Architecture — Andrew Todd Marcus

Private residence · Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts · Next Phase Studios · Architect of Record and Project Architect · completed April 2010 · 3,500 SF · $800,000

A house for a family of four on a limited site and a limited budget. The private rooms are compact and arranged around a two-storey gallery that is transparent from the front of the house to the back, so the living space reads as a single room open to the trees on both sides. Commercial aluminum-frame gallery windows and exposed corner glazing carry the light; a monumental wrapping roof with deep overhangs controls it, and its folded planes appear to shift as the house is approached from different directions. Inside, a custom steel stair and steel columns hold the volume open.

I was Architect of Record and Project Architect, responsible for budget, design, permitting, procurement, and construction administration. The house is built and has been published.

A low modern house seen through bare winter trees at dusk, its interior lit warm, the white underside of a folded roof plane glowing above a white entry wall — Front elevation at dusk

A black-framed pivot door held open, the view running straight through a double-height white room to full-height glazing and trees on the far side — Entry, looking through the gallery

Rear of the house in daylight: a two-storey glazed wall with black-framed doors, cedar siding, an ipe deck, the white roof overhanging deeply — Rear elevation

Unfurnished ground floor: an open steel-and-wood stair at left, thin steel columns, a fireplace, corner glazing to woods, a glossy cherry floor — Living space and stair

Ground floor looking toward a white kitchen island: fireplace at left, full-height glazing to a deck, steel columns, built-in shelving — Living space toward the kitchen

Upper level of the double-height space: white walls, a clerestory ribbon window, black-framed openings, a low guard wall, a bedroom door beyond — Upper gallery

Close view of the stair: wood treads on a folded steel stringer, a thin steel-bar guardrail, a half-landing — Stair

Line drawings stacked vertically: the second-floor plan, the ground-floor plan with garage, and a building section through the two-storey gallery — Plans and section

Allston, Massachusetts · Next Phase Studios, with Behnisch Architekten · Project Architect, leading a team of four junior designers · the $200M public-amenities scope of a $1B, 640,000 SF complex, designed to LEED Platinum · Phase 1 construction documents complete 2008; the complex was later suspended

Behnisch Architekten designed the life-science complex; Next Phase Studios designed its public ground floor. Our scope, about $200M of the whole, was the Conference Center, the Childcare Center, the cafeteria, and the fitness center, each coordinated with the design architect and the client and each given its own character against the technical order of the lab building above. I led the Next Phase team of four junior designers and coordinated the structural, mechanical, LEED, security, and audio-visual consultants through Phase 1 construction documents.

Conference Center. A double-curved glass wall marks the main entry of the complex and encloses two conference spaces: a 250-seat lecture hall with a sloped floor and a flat multi-use room for about 150. Both are daylit and passively ventilated and were designed to hold science conferences, music, and theater.

Childcare Center. Set into the ground floor of a rigid lab grid, the Childcare Center breaks the grid with a curved wood ribbon wall. It follows the Reggio Emilia piazza idea: every programmed room meets in one central social space. Natural ventilation, daylight, and a connection to the garden outside are the organizing principles.

A rendered corner view of a glass-and-metal laboratory building over a plaza with many people; a curved, colour-fritted glass wall wraps the ground floor at left — The complex from the plaza · Rendering

A colour plan of four lab blocks around a central green; a kidney-shaped childcare plan with a garden at left, a raked auditorium at lower right — Ground floor plan

A rendered auditorium with tiers of red seats, a wood-slat ceiling with skylights, a green end wall, a speaker at a lectern — Lecture hall · Rendering

A night rendering of a curved glass wall glowing orange from within, bike racks and a cyclist in front, lit lab floors above — Conference Center at night · Rendering

A backlit physical model at night: a curved translucent wall glowing green to pink between vertical mullions, scale figures and wire trees in front — Study model of the conference wall

A soft, hand-coloured rendering of an outdoor deck with board-formed concrete walls pierced by round portholes, white birches, a play mound, a parent and toddlers — Childcare garden · Rendering

A long line-drawn elevation of a curved wood wall laid flat: contour-line grain across its length, round windows, benches, a doorway — The ribbon wall, unrolled

A building section: a low classroom volume with a clerestory, the curved wood wall in solid black, coloured child figures, yellow daylight arrows, the lab mass above as a flat block — Childcare Center, section

An overhead photograph of a white model: curved ribbon walls enclosing a garden, dried-flower trees, blue ground cover, a white lab mass above — Site model

A full-size mock-up photographed in raking light: wood shingle cladding in a running bond over a curved surface, with dark metal tiles set in — Cladding mock-up

Greenfield, Massachusetts · Next Phase Studios · Project Lead Architect, design through early construction documents · 1,000 SF · completed spring 2012

An energy-neutral greenhouse and science facility, built as a teaching and research demonstration and as a new entry to the college's science wing. The form does the environmental work: a vertical north wall and a steep, fully glazed south slope optimize solar gain and drive wall-to-peak ventilation by stack effect through automated awning windows. The frame is well-insulated wood construction; solar thermal and photovoltaic systems are integrated into the envelope, and the electricity they generate runs the daytime lighting and the fans and motors that keep the house from overheating.

I led the design through early construction documents. I left Next Phase Studios before construction administration; the building was completed in spring 2012, after my departure.

A small wedge-shaped building with a sloped glass south wall and a vertical metal north end, on a concrete plinth above a lawn; students walk past on a path — The greenhouse, completed

A rendered section through the sloped greenhouse against a forest backdrop: growing benches, two figures, red and blue ribbon arrows showing warm air rising and cool air entering — Section, air movement · Rendering

Looking straight up a wood post-and-beam frame against a clear sky: steel gusset plates, tie rods, purlins running off into the slope — Frame

Interior view up through the sloped glazing frame: wood rafters, steel tension rods meeting a cast node, translucent panels, a copper pipe run — Glazing frame

A colour-washed plan: the glazed greenhouse attached to the existing college building, with site contours and a curved drive — Plan

Eugene, Oregon · Andrew Todd Marcus, Architect · Architect; designed and built with local artists and craftspeople · August 2011 · $30,000

A fifteen-person sauna for a 75-acre private family and retreat center, and the one building on this page I designed and built myself. The plan is a ten-foot cube. A double-curved roof with a skylight rides over it, breaking the cube's rigidity, bringing in light, and making the interior larger than its footprint. The walls are cob with straw insulation; the structure is reclaimed timber; the doors and stained-glass windows are hand-made; an attached shower is fieldstone and mosaic.

I modeled the building in Rhino with the carpenters involved from the start, so that every part could be built from locally sourced material, and produced full-scale shop drawings for each component of the roof to keep its curvature true. The drawing set is dated September 2010; the sauna was built the following summer with the artists and craftspeople of the farm, and departs from the drawings in places, as hand-built work does.

A small cob building with peeled-log porch posts, a shingled roof, and a barrel-vaulted skylight riding over the ridge, in low golden light among trees — The sauna at evening

The front of the sauna: an arched hand-made timber door centred in an earthen wall, four log posts, the shingled roof and skylight above, a deck below — Front

A cedar-lined interior corner with a recessed niche and two small square stained-glass windows glowing — Interior

Looking up at an arched stained-glass window set into a curved cedar ceiling: a yellow sun face on a pink marbled ground — Skylight

An outdoor shower of river-cobble walls and a black-pebble mosaic floor, a brass shower head under exposed rafter tails, forest beyond — Shower

A close view of a leaded stained-glass panel of a Ganesha head in greens and reds, set in a routed recess in warm wood — Stained-glass panel

A tinted sectional drawing of the sauna: thick earthen walls lined in wood, two tiers of bench, a thermometer niche, two small windows, the curved roof with the skylight box at its centre, the cobble-walled shower under the eave at right, the deck raised on posts — Section · 2010 drawing, redrawn 2026

Light Sculpture, Genzyme Science Building

Highpoint, day · Rendering · study, unbuilt

Next Phase Studios · three commissions for Genzyme Corporation, 2008–2010

Three commissions for the same client over two years, at three scales: a handrail, a light installation, and a rooftop.

Handrail

Genzyme Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts · completed October 2008 · Project Lead Architect · built

Genzyme commissioned a rail to redress pedestrian flow on the monumental stair in the twelve-storey atrium of its headquarters. The rail is detailed in part like the hull of a boat and tapers in three directions; it meets the stair obliquely and channels people across the run line of the stair's geometry, leaving the code railing to its own independent line. From above it reads as a single monolithic element in the atrium; at hand height its changes of pitch and scale keep it comfortable. I coordinated the wood and steel trades and phased the installation so the building never closed during business hours.

A tapering wood rail, shaped like a hull, ending over a stair landing; a thin steel grab tube beside it; people on the flight below in dappled coloured light — Handrail, Genzyme Center

The monumental stair seen from above in its atrium: bamboo, a reflecting pool, a reception desk, the wood rail running the length of the flight, people small — The stair in the atrium

The upper end of the wood rail seen level-on, knifing to a point past a glass balustrade, rooftops beyond — Terminus at the landing

A colour plan of the atrium floor: the stair, pools, bamboo drawn as circles, the rail as an orange bar, seated figures — Atrium plan

A line-drawn longitudinal section: the stair on its plinth, the rail as a thin inclined prism, grey human silhouettes at either end — Section

Light Sculpture

Genzyme Science Building, Framingham, Massachusetts · completed January 2008 · Job Captain and Designer · built

During construction of a new science building the client asked for a sculptural answer to a poorly lit eight-storey atrium, and for a visual link to the atrium of the Cambridge headquarters. Three large mobiles of prismatic acrylic plates, lit by ambient light and custom fixtures, deliver full-spectrum light to every floor. I handled European sourcing and production of the parts, customs, coordination with the building's architect, and the final tuning of the installation with the lighting engineer.

A tall view of one mobile of clear plates spiralling down an eight-storey atrium beside a stair and a wood-clad column — Light Sculpture, Genzyme Science Building

A dozen acrylic plates on monofilament with small counterweights, rainbow spectra across their faces, a warm wood wall behind — Prismatic plates

Highpoint

Genzyme Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts · 2010 · study, unbuilt · Project Lead Architect

A study for the highpoint of the headquarters roof: vertical-axis helical wind turbines, placed for production and composed as a landmark, still by day and lit at night, visible from the Charles River Esplanade. The technical work was siting the turbines for output while holding the building's structural and architectural order. It would have been the first installation of that generation of turbine in the United States. The study was completed in 2010 and was not built.

A rendered photomontage of the Genzyme Center facade with four white helical turbines on masts at the roofline, blue sky, snow below — Highpoint, day · Rendering · study, unbuilt

The same building at dusk, four turbines lit green against a deep blue sky with a moon — Highpoint, night · Rendering

A composite sheet: a photograph of one white helical turbine against sky at left; at right four drawings, west and north elevations, a lighting section, and a plan, with the turbines in red over a grey building — Highpoint drawings

New York City CityRacks design competition · 2008 · Next Phase Studios · conceptual design, fabrication, and competition coordination · short-listed; exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, 2008

A bike rack made of the thing everyone already uses to lock a bike. The Cable Rack is a grand cable lock clicked into an anchor on the street: a flexible cable sculpture that eases slightly when a bike leans against it, rigid enough to secure the bike, soft enough to invite the hand. A family of forms, the Loop series and the Heart series, lets a venue or a neighbourhood be identified by its racks. Two components, cable and anchor, can be produced in series, and in cost and life-cycle terms the rack may outperform the steel-tube racks it replaces.

The design was short-listed in New York City's CityRacks competition and shown at the Cooper Hewitt. Prototypes were placed on New York streets, and a rack was installed with the City of Boston on Boylston Street.

A spiral-wound steel-and-copper cable looped into a heart form, bolted to a galvanized plate, photographed on white with a hard cast shadow — Prototype, Heart series

A glowing yellow heart-shaped rack composited into a dusk photograph of a Manhattan diner, two bikes parked against it — Heart rack, Chelsea · Rendering

A pale loop-shaped rack with a blue bike composited into a street photograph of Rivington Street at dusk, people and a taxi passing — Loop rack, Lower East Side · Rendering

A diagram sheet: photographs of hands flexing a cable lock, a red cable lock with keys, and grey renders of the Loop and Heart series on their base plates, labelled — How it works

Perch: play stair, platform and bookcase

1064 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts · independent design-build · co-founded and designed; designer, builder, and design lead · summer 2015 · founding board member · part of the Wildflower network; the design became a model for Wildflower schools

A storefront on Cambridge Street became a Montessori classroom in one summer. I co-founded the school and designed and built its room: a forest path of planter benches along the wall, a boardwalk, a bridge with a stair and a cut-out rail, a tree house on real trunks under a plant shelf, a felt forest, cubbies and benches drawn for a parent volunteer to build. The perch, a play stair with a platform over a bookcase and a tunnel through it, is the room's one piece of furniture that is also a building. I coordinated the build, prepared the drawing for the landlord's approval, and managed the design budget. The school passed its state licensing inspection in August 2015 and opened that fall.

The room re-rendered in warm light, with children drawn as white line figures on the rugs, at the table, on the bridge — The classroom

The classroom toward the perch and the boardwalk in warm light: planter benches, a low table with cube stools, children drawn as white line figures — Toward the perch

The room toward a low bookshelf wall under a blue sky painting, the tree trunk at right, the table and stools, children drawn as white line figures — Toward the shelves

The tree-house nook: a plywood shelf on two trunks above a cushioned burlap alcove, dried grasses along a boardwalk, children drawn as white line figures reading and playing — Tree house

Looking through the open green shopfront door in evening light: a pebble-tile entry mat, a round jute rug, the cubby wall at left with shoes, the plywood perch with its oval cut-outs ahead, plants and dried grasses, the street reflected in the glass — From the street door

A rendering of the plywood play stair placed against the windowed wall of the classroom, children on rugs around it — Perch in the classroom · Rendering

A line plan of the classroom with its zones labelled: Bridge, Forest Path, Cubbies, Bench, Stone Tiles, Felt Stone Wall, Perch, Felt Forest, Tree House — Plan, 2015

A line-drawn axonometric of a birch-ply play stair: a stepped side panel with oval cut-outs, an arched tunnel beneath, a platform, and an open bookcase at the end, labelled — Perch: play stair, platform and bookcase

Play sculpture · Louis A. DePasquale Universal Design Playground, Danehy Park, Cambridge, Massachusetts · completed 2021 · Client: City of Cambridge, funded by a Cambridge Arts grant · Designed by middle and high school students of NuVu Studio in the Architecture After Play studios, which I conceived and taught; city and client coordination and design lead through design development · Construction documents and fabrication: Ethan Lacy, with Formateria · Playground design: Weston & Sampson · Photographs: Ethan Lacy

Danehy Park is a former city landfill. Pipe Dreams begins there: a storm pipe, eroded and half buried, at the heart of Cambridge's first playground built entirely on universal design.

The concept and the design are the students'. Over five studios my students carried the project from abstraction exercises through sketch models, diagrams, presentation drawings, fabrication drawings, and budgets, and through the coordination a public commission demands with city officials, landscape architects, engineers, fabricators, and disability advisors. I ran the meetings with the city and the client, worked through each proposal with the students, and led the design they arrived at through design development.

For construction documents and fabrication I brought on Ethan Lacy, who developed the build with Formateria. A Grasshopper script generated the eroded geometry from a two-dimensional drawing. Each plank of acetylated wood (Accoya) was milled to a wedge, shaped on a CNC router, routed and sanded by hand, and assembled on site over a custom plywood jig with 1,600 five-inch stainless steel lag screws.

The playground opened in December 2021. In 2024 Boston Magazine named it Best Outdoor Play Space.

Pipe DreamsEthan Lacy

The complete sculpture sitting low on green and blue safety surfacing under full autumn foliage, houses and the park's timber structures behind — In the parkEthan Lacy

A three-quarter view of the whole wooden barrel with its cut apertures on green turf in winter light, parked cars and houses behind — The sculptureAccoya

The full ring of planks at one end of the pipe in raking low sun, play equipment and a brick house beyond — The intact endEthan Lacy

From inside the pipe looking out through its broken end: wave-cut plank strata sweeping across the frame, a pergola and bare trees beyond — Inside the eroded endEthan Lacy

From inside the pipe: two children on the crown above blowing bubbles, a toddler and an adult with a camera in the opening beyond — From insideEthan Lacy

A toddler in a yellow vest leaning out of a rectangular opening in the plank wall, the wood weathered pale grey — ApertureEthan Lacy

A grey 3D perspective of the pipe with its apertures at left; at right the unrolled plank pattern with coloured control curves and aperture outlines — Plank pattern

A plywood rib jig standing open in the park with shaped planks stacked around it, drills and buckets on a bench in front — Assembly on siteEthan Lacy

The studio that made it

Architecture After Play

on /teaching · entry 3→