Reaching For The Sky
Allison Williams, Architect
SAN FRANCISCO--For most of us, an empty lot is hardly inspirational. But architect Allison Williams views emptiness as an opportunity. The challenge, as she sees it, is to wrestle with the space, manipulate it, and ultimately subdue it. Much of this process takes place not on a flat drafting board but inside her kinetic imagination. "Architects are always challenging the character of a space," she says.
And Williams has challenged formidable spaces in her career. She has designed mammoth corporate buildings such as the Virginia headquarters of Freddie Mac, as well as other large structures. The light and soaring international terminal at San Francisco's airport is her work. A sensuous modernist is how Harrison Fraker, dean of the architecture school at the University of California- Berkeley, describes Williams. "The overall feel and sensibility of [her] buildings are much richer," he says. "They take on a new intimacy and vitality."
In recent years, Williams has set her sights on civic-minded projects. And with the upcoming $33 million African-American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh, she's forging a new path in her designs that is likely to attract a host of new and prominent commissions. "This is the culmination of a lot of things, but it's not a conclusion for me," she says. "I'm aware that I'm at another nexus."
Williams and her architectural firm, Ai, beat out 16 other firms and drew rave reviews for her design of the three-story, 80,000-square-foot museum building that was inspired by historic East African trading ships. One corner of the triangular building, which will stand on a prominent site in downtown Pittsburgh, resembles sails puffed by the wind. Williams was, in part, motivated by time she spent in Africa cruising down the Nile, seeing modern-day successors to those earlier ships. Her goal was to give the building a sense of movement, to make it "an expression of something not at its end but in its process," says Williams, 52, who is one of the few African-American women at the top of her field.
One might say architecture is in her blood. Her father, John Williams, was an urban planner in Cleveland. He was involved in the redevelopment of some of the city's poorer neighborhoods and, according to his daughter, was "very visually oriented and elegant. He knew how things went together"--something, says Williams, that influenced her own way of looking at the world. She went on to earn a B.A. at UC-Berkeley in art (concentrating on printmaking and graphics) in 1972. She traveled for six months, then enrolled in Berkeley's graduate architecture program.
Accessible. "Dynamic and beautiful" is how Carol Brown, who headed the committee that selected Williams to do the cultural center, describes her design. "It has a great street presence as well as being extremely accessible." The building's sail is made of metal and glass, and the facade is composed of panels of translucent and transparent glass, one of Williams's favorite materials. Glass technology has evolved dramatically in recent years, making the material stronger, more flexible, and more textured. There's a lot more to glass, says Williams, than simply putting it in a window.
Williams's criteria for what makes great architecture can be summed up in one word: "timelessness." Only by having a building reflect current society and life, she says, will it retain its meaning in the future. Williams regards many of the new buildings today as faddish--a self-conscious layering of historical styles, from neoclassical to neo-Gothic to neo-everything that may be fashionable now but won't be for long.
People friendly. That's not to say that Williams is an iconoclastic artist who doesn't care what her clients think. Quite the contrary. Her fans say all of her buildings are designed with the needs of future occupants in mind. She's a self-described collaborator who doesn't claim sole credit for her designs. Instead, she says, she pulls the process together among architects and engineers--a rare admission in an industry dominated by substantial egos.
Williams plans to spend the new year working on the African-American Cultural Center, which is scheduled to be completed in 2006. She's also at work on a design for the International Women's Museum in San Francisco and, of all things, a Border Patrol station in San Diego. After that, she'd like to find a client interested in a smaller-scale project: a house. For all the grandiose buildings she has designed, that's the one structure she has yet to tackle.
KEEP AN EYE ON: JON STEWART When nobody else has the spine to say it, this smartly irreverent comedian/host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show With Jon Stewart undoubtedly will. He'll have plenty to say during the political campaigns.
This story appears in the December 29, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.