BARCLAY SIMPSON STUDIO

Oakland, California

1992

An interdisciplinary studio for graduate students in glass and sculpture, the building employs natural light and ventilation in a simple, flexible space.  A frame of steel filled with glass blocks—materials made with fire—sits on a base of roughly cast concrete—a material made of the earth.  Between the two are galvanized steel flaps that allow air movement throughout.  The steel-and-glass enclosure that admits light by day radiates illumination at night, a beacon of the creative energy contained within.

There’s a simplicity to the project—there are no metaphors—which leads to an abstraction that will extend the life of this building over a long period of time. It’s a polemical building, very carefully done, beautiful.

Progressive Architecture 01/91: Annual Awards

The Barclay Simpson Sculpture Studio sets a new standard for art school facilities.

San Francisco Focus 02/97

With glass and other staples of modern sculpture—galvanized sheet metal, concrete and fiberboard—Jim Jennings, whose work has never fraternized with the ordinary, has designed an extraordinary building that far transcends its specific purposes.

It is a triumph for modernism.

San Francisco Examiner Magazine 01/17/93

The Barclay Simpson Sculpture Studio is an example of Jim Jennings’s “baseline modern” buildings, which expand upon their Miesian model; recall the early twentieth-century work of the French Modernist Pierre Chareau; and reflect a deep understanding of Louis I. Kahn’s underlying principles.

U.S. Design: 1975-2000 (Germany) 2001