Chris Karlson, 2011 Rotch Scholar
Aside from a whirlwind tour of Europe in high school, Chris Karlson Assoc. AIA has not had the opportunity to travel abroad. Soon, though, he will embark on a four-month-long research trip as the 2011 winner of the Rotch Travelling Scholarship. His research, into contemporary contextualism in architecture, will take him from Reykjavík, Iceland, to the western coast of Norway to the Mediterranean coasts of Greece and Spain.
Karlson plans to study contextualism in contemporary architecture because he sees a return among some architects to regional attitudes and climatically sensitive design, and a resurgence of interest in local materials and craft traditions.
Over the years, he became increasingly frustrated by contemporary architecture that resembled “jewels in the landscape” and demonstrated a lack of interest in context or regional antecedents—buildings that did “not register to anything urbanistically.”
His research proposal focuses on Scandinavia because, in the last century, modern Nordic architecture used local construction methods; simple, sustainable approaches; climate-appropriate design strategies; and local materials.
For example, in Iceland, most of the timber is birch, which is not appropriate for large structures, so the local population developed turf houses. In Sweden, there was a plentiful supply of timber appropriate for large-scale structures, and thus modern Swedish architects developed innovative new ways of working with wood. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a step away from such contextually specific design, even in Scandinavia, but Karlson sees contemporary Scandinavian-based architecture firms such as BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), Snøhetta and Saunders Architecture as returning to many of same concerns as their modernist Scandinavian predecessors.
Much contemporary architecture in Switzerland, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal shows a greater sensitivity to climate, and Karlson plans to travel through those countries to study different regional attitudes. Talking about design and his research, Karlson becomes visibly excited, especially about the prospect of experiencing in person these buildings that he has studied only in books, and he hopes to interview contemporary practitioners along his trip.
As a kid growing up in Florida, Karlson developed an interest in the public realm and the role buildings play in cities—partly because Florida is so “anti-public.” He caught “the architecture bug” early in life and took architecture classes in high school and then a summer design course at the University of Florida (UF). As an undergrad at UF, he developed the perspective drawing skills and knowledge about building for which UF architecture graduates are known. After college, a two-year stint in Richard Meier & Partners Architects’ in-house model shop in New York cemented Karlson’s interest in craftsmanship, urbanism and the public realm. He returned to school, ending up at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the MArch program, partly because of the GSD’s historic focus on urbanism. After graduating from the GSD in 2008, he worked at Anmahian Winton Architects in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a range of structures, often designing through models. Currently, Karlson works as a designer at Perkins + Will, and explores sustainable design strategies on much larger buildings.
His entry in the first stage of the Rotch competition, for a bike-share station near the Rose Kennedy Greenway, employed many of the same approaches as those he plans to study—simple construction methods, and sensitivity to context and environment. For the second stage of the competition, his entry was a mixed-use building on the Greenway, and Karlson took a similarly contextually sensitive approach, occupying the full parcel through a low building.
Preparing for his trip, Karlson has been emailing and talking regularly with Hansy Better Barraza AIA, LEED AP, his Rotch advisor, and Christopher Shusta, the 2010 Rotch Scholar, who is currently traveling through many of the places Karlson will visit. (Karlson and Shusta were also graduate-school classmates.) Thinking ahead to his trip, Karlson looks forward to sharing his research and travels through a blog.
Meera Deean is a designer in Boston.
Top image courtesy of Chris Karlson Assoc. AIA.
