Ruhl Walker Architects

After a very long, exhausting day flying from Boston to the Big Island of Hawai‘i, and after a bizarre drive across seemingly endless miles of lava – usually at night with little sense of scale – harried visitors are often welcomed by a warm “aloha”, friendly faces, cool towels, fresh guava juice, and hotels unlike anything most of us have seen before. Who knew that hotels didn’t really need walls? As with Hawaiian houses, the main public spaces of most Hawaiian hotels are essentially large open air lanais; no screens as you would find in the Caribbean since flying insects are less prevalent in Hawai‘i, and it is rare to see the discrete bi-folding shutters or sliding skylights closed. The next morning you wake up, and you see views like those below.  Pure heaven! And fresh ideas for how these design possibilities might translate into our own work on custom vacation houses in New England…

Credits:
Mauna Kea Beach Resort: Mauna Kea Beach Hotel
Four Seasons Hualalai: Four Seasons Resort At Hualalai

Having just returned from the Big Island of Hawai‘i – the first time in five years not related at least partially to working with the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center – I still have Hawai‘i on my mind… It doesn’t help that the temperatures dipped into single digits this weekend, with wind chills below zero!

Architects have a hard time traveling without focusing obsessively on local architecture, and Hawaii’s – the openness to the elements, the blurring of inside and outside, the direct link to Asian architecture in both form and spatial flow – is particularly alluring. One key element is the “lanai”, a term first used in Hawai‘i in the early eighteenth century, and elsewhere known generically as a porch or veranda. The Hawaiian Islands are well known for their steady tropical breezes, a benefit and sometimes curse of being located so remotely in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaiian lanais are often a house’s primary living space, and provide much needed shade and help Hawaiian buildings breathe by catching the trade winds and using that constant supply of fresh, naturally cooled (by the Pacific) air to remove hotter, more stagnant air. Below are a few of my favorite examples of modern lanais.

Send us your own images and thoughts! And look forward to future posts showing how we bring this “exotic” knowledge to our New England projects!

Will Ruhl

Credits:

Belzberg Architects, Santa Monica, CA: Belzberg Architects
Olson Kundig Architects, Seattle, WA: Olson Kundig Architects
Craig Steeley Architecture, San Francisco, CA: Craig Steely Architecture
Legoretta + Legoretta, Mexico: Legorreta + Legorreta

We are proud members of the 1%, but before anyone gets upset, we are not talking about vast, personal wealth (au contraire!), but about the program founded in 2005 by Public Architecture with support from a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. Public Architecture is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in San Francisco, and The 1% program encourages pro bono service within the architecture and design professions, and helps connect architects and non-profits.  Their inspiration is that “if every architecture professional in the US committed 1% of their time to pro bono service, it would add up to 5,000,000 hours annually – the equivalent of a 2,500-person firm, working full time for the public.”  We renew our commitment to meet our part of this goal annually.

As we have shared in earlier posts, we’ve provided the bulk of our pro-bono support over the past four years to the Hawai’i Wildlife Center on the Big Island of Hawai’i. (See previous posts from November, August, May, and March).  We have proudly contributed over 2,000 hours of our time – a true labor of love / aloha! – not to mention all the time donated by our affiliated architectural and engineering partners in Hawaii.  How did our efforts help this non-profit?  Our early design digital modeling and renderings allowed this under-funded non-profit to leverage its fundraising position by illustrating a serious, well designed facility, attracting substantial public and private support without the aid of a professional fund-raising team, and in the midst a deep recession. With those early funds, the HWC was able to build the building shell and landscaping, and the building itself – the physical embodiment and symbol of the center – became a compelling fund raising tool, its image and the progress giving additional donors the confidence that the HWC was worthy of their support, allowing the HWC to raise additional funds for the labs and interior finishes, fittings and equipment.  In a very real sense, the donated architectural services made the mission of this non-profit possible, not just affordable.

As our fellow professionals in medicine and law work for health and justice for the underserved, we believe that architects have an obligation to ensure that a well designed, sustainable environment should not be a privilege reserved only for the wealthy (the other 1%!).  As we complete our work in Hawaii, we’re actively looking for another great fit for our interests and abilities.  We’d love to have you recommend any New England organizations that could use our design help to further their mission! Please do let us know if you have any non-profits near and dear to you that you think could benefit from our efforts by commenting below.

Last Saturday, November 19^th, our Hawai‘i Wildlife Center had its official opening, and Will Ruhl and Sandra Baron were fortunate to be able to be in Kapa‘au to represent Ruhl Walker Architects in paradise. We were joined by our Associate Architects and great friends Rhoady Lee and Aaron Spielman of Rhoady Lee Architecture + Design, our landscape architects Jason Umemoto and Nancy Cassandro of Umemoto Cassandro Design, the rest of our talented (and pro bono) design and engineering team, the general contractor and many of his incredibly generous sub-contractors (many if not most of whom had donated or discounted their time and material costs), and hundreds of neighbors, family, and friends.

The celebration began with a quietly beautiful and poetic blessing of the Center by Kumu Hula Raylene Ha‘alelea Kawaiaea, and also included some other visiting dignitaries who publicly declared their support, like John Buckstead of Governor Abercrombie’s office in Honolulu, who spoke on behalf of the Governor, who declared November 19^th, 2011 as the official day of the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center. In between the speeches, entertainment was provided by students of the nearby Kohala Middle School, as well as the Kohala Hula group, Halau Kalaniumi Aliloa O Hawai‘i Nei, and topped off by the Grammy Award winning slack key guitarist John Keawe. There is always an element of bittersweet sadness at the end of a project, for clients and architects alike, but the focus of the day was on the path that led us to this point, and on the new beginning of the HWC’s important efforts to protect and rehabilitate the native flora and fauna of this magical place.

Though the project has a (small) punch list still to complete, the Certificate of Occupancy is in hand and “all” that is left to do is construct the pens and pools in the fenced-in rehabilitation yard for the expected endangered native species, build the custom pens for the recovery rooms, connect the custom hoses for the wash-rinse room (for handling any future oil-soaked animals in the event of an oil spill), install the rooftop solar photovoltaic array and the water-collection catchment system, deliver the triage room furniture, install building signage and educational displays, hire staff, and … raise some money for operations! We hope you will consider joining us in donating online to this wonderful and critically important environmental organization; just click here! Mahalo!

For additional information on the opening of the Hawai‘i Wildlife Center, see:

Hawai‘i Tribune Herald

Big Island Video News (great video, if you have time!)

Hawai‘i Wildlife Center Facebook

Ethan Tweedie’s online photo album

For additional information on the HWC architecture, see:

Ruhl Walker Architects

images courtesy of Ethan Tweedie.

The Hawai’i Wildlife Center, designed by Ruhl Walker Architects, was featured in ArchDaily on August 20^th.  ArchDaily is one of the leading and most influential architecture website in the world, and gets over two million visits and eighteen million page impressions per month according to Google Analytics.

Please visit our portfolio website for additional information on the design of the HWC, and join us in supporting this critically important environmental cause by visiting the HWC’s online donation page!

The exterior of the HWC has been completed, and the interiors will be finished in November, in time for a grand opening celebration on November 19th.

Ruhl Walker Architects is providing pro bono design services for several affordable / sustainable house prototypes to be built in the Summer of 2012 in Kailua-Kona, Hawai’i, as part of “Blitz Build”, an annual event undertaken at different locations around the country by Blitz Home Builders, an international group of Habitat for Humanity volunteers that have organized annual Blitz Builds since 1996.

The Blitz Build will take place from September 12-22, 2012, in Kailua-Kona on the west (dry) side of the Big Island.  The West Hawai’i affiliate of Habitat for Humanity hopes to build up to five houses in this 10-day span! These homes will be similar to the Habitat homes built on the mainland, but will have some unique design features suitable for the heavenly Hawaiian climate. Please visit the Hawaii ’12 page on Blitz Home Builder’s website for additional information.

Ruhl Walker has begun preliminary design work on two prototypes that will be presented to Habitat West Hawaii’s Building Committee later this year. The plan features a covered deck or lanai, an open living / dining / kitchen with sliding glass doors leading to the lanai, and a screened porch / hallway leading to 2 bedrooms and a shared bath. The proportions of the house — 16’-0” wide by 60’-0” long — allow for simple wood framing and ample cross ventilation; the covered lanai and screened hallway further enhance natural cross ventilation.  One side of the house has fewer / smaller windows and would be oriented towards the prevailing trade winds, and the other sides would have larger windows and generous overhangs and be oriented towards the sea (“makai”). The screened hallway would have painted studs 24” on center and horizontal battens 12” on center, and the resulting grid would read as a large window.  Materials under consideration are composite siding and trim on the makai side of the house as well as the end elevations, and corrugated metal siding on the windward side. 

The images below are very preliminary.  We look forward to posting updates as our design work – and ultimately construction – continues.

The prototype floor plan, with lanai on the far right, main living space in the middle, and screened hallway, two bedrooms, and shared bath on the left.	One option for the exterior, with separate volumes for the living and sleeping spaces, separated by the screened hallway.
A second option for the exterior of the West Hawai’i Habitat prototype, with a more linear expression.	The windward side of the house will have smaller windows and corrugated metal siding.

The new native species gardens are growing in nicely at the new facility Ruhl Walker Architects designed for the Hawai’i Wildlife Center on the Big Island of Hawai’i, and the construction team at TDI is making great progress towards the official opening in November. Rough plumbing, electrical, and mechanical work are installed and ready for the interior finish work.  

Our partners at Rhoady Lee Architecture and Design are managing the day to day construction administration process which is great except it means for Will there is no longer a regular excuse to visit the islands, unlike the last few years… It’s been great collaborating with Rhoady and Aaron; they’ve been helping us on the HWC, and we’ve in turn collaborated with them on several residential projects, including a recently completed house at the Hualalai Resort, home to the fabulous Four Seasons.  In fact, our senior associate, Sandra Baron, spent 6 weeks working in their office in Waimea during the detailing push for that house, 3 weeks each on two separate occasions.  Aaron, when are you coming to Boston?!

The outpouring of community support for the HWC continues to be amazing. On June 15^th, a contingent of Marines – members of Wing Support Squadron 171, stationed in Iwakuni, Japan, but currently training at the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island – joined Linda Elliott and others to assemble enormous lava rock slabs into benches and tables within the interpretive courtyard. The slabs had been donated by Ryan Associates.

November can’t come soon enough!

Please join us in supporting the Hawai’i Wildlife Center by donating online here!

Exterior view of the main façade of the HWC, seen from the parking area, towards the lanai and open-air education pavilion.	Exterior view of the main entrance to the HWC, with the staging porch (open air triage space) on the left.
A vibrantly painted blue planar wall continues from the entrance lanai into the reception area.	The members of Wing Support Squadron 171, stationed in Iwakuni, Japan, but currently training at the Pohakuloa Training Area on the Big Island, ready to assemble the lava rock slabs into benches and tables for the interpretative courtyard.
The ventilation system will not only cool the injured endangered species being cared for, but also will provide the required air exchanges that will improve their healing more quickly; air conditioning will be minimal despite the tropical climate, due to excellent cross ventilation and reliable tradewinds.	The elaborate plumbing systems will be able to handle major oil spills as well as day to day rehabilitation needs.

As part of our commitment to annually contribute a minimum of 1% of our time to pro bono causes, Ruhl Walker Architects has been working with the Hawai’i Wildlife Center since 2006 on Hawai’i's first and only native wildlife recovery, rehabilitation, and education center. The HWC is located in Halaula, Hawai’i, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. 

It is difficult to think about problems of any kind amidst the overwhelming natural beauty of the Hawaiian Islands, but the sad truth is that the Islands are host to more threatened and endangered native species per square mile than any other place in the world. A report from 2010 on Climate Change states that 93% of Hawaiian birds are at medium to high vulnerability. In February 2007, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) declared that the forests of the Hawaiian Islands are the most threatened bird habitat in the United States. The ABC stated that “most (native species) are dependent on vigilant conservation measures to survive at all.” Having seen many of the Big Island’s native birds on a recent trip sponsored by HWC founder and director, Linda Elliott, and renowned wildlife biologist and widely published photographer, Jack Jeffry, project architect Will Ruhl has an even more profound feeling of the urgency for this facility. The BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is all the proof one needs that tragedy can occur even in paradise.

This continues to be a labor of love as we progress with fund raising to complete the interiors of the HWC; needless to say, fund raising has been particularly difficult due to the Great Recession! But we are proud to be part of an amazing team of architects from Boston and Waimea, engineers from California and Hawai’i, a landscape architect from Oahu who grew up near the HWC site, construction managers from Hawi, and many local contractors and subcontractors who have contributed so much of their time and donated materials. The spirit of aloha is alive and well!

The interiors of the HWC are framed and roughed, but the good news is that the exterior shell and rough landscape, grading, and parking is now substantially complete.

The Hawai'i Wildlife Center from Lighthouse Road.	The HWC with, from left to right, staging porch, entrance to rehabilitation facility, central public lanai, and open air classroom.
The front facade of the HWC is composed of fiber cement siding that alternates from solid lap siding to slats spaced apart at different intervals to allow natural ventilation into the education pavilion and staging porch.	The entrance to the HWC treatment facility is defined by planes of vibrant color set within an otherwise monochromatic composition the HWC's lanai will eventually lead to a native species garden, currently being propogated by a local school group, and will house educational displays focusing on native endangered species.
The front wall of the staging porch -- essentially the emergency room entrance for delivering injured birds -- is sheathed with composite siding held apart to allow natural ventilation, a new take on an old agricultural building tradition.	The side walls of the education pavilion are sheathed with clear corrugated polycarbonate paneling, allowing natural illumination into the space while also keeping out the prevalent rain and mist that North Kohala is known for.
Entry to the open air education pavilion is through the central lanai.	Closeup view of the slatted front plane of the education pavilion seen through the corrugated polycarbonate paneling.
The HWC will host talks to local school groups, educational outreach on environmental issues to locals, and talks geared towards vacationers.	By varying the size of the composite slats as well as the openings between slats, a virtual "window" was created in the front facade of the education pavilion.

You can find a lot of facts and figures about our team on our portfolio website, but the facts do not tell the whole story.  We are more than the sum of our parts; we like to think of our studio as a family, including our alumna/ae who may have moved along to other firms in other parts of the world but continue to have an impact on us to this day.  We have been so fortunate to have worked with so many incredibly able, talented, intelligent, and INTERESTING men and women over the years.

You might be interested to learn that we have attracted an unusually large number of surfers, like our first associate, Mark Bandzak, who thought nothing of surfing in Maine in the middle of winter; or Matt Ostrow, who surfed competitively all over the world prior to joining our studio; or Grant Scott, who grew up in New Zealand and surfed his way around the world, cut his dreads and found his architectural calling in London, somehow landed in Alabama of all places, then turned up in Boston, luckily for us.  At the moment, we do not have any surfers on board, other than our lead snow-boarder, Lilly, and other than the token surfer wanna-be – Will Ruhl – thanks to his love of the Big Island of Hawai’i…

So, we tend to be a pretty laid-back crowd for the most part, other than that we work intensely during normal working hours.  The office can be pretty quiet as we crank away on behalf of our clients…  Brad and Will work really hard to maintain the office equilibrium and work loads, and other than one period of 3 weeks when we had to charette due to the frantic This Old House TV schedule featuring a house we designed in Cambridge, [click here for a link], we have been able to keep to unusually normal schedules, rare for design studios in Boston.  We do this not just for ourselves and our quality of life, but for our clients, since no one benefits from being on full-time panic mode! So, laid back, passionate, intense…

We can’t resist bragging about our current team. Our senior associate, Sandra Baron, is a LEED Accredited Professional and Registered Architect, with architectural degrees from UVa and MIT, and brings the benefit of almost 9 years of professional experience to our studio and our clients.  Lilly Smith is not only our lead snow-boarder but is also our resident artist (BFA Summa Cum Laude from UMass, Amhearst), another MIT graduate, a LEED Accredited Professional and brings almost 8 years of diverse experience to the team. Lilly directs sustainability issues in our practice. Nerijus Petrokas brings his wit and refined sense of humor to our studio by way of his Master’s Degree in Architecture from Penn; 3 years of architectural experience at firms such as Machado + Silvetti, office dA, and Howeler + Yoon; 2 years building custom houses on Nantucket; and growing up in Lithuania.  Keith Case is yet another MIT grad, where he received the Alpha Rho Chi medal, received his undergrad degree from Middlebury, and has worked in Maine, Vermont, and NYC, where he interned with Tod Williams Billie Tsien.  Paul Commito is the most recent addition to our studio, and joined us after spending four years in Washington and London as a Marketing Manager for an executive networking/education board, and two years with Gensler in Washington working in marketing and business development. It’s a great team, with each person bringing unique strengths and interests, and the mix being a genuine benefit to our clients.

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Hillary and Dragomir

Lilly and Wyatt

2010 saw the addition of two more honorary RWA family members.  In May, one of our all time favorite associates, Hillary Mateev, who had rejoined us in February after 3 years at Cambridge 7, and her husband Slavi brought baby Dragomir (nicknamed “Dari”) into the world! And then on Thanksgiving night, Lilly Smith and her husband, James, gave birth to Wyatt James Smith! Hillary is now back at Cambridge 7, and Lilly is on maternity leave, but they and their families are still an integral part of our studio.