A black-marker scrawl on a classroom whiteboard sums up the vibe of this way-cool place: “Well-crafted, but not precious’ – Dave. The calligraphy’s flair may not real Dave’s identity, but it tells plenty about the room’s whereabouts: a studio tucked in a hyper-creative universe whose thrumming hub rises as a glass-and-steel incubator for budding architects.
You’re in Lee Hall, among the most highly regarded collegiate structures in the world.
“We talk about it as a building that teaches, but we also use it as a place to teach,” says Kate Schwennsen, chair of Clemson University’s School of Architecture. She arrived in 2010, the same year construction began on a building designed as much to harness students’ imaginations as to capture everyone else’s.
The white-and-glass structure on the campus’s southern perimeter appears like a space station waiting to rise into the heavens; like a performing-arts pavilion in an über-hip, twenty-second-century metropolis; like the coolest office building anyone, especially a college graduate, could want to work in.
In a sense, the space, inside and out, functions as all three: brilliantly crafted, not even remotely precious.
The Lee Hall we’re talking about is really Lee III. The first Lee Hall was built in 1958, and it looks like it.
Harlan McClure, the founding dean of Clemson’s School of Architecture, designed the first Lee and named the hall after Rudolph Lee, who belonged to Clemson’s inaugural class in 1896. Lee went on to become the first dean of the architecture department in 1913 and was the architect for Riggs Hall, where his students studied until Lee was built. Riggs was named for the father of Clemson football, Walter Merritt Riggs; notably, ClemsonWiki says of the Beaux-Arts design: “Clemson lore says that the grotesques decorating the front of Riggs Hall depict the faces of past professors at the University.”
It wouldn’t be fair to describe McLure’s mid-century modern Lee Hall as a detention facility, though the steel vertical grates over the windows facing Fernow Street give the two-story brick façade a certain closed-in look. “The building is one of the most elegant examples of mid- century modern architecture in the South,” the school’s website says with no small pride for the building that in 2010 was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
When the School of Architecture outgrew that Lee, Lee II came along. The addition opened in 1975, only to expand again in 1991 so the school could accommodate the always-bursting-at-the-seams population. Like most middle children, Lee II is just sort of . . . there.
Today, a bridge joins the middle Lee with the latest Lee, connecting more than just the former’s modernist straight lines with the latter’s postmodern curves. In fact, Lee III’s earliest conceptual process bridged Clemson’s past with its future. Among Lee III’s initial collaborators was Harvey Gantt, the first African-American student admitted to Clemson in 1963. A founding partner of Gantt Guberman Architects in Charlotte, he wasn’t available to discuss the design, but Thomas Phifer and Brad Smith were. Phifer earned his bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1975 and his master’s in 1977 from Clemson. Smith, a 1982 Clemson graduate, is managing principal at McMillan Pazdan Smith in Greenville.
Smith hails Phifer’s design as a “sculptural building because there are a lot of pleasing things to look at. The building attracts your eye to something different every time, and it gives you a lot of perspectives, and you always come up with a different feeling.”
Listening to Tom Phifer speak is like watching a master architect draw. One sentence leads straight to the next, connecting one detail to another, each word adding to the picture. Perhaps that’s why the multi-award winning architect was selected to lead the team that built Lee III.
Kate Schwennsen, department chair of Clemson University’s School of Architecture.
“As architects, we design the building by designing the process,” he says from his Thomas Phifer & Partners offices in Manhattan’s SoHo. “Our goal is to make architecture in which one can experience surprise, intellectual stimulation, a profound sense of physical well-being, and an af rmation of the spiritual unity between man and nature.”
The latter Lee captures all that. You hear it and feel it when Schwennsen takes you on a strolling tour through the lofty space of glass and light, where the white steel support system seems so inconspicuous that the very air appears to be holding everything up.
“When I was there,” Phifer recalls of his student days, “everything seemed to be behind the closed door. The professors were in their own hallway with closed doors, the studios were on another oor, the artists worked in different places from the architects. Everybody was just completely separated.”
Not here. The building is wide open and big. At 55,000 square feet, the structure could fit between the goalposts of nearby Death Valley; a football field, including end zones, is just shy of Lee III’s size. One could say the building is two stories, but the imagery doesn’t square with what’s inside. Yes, a staircase takes you to the second floor, but the concrete floor’s actually a mezzanine that overlooks studios doubling as classrooms. On any given day during the school year, a group of 40-some students, among the more than 840 in the School of Architecture, clusters around drafting tables while one of two professors writes on a whiteboard much like the one with Dave’s inspiring epithet.
Running through the middle of the mezzanine, which Smith refers to as a shelf, are faculty offices. The offices’ glass walls look out on studios also busy with students, workspaces, countless cardboard models, and lots of bits and pieces of materials from so many scaled-down versions of what may one day grow up into real buildings. Schwennsen says 98 percent of the building offers through- and-through views. “That leads to great productivity, too.”
David Franco beams like all the light infusing the building. He’s among 80 faculty members who teach in the three Lees. “It’s amazing, it’s beautiful, I love to work here,” says a man accustomed to amazing architecture; he grew up amid the historical abundance of old Madrid. Before joining the faculty three years ago, the 43-year-old Spaniard says he would often hear about Lee III from colleagues all over the world. “Hey, man, you’re lucky,” he says they’d say. Students working on their sky’s-the-limit designs echo the assistant professor and doctoral candidate’s comments about their enviable working conditions. Unlike all other students at Clemson, the graduate students are provided their own desks here. That means they show up to work as if they were already employed in the world’s coolest architecture office.
“As an undergraduate here, I was stuck in Lee I,” says Kunal Patel, a 22-year-old Seneca student pursuing a master’s degree in architecture. Realizing he might have put the elder Lee in a bad light, he laughs and adds, “I actually like Lee I a lot.” Then he explains how students work their way from the older buildings to the newer one, along the same lines of a neophyte who ultimately wins the corner office after apprenticing in a cubicle. “If you were around, at the end of the day, you feel like you made it.”
On a brilliant winter afternoon, Patel leans into a computer at his workstation. He and classmate Xingjan Ma, a soft-spoken 23-year-old student from China who goes by Max, study a design that looks a bit like a blueprint for an upgraded NCC-1701. It’s not some new Starship Enterprise they’re designing, though, but a medical city in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Their complex and challenging assignment is typical here. In another part of the building, students work on plans to repurpose shuttered big-box stores, turning old Walmarts into self-contained mini-cities. In yet another space are walls left over from a project called Indigo Pine: a three-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot, energy-ef cient home entered in the US Department of their self-designed structure in nine days. Now they’ve applied for a patent on what Schwennsen calls “a whole new structural system.”
“We have our students do some blue-sky thinking about architecture and planning the way into the future,” she says.
Energy’s Solar Decathlon. Students built Lee III is as much a futuristic role model as it is an environmental achievement. While the building sits on the very edge of campus, with its backyard overlooking Lake Hartwell, trees, and mountains, it sits on the cutting edge of green design and construction. Phifer frequently circles back to, as he puts it, “the environmental imperative we imposed on the building.”
David Franco, an assistant professor and doctoral candidate at the School of Architecture.
Among several enviro-centric components, pipes run through the mezzanine’s concrete-slab flooring. Water from 42 geothermal wells 440 feet below ground flows through the ducts at a median 59 degrees, helping maintain temperatures through Southern heat and Piedmont chill.
You can even see something like trees in the forest of all these energy-saving features. Columns branch out into limbs that support the roof, but in a design that required less steel. On the roof itself, 30,000 square feet is covered with sedum, a flowering cactus-like plant. That not only creates yet more energy efficiency, but gives Lee III the distinction of having the largest rooftop garden in the Southeast.
Skylights are everywhere, too—53 of them, internal and external. The ones in the offices retract, offering ventilation in the summer. Back to the roof, fixtures that look like ice scoops jut upward from the skylights, which automatically change angle and aperture depending on interior lighting and temperature requirements.
Taken together, the building is “net-zero energy,” producing as much energy as it consumes. Little wonder the U.S. Green Building Council in 2010 recognized all that with a Gold certification in Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED). Architects heap praise on the aesthetics, too. In 2014, Architectural Digest magazine listed Lee III among eight other collegiate buildings from Beirut, Lebanon, to Glasgow, Scotland, as “one of the best in new university architecture around the world.” In 2013, the 83,000-member American Institute of Architects bestowed Lee III with an Honor Award.
As Franco puts it: “It’s a great example of what you can do in the South; it’s not a stereotype.”
It’s tempting to define Lee III as an architectural objet d’art, but you’re hard-pressed to hear Phifer refer to his design that way.
“The artistic statement comes from how it works,” he says. “We always wanted a building that teaches. If you grow up with a building that’s open like this, where everyone works together, as you leave the school, you will begin to work that way yourself.”
Schwennsen adds another bonus. Lee III serves as an attractive recruiting tool for Clemson and the departments and programs housed in the three Lees: Art; Landscape Architecture; City and Regional Planning; Construction Science and Management; Real Estate Development; and a doctoral program in Planning, Design and “the Built Environment.” Another cutting-edge program, Architecture + Health, lives in the Lee campus, too.
While Lee III’s a living, breathing laboratory, it’s also a career launching pad, Schwennsen says. “We have students who are graduating this spring and getting job offers for jobs they haven’t even applied for.”
They’re trained to design a better world, undoubtedly inspired inside Phifer’s creativity.
So, who is Phifer’s inspiration? You’d expect an architect of his renown to count among his heroes I.M. Pei or Mies van der Rohe, the latter the influential German-American architect known for his minimalist designs and often credited with the aphorism “less is more.”
Phifer’s biggest influence? Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The design is expressed in neighborliness and a democracy of spirit,” he says. “Buildings marked by design excellence are connected to their surroundings and embody the culture of the places they inhabit. They are simply open and accessible. They are built, first and foremost, for the people who use them. Their design is rooted not in fashion of form or theory, but in the very activity by which they are realized.”
A statement as well-crafted as a design that nurtures precious resources.
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