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Architects: Newick Architects
- Year: 2010
Text description provided by the architects. Located in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, the site for this project is an existing 1960’s modern house with a 1980’s complementary addition, including a pool at the outset. Designed by Newick Architects, the design for the Firestone Pavilion needed to serve multiple functions as a car port and pool enclosure fence. The architecture pre-dated the current owner, who asked the architects to reinvent these spaces from the English trellis and dovecotes that originally maintained these spaces.
A 2010 AIA Connecticut Design Award recipient for Architecture: The Encompassing Art, the jury praised the Firestone Pavilion, "The sensitive handling of intersecting walls, beams and planes and the abstract sculptural quality of enclosures, such that it reminded us of a composition by the sculptor Donald Judd."
As the design developed, the architects introduced a fourteen foot wide glass and aluminum rolling door facing the pool so that the car port could be used as a pavilion for parties. The rear portion of the pavilion houses the pool equipment.
The materials are a precise array of painted steel, stainless steel woven fabric, aluminum, low iron clear and etched glass and stucco. The garden was repaired and enhanced at the base of the woven stainless fence. This stainless material is an intricate material detailed here as if it was a solid infill panel in its painted steel frame. It reads as if opaque or translucent or transparent depending on how the light is hitting it.
The construction of the pavilion was unforgiving. Every piece shows and the precision of the materials made the installation and alignment of the various parts a difficult task. The cement stucco is quite rough and was finished to match the roughness of the stucco of the main house.
