Ideas

Structure, purpose, and beauty at the Athenaeum

by Thom Nickels
Contributing Editor, Weekly Press

Architectural exhibitions never draw the huge crowds and press that fine arts exhibitions do. The Cezanne exhibit, complete with its Action News special reports, gift shop coffee mugs, SEPTA bus advertisements, signature handbags, baseball hats, and framed prints will rule the exhibition-media airwaves for quite some time. In the meantime, humbler yet “almost” as important exhibitions are certainly worthy of a look.

The Voith & Mactavish Architects exhibition currently at the Athenaeum on Washington Square is a case in point. They’ll be no long lines to study the framed photographs of the firm’s work during the last decade. Like the firm’s highly praised exhibition at Haverford College in 2003, the new display includes hand rendered conceptual sketches, models, large and small scale photographs and two and three dimensional renderings. The award-winning firm—I’m thinking of the 2005 Palladio Award for an exterior space in Rittenhouse Square, a garden and landscape project completed in conjunction with Victoria Steiger Garden Design—has always had as its motto, “Great architecture comes from innovation within the context of tradition.” This fact is made abundantly clear in the Athenaeum exhibit.

Among the featured projects at the Athenaeum are Beth AM Israel Synagogue, Germantown Friends School, and the Duffy Arts Center at Malvern Preparatory School, the Residence Hall at Chestnut Hill College, the Paul Peck Alumni Center at Drexel, and the Bryn Mawr Film Institute. Again, it may not be Cezanne, but it’s interesting and impressive work when one considers the unique nature of this firm, which began as a two-person Mom and Pop operation in Manayunk-Roxborough area. That was twenty years ago. Today Voith & Mactavish, as one of the top firms in the city, has its offices on the 24th floor of a Center City office building.

Co-founder Daniela Holt Voith is a tall, regal sort of woman with an Anne de Harancourt manner. That’s saying a lot. Ms. Voith is a self-described “pull up her sleeves” worker, a 1976 alumna of Bryn Mawr College, and a Lecturer in Growth & Structure of Cities. Last year she was asked to join Philadelphia’s new Zoning Code Commission by Mayor Michael Nutter. About that appointment, Ms. Voith told ‘Bryn Mawr Now,’ a college newspaper, “It’s been a long time since the code has been changed, and I think the city has become a very different place than it was in the sixties.” The city’s old zoning code, in case you don’t know, is a huge 600-page tome with 55 different zones, enough to make a German scholar’s head spin or evenfall off. The formation of the new zoning code was one of Mayor Nutter’s more daring acts as mayor: its reorganization saw the “controversial” dropping of former Mayor John Street’s son, Sharif, as a Commission member. About city zoning codes in general, Ms. Voith told ‘Bryn Mawr Now’ that the city of Houston has no zoning code whatsoever. “Any building type can occur next to any other building type [in Houston]. The thinking was that capitalism should drive all development. You ended up with some very strange juxtapositions there,” she said.

Architects don’t seem to be verbose people in general, and this was certainly evident when the Athenaeum’s Bruce Laverty introduced Ms. Voith and Mr. Mactavish before the 300 or so invited guests. Both Ms. Voith and Mr. Mactavish promised that their talk would not exceed 10 minutes because they knew that guests wanted to get back downstairs to that other exhibit—the luscious hors d’oeuvres table (in itself worthy of a Cezanne painting), and the open bar. While Voith & Mactavish is a firm that takes itself seriously, the humor in Ms. Voith’s talk showed that self-confidence and success need not be stuffy, arrogant or staid. At one point during the talk, guests were encouraged to pay close attention to a slide show, just a few minutes long, of the firm’s founding and history. In one slide—taken after the firm’s growth from 2 people to a couple dozen—principals and architects alike posed outdoors on construction equipment on a sunny day sometime in the 1980s. This picture clearly showed that Voith & Mactavish was more than an architectural firm but in fact had transformed itself into some kind of “community.”

During my conversation rounds I spoke with a young (and beautiful) African American architect who explained, in very general terms, how the firm was dealing with this economic depression. She mentioned internal realignments with projects and some streamlining without going into detail. It’s common knowledge that when the economy gets bad, architects suffer, but this really doesn’t seem to be the case with Voith and Mactavish.

One of my favorite V&M exhibition photographs is the Rittenhouse Square townhouse garden.

“There was a rubble yard in the back – it was a mess,” Ms. Voith told Architecture Magazine. “One of the design goals was to create a gracious entry sequence from the garage to the house. The walk is punctuated by required turns to emphasize views. The rill, pergola and paving all were designed to provide interest, because the distance is rather long. Entering through the new garden door, the immediate view is of the main stair in a newly created ‘rear’ entrance hall that connects directly to the front hall. The door’s position in the house, its large scale and extent of glazing all speak to the desired sense of understated grandeur.”

Ms. Voith is on record as believing that the big challenge in residential construction these days is improving the look of a pedestrian ‘back door.’

“Many houses are designed with three ways to enter – a formal entry that gives access to the entrance hall, living room and dining area, doors that lead to the garden and the way in from the garage. Experientially, many guests, but more importantly the owners, tend to regularly use their back doors for convenience’s sake. Unfortunately, the back-door entry is often hideous – one walks past the trash cans, the stored bikes, the laundry, the pantry,” she said.

Subtlety, depth and grace—these words aptly describe the work of Voith & Mactavish Architects. “How many other firms,” Eve Kahn asks in her introduction to the VMA exhibit catalog, “would maintain the stock of raw timer lofts in classrooms built over the years by the parents at the progressive Miquon School, all while tucking new computer labs underneath? Virtually everything is welcome [in this firm] from rural landmarks in Quaker fieldstone at Cheyney University and Washington Friends School, to a Victorian brick folly of a bank studded with carved stone pinnacles and lavishly stenciled inside Drexel University’s Paul Peck Alumni Center…” And, of course, who can forget VMA’s modernist neon imprint on the windows of the Moore College of Art & Design?

Thom Nickels can be reached at ThomNickels1@aol.com

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