Architecture Commons^™

Dcamm And Capital Stewardship, Sarah Felton

UMassBRUT Community

Created in 1980, the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance (DCAMM) manages some 68 million square feet of building space for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This talk focuses on some of the challenges DCAMM faces in managing these facilities at the state's higher education institutions where 74% of the building portfolio were built prior to 1981. After discussing the Commonwealth's priorities in Capital Investment, the talk concludes with a look at DCAMM-funded renovations to the Claire T. Carney Library and Science and Engineering Building at UMass Dartmouth.

Towards Civic Brutalism, Daniel Abramson

UMassBRUT Community

1960s Massachusetts was a Brutalist mecca, much of it with civic dimensions, mediating through architecture citizens' rights and identities. The expanded welfare state's administration in Massachusetts was consolidated in new buildings for federal, state, and municipal workers in Boston's Government Center, a top-down urban renewal process. Government Center's buildings, including Boston City Hall and the Massachusetts State Service Center, embodied Brutalist values of material integrity, monumentality, and abstraction. Little thought was given to the architecture's civic dimensions, how people would engage politically with each other and the state. Subsequently, City Hall Plaza functioned for decades as eastern Massachusetts' civic fairground, …

Brutal Realities, Mark Pasnik

UMassBRUT Community

This presentation examines the changing tide around the reception of Brutalism in the United States during the last decade, while questioning how that change will impact our treatment of concrete buildings in the future. As concrete modernism comes into more positive focus today, will attitudes toward the future of these buildings in the architecture and preservation communities readjust? Should such structures be preserved or conserved, adapted or transformed? And how important is it to be responsive to original intentions and elements of significance? A conservation management plan for Boston City Hall is presented as a case study in which careful …

Umass Dartmouth Science And Engineering (Seng) Building Systems Upgrades Project, Jillian Cornelius

UMassBRUT Community

Although UMass Dartmouth's Science and Engineering Building has long been viewed as an architectural treasure, its aging interior and structure have presented some challenges to users nearly 50 years after it opened. This talk examines Ellenzweig's extensive retrofitting of the UMass Dartmouth SENG building for accessibility, a new envelope, updated MEP, and fire-safety measures. After looking at the design phase and interactions with the Mass Historic Commission, the talk ends with an examination of the replacement of windows in the building.

Brutalist Structures – Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Theresa Wolejko

UMassBRUT Community

Until they were banned by the Federal Government in 1978, Polychlorinated Biphenyls or PCBs, were used extensively as sealants in Brutalist structures across the United States. As a result, these hazardous chemical compounds still reside in concrete buildings and present a danger to those looking to clean or renovate Brutalist structures. This talk explains the problems the University of Massachusetts Amherst has faced in dealing with PCBs over the last couple of decades and recommends some best practices for owners, designers, builders working on midcentury buildings which are suspected to contain these dangerous chemicals.

Concrete Deterioration And Diagnosis, Matthew B. Bronski

UMassBRUT Community

Built primarily in the 1960’s, mid-century modernist concrete buildings are now at the age when we regard many as historic or architecturally significant (and thus as deserving of careful restoration and stewardship), but also at an age where many now exhibit significant deterioration. In this presentation, Matthew Bronski describes the most common maladies and deterioration mechanisms that can befall exposed concrete facades, outlines investigative and diagnostic approaches, and discuss the pros and cons of different rehabilitation treatment options, and the importance of tailoring the treatment to the malady.

Concrete Diagnostics & Assessment, Michael Schuller

UMassBRUT Community

The process of repairing Brutalist architecture begins with diagnosis and assessment of the material conditions of these buildings. This talk focuses on the processes that engineers undertake in order to document and access historic concrete before conservators and designers can form a plan to save such buildings. The speaker gives insight into the diagnostic techniques, such a visual assessment, nondestructive evaluation, sounding, moisture and metal detection, and chemical analysis.

Concrete Conservation Strategies And Repair, Paul Gaudette

UMassBRUT Community

Drawing on the speaker's many years in the field, this talk gives a comprehensive overview of concrete conservation. Beginning with the goals and approaches to conserving concrete, the talk then covers common protection systems, petrographic and chemical studies, and the design of mixes used in repairs. In order to demonstrate these techniques, two case studies are examined, including a Brutalist building and building with architectural precast. The talk ends with some recommendations on how to best approach cleaning and conservation of historic concrete buildings.

Approaches To Renewing Brutalist-Era Lab Buildings, Jean Caroon

UMassBRUT Community

Given the immense amount of embodied carbon that mid-century Brutalist structures represent, we must redirect our focus from demolishing these concrete structures to renovating them to fit our needs in the 21st century. Higher education laboratory buildings from the 1960s and 1970s are a particularly challenging type of facility. This talk describes the work that Boston architecture firm Goody Clancy has recently undertaken in renovating over 1 million square feet of lab building space. The talk not only covers specific retrofits and envelope improvements to science buildings, such as the Gant Science Complex at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, …

Humanizing The Brutalist Interior: The Renovation Of Paul Rudolph's Claire T. Carney Library At Umass Dartmouth, Kelly Haigh, Ben Youtz

UMassBRUT Community

Members of the team that worked on the renovation of the Claire T. Carney Library, designed by Paul Rudolph and completed in 1972, share their design solutions for maintaining the integrity of the architecture and fostering an interior that is welcoming of its occupants. Discussions focus on interior attributes, human occupants, color, light and texture as approaches to humanize the massive concrete attributes that are notorious of Brutalist structures.

Modern Heritage: Why It Matters, And What Gci Is Doing To Help Conserve It, Chandler Mccoy

UMassBRUT Community

The Getty Conservation Institute entered the field of conserving modern heritage in 2013, with the establishment of its Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI). The CMAI aims to advance the practice of conserving modern heritage and feels that the best way to retain and reuse modern buildings is by knowing how to maintain, repair and upgrade them, and does this by providing useful tools, case studies, and training to help promote this effort. There has recently been a wave of notable demolition cases which raises the question about the environmental impact of replacing existing buildings with new ones, with many concerned …

Umass Brut: Re-Imagining The Plinth, John Amodeo

UMassBRUT Community

Modeled on UVA’s Lawn, Paul Rudolph’s mid-century Brutalist UMass Dartmouth buildings march down both sides of a gently sloped great lawn following the grade with one exception, the Auditorium, which is raised above the quad’s lawn on a 6’ high plinth, accessed by monumental stairs underscoring the entire building. With its entries elusively tucked into the ends of the building, the Auditorium steps were ceremonial at best and vacant, functionless and windswept at worst.

Evolving tastes, priorities and social behavior over subsequent decades, and even more recently, the pandemic, have made indoor/outdoor relationships, outdoor space, and universal access a top …

Beholding Brutalism: A Cultural Landscape View, Elaine Stiles

UMassBRUT Community

This talk looks at the complexities of how we encounter monumental concrete not as art objects, but as elements of the cultural landscape with social meanings, relationships, and stories encoded into their spaces. This socially-driven approach rooted in historic and cultural context, renders fuller biographies of these places than aesthetics alone, and also enriches thinking about the futures of these monumental places.

Teaching Brutalist Architecture On Campus, Lydia Brandt

UMassBRUT Community

Modern architecture on campus--especially of the Brutalist variety--provides ample opportunities to introduce and analyze the history of twentieth-century architecture with college students. This talk presents strategies for documenting, teaching, and advocating with modern architecture on American college campuses using the speaker's work at the University of South Carolina as a case study.