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DP

Yeah, it sounds expensive.

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PN

It was, but it's a state building and you want it to be done right, and further, I don't know if you've had this experience on your work, but I've gone back to visit buildings sometimes that are years old, ten years old maybe, and some of those angles that support brick can start to rust. So, we wanted to avoid having that happen on a building this important.

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DP

Yeah. And you know, you're going to make a few statements in the architecture and that's one really big one right at the front of the building. Very cool. So, before you go, you've been at this for 30 years or so. If you could give yourself – your younger self some career advice, what would it be?

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PN

Oh, boy. Well, I do meet with mentees – we have a mentorship program here at HGA, which is highly valued by the people who are just starting out in their careers. And sometimes what I'll tell them is try to pay attention to everything you do, even the details. And not just focus on the big picture because the more you can know about the way buildings are specifically put together, the more you can understand about the structure and the other disciplines, the better you can be at making those decisions and choices at the beginning of your project. And so, I always encourage architects, especially people who are interested in being designers, to learn every aspect of the project down to the details.

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DP

Yeah, if you're not interested in being a lifelong learner, architecture may not be the right profession for you.

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PN

That's true.

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DP

Right? You're always learning something.

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PN

I'm still learning.

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DP

Oh, yeah, I am too. Every day. So, Paul, it's been great to have you here. Thanks for your time. Where can people go to learn more about HGA architects?

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PN

They would go to hga.com, and we've got our projects there that you can look at, and our teams, our people. It's a fun place to go.

TRANSCRIPT

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DP

That's great. It sounds like a really interesting place to work.

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PN

It is. I really enjoy it. There's a lot of smart people here and I'm so glad that I get to play the role I play. But I also admire those people who play all the other roles that we have at this firm.

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DP

That's great, Paul. Thank you.

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PN

Thank you. It was a pleasure.