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Focus: Gage/Clemenceau Architects

We interview the young firm’s partners about their start and their work, and also gain some insight into their views on the practice of architecture.

-- Interior Design, 6/6/2006 1:39:00 PM

Fate had it that two architecture students with almost the same first name, Marc Clemenceau Bailly and Mark Foster Gage, would meet in college at Notre Dame and end up rooming together in the school’s study-abroad program in Rome. While neither really believes they share the same aesthetic, both knew some time after graduation that they wanted out of their firm jobs so they could try to push the limits of architecture.

“Architecture has never captivated the public interest like it does now,” says Gage. “If you watched Project Runway on TV, one of the assignments was to take a Mark Foster Gage building and to make it into a dress.”

Both the dialogue between various design disciplines and advancement in technology, have a place in their 2002-founded firm, Gage/Clemenceau Architects. The architects, who are also teachers (Gage currently instructs at Yale University), have been working on projects ranging from residential renovations and small buildings to concepts for competitions. And while the competition entries haven’t won yet, they’re certainly showing up on some radars—the AIA New York chapter recently exhibited the firm’s proposal for a Seoul performing arts center. The partners tell us more about their thoughts on the profession and their work.

You both have teaching experience. So what’s most rewarding about working with architecture students?

Bailly: There’s a nice give and take, and it keeps the office as a sort of a laboratory of investigation. It’s ongoing.

Gage: Teaching and being involved in academia keeps us abreast of all the developments in architecture. Schools are like the clearing houses of new materials, technologies, ideas, and it’s actually critical to our practice. I’m up at Yale and constantly bringing students into the office—they’re working with me and for me—and then the work at the office floods back to the school. Things we discover doing various experimental work here sort of floods back into my classes and design studios. It’s a helpful exchange for the students and for us.

How did you end up joining forces?

Gage: At Notre Dame, it’s entrenched in teaching classical architecture. So when we got out of school, we were both working for firms that were of the classical bastions in New York. After a period, we decided that we weren’t really interested in pursuing that anymore. And we both had a couple little projects on our own. So we decided to join forces and really push our own office in a new direction that was different from the previous direction of classical and traditional houses, interiors, and buildings.

Were finances a factor at all?

Bailly: Any time you’re starting out, you feel like you’ve jumped off a cliff. It’s just easier, especially in architecture, to jump off this thing and do more things faster if you have more people involved and divide up the work, rather than try to do everything yourself.

Gage: Now that we have six people, it gets really serious, because you’re responsible for someone else’s livelihood in some way. I can eat ramen for a couple years, but when you have someone working for you who has a kid, the ante goes up a bit.

Do you have a similar aesthetic?

Gage: Not so much the style, but similar ambition. Our individual talents and directions are still pretty diverse. Marc is really good with the money, knowing how to get things built and done, he speaks the language of contractors and is kind of the engine. I’m like the mini hubcaps. I don’t have the same expertise in the how-to. Mine is in putting the architecture and interior design work in dialogue with contemporary developments in design and architecture, and new alliances, like new media, graphic design, new materials, new engineering strategies…

Bailly: There’s this tension in our office, between pushing the limit and wanting to get things constructed. I couldn’t really find anyone else who would be willing to jump into that with me like Mark would. It would be a positive thing for the office, rather than something we’d always be fighting against. We’re interested in getting things built, but we’re also interested in experimenting with shapes and new technologies.

Where do you get your inspiration?

Gage: Where we get inspiration is up in the air. It’s not always the same. It can be from movies, dialogues with clients, computations, every time the computer is able to do something new, we work hard to figure out how we can make that an architectural solution to a problem.

Bailly: I’ll also see exhibits on old master paintings and see things in it that others may not, like new technologies that they worked for in painting could be just as relevant today as they were 300 years ago.

Gage: Marc is the aesthete. He would rather look at the old paintings; I would rather go home and watch the Food Network. Up until maybe ten years ago, nobody could see how a master chef cooked, or see a genius with motorcycles put one together. Now we have this encyclopedia on cable on how to do all these things, and I find that immensely inspiring and productive—watching other experts at work and revealing strategies on how to put things together.

You say you don’t favor any one type of project. But where do you think you’re able to stretch your creative muscle most?

Gage: I think what’s most exciting to us is going after the big competitions. We’ve entered five or six in the last year. Not that we don’t enjoy doing other projects. We have fun watching our clients’ projects come to life. But there’s something about working on a large project where the stakes are really high. What we do with these competitions is take all of our most progressive ideas and put them into the project.

These competitions take up time, so how do you select which ones to enter?

Gage: More often than not, we look at the ones that have potential of being built. So we just entered one, a culture yard in Denmark, and we’ll be entering another one soon for a library addition in Stockholm. Both of those are more real, tangible projects. We also have a housing complex in New Orleans that we submitted and we’re supposed to be hearing back this summer. It was looking at new strategies for developing high density housing. We were interested in looking at a type of building that was not only interesting aesthetically, but also had the ability to shed high winds and develop a system of wind trap to be resistant to future hurricanes.

Last year you entered a competition for a Seoul performing arts center. What was the inspiration for that concept?

Gage: Looking at the way a surface can invert. We were getting the inside to fold to the outside. Part of the competition brief was that they wanted a democratic place where their citizens could gather. The idea was turning the concert hall inside-out so it was no longer this box for the elite, but the inside became the outside and the outside became the inside so that it was visible to everyone from everywhere. We didn’t win this, but we got a citation from the AIA New York’s Emerging NY Architects committee.

Tell us about a proposal you submitted for a Roosevelt Island performing arts complex.

Gage: That was one that may not result in a building. When I drive up to New Haven to teach, I pass by Roosevelt Island, and I’m always astounded by the primacy of location where the project was. So when I found out that there was a competition there, I thought we have to do this. The brief was that they wanted these theaters to be visible. So instead of embedding inside a larger structure, we created a sort of strange creature or skeleton where different large public rooms are hung. There was a heavy emphasis on access for people with disabilities. Typically, people with disabilities get into the elevator and everyone else gets to go up these grand stairs. In order to equalize that, we didn’t create a grand stair. Instead, we created this translucent elevator for everyone. Then they all would cross the same bridges.

What about your built projects?

Gage: We completed this luminous, aqueous, saturated loft. We wanted to maximize the way the light came in, and refract it around these reflective surfaces to create a shimmering effect of being underwater, rather than being in an industrial, minimalist project. It was kind of a chopped-up apartment, so we also wanted to maximize the ability to see every aspect of the spaces from every other place. We responded with things like the floating stairs of thin steel treads; they basically disappear. All you really see are the lighting effects and all the other architecture sort of disappears.

You worked on another, darker loft. How did you resolve the lighting situation there?

Gage: The client wanted to keep everything open, but still have a separate bedroom. The problem was that the windows were in the back, and since this was on the second floor of the building, there was almost no daylight coming in already. We developed this acrylic screen and etched a drapery pattern in it. It creates this translucent curtain where the light from the bedroom comes through into the living room, but you can close off those panels to make the bedroom a separate space. Then, in the bedroom, we embedded these daylight fluorescent tubes in the windows, with a translucent screen pulled down, to make it look like there’s more light coming in.

What are you working on now?

Gage: A project that we’re unable to talk about for a large New York institution. We’re collaborating with other people for this and haven’t been selected yet, but they’re down to five groups of architects. We’re also working on a boutique hotel in Brooklyn, the library competition in Stockholm, and house renovations and additions in Millbrook, Bay Ridge, and Southampton, New York.

What would be your dream project?

Gage: There’s a new generation of developers, whom I call enlightened. They’re realizing that architects bring a value to a project. I’m seeking out not just the right type of project, but interested in finding the clients who really want to do something great.

Bailly: Along similar lines, the reason why I liked one of the loft projects we did was that the client and the process were easy. He trusted us, loved the process, and wanted to do something unique. The ideal project is when the client wants to do something interesting, has big ideas, wants to do it the right way…Taking that to a larger scale would be ideal.

Do you see room for improvement in architecture?

Gage: I kind of wish architects would get more ambitious and excited that the profession is having such a renaissance right now.

Bailly: I think for architecture to really continue this way, architects have to be a lot more in the public eye and stand up for things. There’s a reason why there are a lot of ugly buildings—architects aren’t pushing their clients enough. I think they have to put their foot down and not be bullied by whoever the forces are, whether developers, political…and really set their standards high and only stand for that.

Gage: That doesn’t mean being prima donnas. It’s about being able to say to a client that what you’re doing will be more valuable and beneficial to the city and society if it has an interest in great design.