Fusion

de Kevin Sullivan, Payette, Z. Smith

Fusion: The Performance of Architecture explores the integration of high design and performance as the two drivers creating architecture that is rational, humane, and beautiful. The recipient of the 2019 AIA Architecture Firm Award, Payette embodies practices that are crucial to bettering our built environment. Founded eighty-five years ago, the hospitals and laboratories that Payette has designed introduced advances that continue through today, while never compromising on aesthetic and use value. With primary sections illuminating core principles of the firm -- Identity and Transformation, Materiality and Craft, Taming Complexity, and Measuring Performance -- the book presents detailed portraits of recent projects that manifest these principles. Sympathetic to their cultural settings, incorporating nature, socially rich, and legibly ordered, these projects stand as models not only for the state of the art of hospital and laboratory architecture, but also for how architecture improves people's lives every day. Rooted in the conviction that beautiful buildings should perform beautifully -- not just in environmental and use terms, but also socially and culturally -- Payette in this book provides insight into how dispelling the artificial dichotomy between performance and design creates a holistic architecture for the twenty-first century.