AIA DESIGN THEORY-September 2011

Edited by Rebecca Falazno
Photography Trent Bell

Paul Lewandowski believes that memory plays a large role in design

For architect and interior designer Paul Lewandowski, design inspiration can come from an unlikely source: our memory. As design principal at SMRT, Lewandowski works on projects across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, education, corporate, government, and industrial facilities and, lately, industrial and fashion design. No matter what the type, design work requires inspiration, an idea, a starting point. “I often turn inward and rummage through my memories and try some of them on,” he says. “One of the benefits of strong inspiration is the way it can be turned into a design narrative: the ‘story’ of the project. The narrative establishes a common language that helps convey design intent.” Lewandowski is currently working on a concept that will take memories and reinterpret them as materials. The idea is that memories as a design element, interpreted through a finish or a detail, can help users feel comfortable and help them find their way through a building. “I want to create a positive memory in people’s minds of the spaces I design—a feeling of comfort, being welcome, and maybe an interest to explore the space and understand it more fully.”

Q: What are some of the memories that have influenced your design, whether consciously or subconsciously?
A: I grew up in Maine in the 1970s and watched my share of pre-cable television: Schoolhouse Rock, The Brady Bunch, Johnny Quest, Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space, and so on. But though I filled my mind with trash TV, I maintain that, for me, the popular culture of my youth has shaped the way I look at things, and often it creeps into my design concepts. I also have fond memories of my aunts’ places on Flying Point in Freeport and Crystal Lake in Gray. There were things to explore there: things that grew, crawled, or just looked very interesting to me. Colors, textures, patinas, the facets of nature that still intrigue me as a designer. Add to that mix a minor focus on geology while in undergraduate architecture school and you have an interesting combination.

Q: Can you give us an example of your projects and the things that inspired them?
A: When working on the renovation of the exterior of 144 Fore Street, I was faced with a large canvas. The building is over 180 feet long and 22 feet tall. It is also in the center of the eastern waterfront/India Street neighborhood in Portland, an area that is percolating at the moment: lots of new building, more and more cruise ship visits, a view of Casco Bay, a slightly gritty industrial vibe. So I turned to art, paint, color, cartoons, and illustrations. I wanted a dynamic façade that would change in the light, one that captured motion and had visual interest. I began by collecting images, some literally and some in my mind: The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Hokusai, a fantastic fractal-art woodblock print, snippets of Winslow Homer’s many ocean storm paintings, a memory of 1970s cartoon hero Johnny Quest capturing an invisible monster by splashing it with paint.

I knew that budget concerns would limit the material palette, so I suggested we use metal roofing shingles as siding to recreate a pixelated (a bit more industrial than romantic) version of a great wave splashing onto this giant canvas. A mural as cladding that wasn’t really a mural, one that had an iridescence that changed during the course of the day and the change of the weather. The resulting façade, with some brightly colored awnings to shield the southern sun, managed to capture my inspiration and refresh the building.

Commercial carpeting that I designed and that is slated to go into production next year was inspired by my memories of nature: those gouged and striated rocks that drew you along the coast of Maine—the same rocks I flew over in my dreams as I drifted over them to the ocean, products of the glaciers that carved them and the pounding surf that continues to hone them. I wanted to develop an “organic stripe,” a pattern that was linear but not stoic. I turned to nature and thought about those rocks and about other stripes in nature: birch trees standing in a grove, cattails growing in wetlands, white pine needles. The resulting pattern, Coastal Rocks, is based on all of these things. It is an organic stripe, but it is also for me a memory of nature and motion.

At St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, the design inspiration was heritage—partly my own—as I grew up there and my maternal grandparents both worked in the mills. That heritage of textiles, of weaving, of bringing together a community seemed appropriate for a new hospital wing. I contacted Museum L-A and they graciously allowed me to see the patterns of Bates bedspreads in their archives and to adapt them as design elements. The brick façade was based on long-dyed yarn weavings and silk carpets that reflected a handmade aesthetic. I was able to relocate a much beloved bas-relief carving of the founder of the hospital that I remembered from childhood to a prominent position behind the reception desk. The result is a building that reflects the history of the hospital in addition to the state-of-the-art care it provides.