Polshek Partnership
Polshek Partnership Architects LLP is an architectural design firm located in New York City. Polshek Partnership was commissioned by the Clinton Foundation to create the architectural plans for the William J. Clinton Presidential Center. The firm had 130 employees in 2001, and is led by James Polshek and six partners: Joseph Fleischer, Timothy Hartung, Duncan Hazard, Richard Olcott, Susan Rodriguez, Todd Schliemann.
The modernist Library is essentially a long, rectangular box elevated forty feet off the ground. A two-story veranda is attached to three sides of the steel and glass building. Polshek publicly unveiled the design for the presidential center on December 9, 2000.
Polshek Partnership has received a number of awards for the Clinton Library design, including a 2004 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum award for excellence in architecture. Polshek has said of the company that "continuity in a practice is valuable. It requires a collaborationist ethic, which is what this practice has been building up to for a long time. We have been aggressively noncorporate, which has led us to seek highly visible, ethical commissions, i.e., nonprofit clients in health, education, culture, and government."
References
- Celestine Bohlen, "Built for Substance, Not Flash: James Stewart Polshek Says Architecture Should Serve People Instead of Egos," New York Times, January 22, 2001.
- David W. Dunlap, "New York Firms Chosen to Design Clinton Library," New York Times, August 9, 1999.
- Julie V. Iovine, "Spin Masters Molding Myth With T-Square," New York Times, December 14, 2000.
- Robert Ivy, "Polshek & Partners: A Firm and Its Universe," Architectural Record, 188.8 (August 2000): 88.
- Susan Strauss, ed., William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park (New York: Polshek Partnership, 2006).
