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Bauenstudio: Exploring container and contained

By Ingrid Spencer

Some young architects feel it’s time to start their solo practices when they have a client. Others wait until they win a competition. For Marc Roehrle and Mo Zell, both happy circumstances came to pass, one after the other, and, in 2006, Boston-based Bauenstudio was born.

Photo courtesy Bauenstudio

SJ Garage + Workshop, Virginia Beach, Virginia, 2000

To view five recent projects by Bauenstudio click here.

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The word bauen means “to build” in German, and the couple—who are personal and professional partners—chose that name as a nod to Roehrle’s German heritage, an homage to Heidegger’s comments about building on the land (bauer, a variation of bauen, means farmer), and because they base their practice on what they call the architecture of engagement, referring to a focus on interactive relationships between people and materials, visual elements, and the tectonics of space and scale. “We don’t mean it to sound so snotty,” laughs Zell. Roehrle and Zell both have architecture degrees from the University of Virginia, and they say it was their education there that led them down a straightforward architectural path. “UVA isn’t such an artsy school,” says Marc. “We were challenged to form a hypothesis and defend it.”Armed with this skin-thickening education—and graduate degrees from Yale—the two moved to Seattle to pursue opportunities for Roehle with various firms, then to North Carolina for teaching opportunities for Zell, then ended up in Boston, where they both got jobs teaching at Northeastern University.

Through the moves, their work for others, and their teaching gigs, Zell and Roehrle have always kept their design minds active doing competitions and design exercises. “Owning our own firm seemed so unattainable then,” says Zell. Not atypical for a fledgling firm, Roehrle and Zell’s first clients were Zell’s parents, who commissioned the two to build them a garage/workshop first, then a pool house. Both projects allowed for the luxury of experimentation, and the resulting structures provide functional spaces that use materials such as polycarbonate panels to play with light and shadow as elements to both veil and reveal from the inside out and the outside in. These projects informed their winning competition entry for the Northeastern University Veterans Memorial, which commemorates former Northeastern University students who lost their lives while fighting for this country. A project like this, with its inherent public interaction and ceremonial and private moments, was right up their alley. The memorial space features a contemplative garden, a public plaza, and a dual-sided polished granite wall. On the northern facade of the wall, each soldier lost is represented with a stainless-steel plate, meant to be touched and lifted. These “dog tags” are engraved with that soldier’s name, date of birth, hometown, major, graduation date, and date and place of death. The couple hopes to add more public projects to their portfolio, which currently has a nine-unit condo building in Boston and a house in suburban Virginia on the boards. In every project, the macro vs. micro scales interest them, and keeping their shop small lets them stay focused. “We think small-scale elements can have a huge impact on large-scale spacemaking,” says Roehrle. “We’re currently trying to bring some soul to the suburbs,” says Zell. We’re pretty sure they can.

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