Marlon Blackwell Architects

Most of my place, my surroundings, has become suburban—filled with space rather than form. The gentrification of farmland is characterized by commercial development and office parks—indistinguishable from nearby gated communities—and consists of clusters of office “homes” arranged in a neighborly way. Banal, hermetically sealed, unresponsive to the land, and asserting notions of utility with little finesse, these buildings are pervasive in the built environment—the space of the everyday. An open challenge to what a suburban office building can be, the Syrgley Building proposes another possibility. 

 

Situated in a small office park, we consciously ignored (with the owner’s support) much of the given covenants of commercial architecture and the prevailing orientation—front facade to the street—of other offices. Stretching north and south, the building’s masonry base is inflected at the center of its east elevation to provide a “slipped entry,” for access between an angled, sandblasted concrete-block wall and a metal clad shell—an industrial exoskeleton that acts simultaneously as wall and roof. 

 

A central lobby space conjoins a one-story level of offices and work zone with a two-story area of spaces dedicated to personal activities—exercising, smoking cigars, tasting wine, and cooking. The convergence of these two interior areas is manifested at the exterior with a folded roof—actually two roofs pitching in different directions that unite to invigorate the buildings profile and expression. The upstairs cigar room, enveloped in walnut panels and flooring, extends through a folding glass wall on to a shaded deck. This is an exterior room, with the foliage of trees filling in and completing its open side. At the south end of the building, rooms open out to decks with views to a creek below and are screened from the shopping mall by local oaks and sycamores that line the creek banks.

 

Under construction at the time of this writing, this building is presented, like others in this book, in support of place-specific architectural form and is set in opposition to the inexorable standardization of most contemporary construction...and ideas.