Fusion: The Performance of Architecture explores the work of
award-winning, Boston-based architecture firm Payette, a leader in the
design of complex settings for science and healthcare.
Payette's work embodies the integration of design and performance that
is essential to the creation of humane and sustainable buildings of any
type. To achieve this integration amidst the programmatic intricacy,
technological complexity, and intense energy use of hospitals and
laboratories, the firm draws on its almost ninety-year history of
progressive innovation. It draws, as well, on an inclusive,
collaborative, research-oriented culture that is a model for the
profession.
Fusion presents Payette's philosophy and traces the firm's contributions
through concise histories of laboratory and hospital design. It explores
the core principles that underlie its work - Identity and
Transformation, Materiality and Craft, Taming Complexity and Measuring
Performance - and digs deeply into seven of the firm's most recent
projects. Other chapters describe the process of nurturing the design
excellence and practice culture that earned Payette the 2019 AIA
Architecture Firm Award.
The monograph's 400 diagrams, drawings, and photographs reveal the
firm's principles and methods, along with the open-source tools it has
developed to enable it to design, not "by the numbers," but with the
numbers. A gallery of architectural "fingerprints" presents plan views
of more than 100 of Payette's projects, drawn to a common scale.
With a preface by Z Smith, Director of Sustainability and Building
Performance at EskewDumezRipple, and an introduction from Kevin
Sullivan, President of Payette, Fusion includes essays by Sullivan and
partners James Collins, George Marsh, Leon Drachman, Andrea Love and
Peter Vieira, as well as a critical reflection by Mark Lee, Chair of the
Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.