Architects of the inevitable

You'd never guess that the new student center at the American University in Beirut was designed by a Minnesota architect. With long narrow buildings arranged along walkways tumbling down toward the Mediterranean, the three-block complex feels like an integral part of the Middle Eastern city. In the daytime, students cluster in ground-level spaces cooled by water walls and greenery. At night, they move to the rooftop gardens to catch ocean breezes.

"This is as Lebanese a project as we've seen," Robert Fayad of the university's facilities department told the architects.

This international coup is the work of the low-key but powerhouse Minnesota firm Vincent James Associates Architects (VJAA). The reserved Vincent James, 56, founded the firm in 1995 after leaving Hammel, Green and Abrahamson. James hired Nathan Knutson out of architecture school at Minnesota, and in 1997 was joined by London-educated Jennifer Yoos, who is also his wife. Now 21 strong, the firm is batting a thousand. Every one of the 11 projects it has designed, including the Minneapolis Rowing Club and the Dayton House on Lake of the Isles, has won a Minnesota Architecture Honor Award. Its precise, minimalist work has garnered 14 national awards.

The Charles Hostler Student Center in Beirut is no exception. Earlier this month it earned an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects-Minnesota along with two other VJAA projects: a guesthouse and a chapel, both at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minn.

This year's Honor Awards also went to eight other projects designed by Minnesota architects, including a synagogue in Rochester, Minn.; a community and recreation center in a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.; a house by Duluth architect David Salmela, and the renovation of the Whitney Loft's turbine room as a live/work space.

The Beirut student center stands out in both its design and history. (Construction was delayed six months in 2006 when Israel bombed the city.) Thanks to a colleague impressed with the environmentally sensitive student center the firm had designed for Tulane University, VJAA was asked to submit a proposal in a design competition featuring an impressive roster of international firms.

"We weren't trying to win," said Yoos, the more voluble of the partners. In fact, they ignored the competition brief, which called for one large building with one huge plaza.

Situated down the hill between the original campus and the city's famed Corniche along the sea, the student center opened in May and already has become "part of the essential fabric of Beirut," said Tom Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota's College of Design. He said VJAA's work is better known outside of Minnesota than inside. "Part of their genius is finding such clear ideas that it makes their work seem inevitable."

The guesthouse and chapel at St. John's are opposite in scale and climate, but project the same sense of rightness. Inspired by the monks' cloisters, the guesthouse is simplicity itself: rooms for those on retreat on the lower level, dining and gathering spaces on the main level and guest rooms upstairs. All rooms overlook Lake Sagatan. Glass, channel glass, precast planks and concrete block create a serene minimalism.

The chapel, a former pastor's office off the Abbey Church, was reworked to become a meditation space holding the blessed sacrament. One door opens to the main church, a 1961 architectural landmark of concrete construction. Carefully composed walls of wood panels and slats, a platinum-leaf ceiling and reflective floor recall the textures of the famed church while creating a luminous spiritual space.

Unlike many architecture firms, VJAA is busy, designing three new houses, two in the western United States and one on Lake Minnetonka. Expect to hear more.