In 2008, the Indianapolis Museum of Art acquired the landmark Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana, designed by Eero Saarinen, with interiors by Alexander Girard, and landscape design by Daniel Urban Kiley. Kevin Roche was Saarinen’s principal design associate when he joined Eero Saarinen and Associates in 1950, and he played a significant role in the design of Miller House as well as many other Saarinen projects.

Multiverse, the largest and most complex light sculpture created by American artist Leo Villareal, may be seen and experienced by visitors as they pass through the Concourse walkway between the East and West Buildings of the National Gallery of Art. Commissioned by the Gallery and on view until November 2009, the work features approximately 41,000 computer-programmed LED (light-emitting diode) nodes that run through channels along the entire 200-foot-long space. The development of this LED project began in 2005, and the installation created by Villareal specifically for this location began in September 2008.

RELATED POST
Environments: Leo Villareal

SOURCES
Villareal is represented by Gering-López Gallery in New York City and Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C.
Color Kinetics has provided the artist with electronic equipment for several projects.

Starting With the Universe, Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, through September 21, 2008

Credit: Digital animation by Michelle Chang with Helen Han and Temple Simpson.

“The animation demonstrates how this simple geometric shape can be transformed to create several complex polyhedra. Next, it produces a different version of a vector equilibrium that Fuller called tensegrity—short for a stable structure of tensional integrity. In the last part of the animation, a map of the entire globe is transferred onto the vector equilibrium, which unfolds to produce a flat map of the earth made from six squares and eight triangles. Unlike conventional world maps, Fuller’s vector equilibrium map represents the world with minimal distortions to the relative size of the continents.”

READ♥Buckminster Fuller’s Dreams of Spanning Great Distances Are Being Realized in Big Projects. [C:OOL Page]

Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., through August 23, 2008

Credit: Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (2006, 16 minutes) a documentary from KDN Films, which can be seen in its entirety at the National Building Museum

READ♥Eero Saarinen has his own site. [Web]

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through October 20, 2008

[C:OOL] POV→ Eight years into the 21st century, a telescopic look at building innovation in the 20th has finally emerged. Bucky holds court at the Whitney, but he performs in the chorus at MoMA. Quirky [Archigram, Fuller]; ahead-of-its-time [Breuer, Eames, and Fuller again]; buildable, but unattractive, [Hecker]; and downright nutty [Edison, Jantzen], every effort with any credibility is displayed on the sixth floor.

The exhibition is primarily about the experiments of the last century, but it also includes the fantastical models and chimeric fetishes of several contemporary architects. (The computer is the medium, not the message! Lest we forget.)

In a vacant lot adjacent to the museum lies the sane, economical, sustainable, and architecturally palatable future of residential design. There are five structures, none of which is merely a lifesize mock-up or a fullsize model. They are all “proof of life.”

Cellophane House provides the most proof. Philadelphia-based KieranTimberlake Architects‘ four-story, 1,800 square footprototype is a real house. Connect the plumbing and move in.

Cellophane House

View time-lapse video of the installation.

A myriad of seamless sustainable strategies are remarkably integrated, inconspicuous, and unselfconscious. The entire structure is modeled using building information modeling (BIM), a digital visualization tool that automatically and simultaneously tracks needed materials based on a set of required tolerances, a process also known as parametric modeling. The house is fabricated off site and its numerous components, both volumes and individual pieces, are hauled to the site by truck.

SmartWrap at the Cooper Hewitt (2003)

Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake have been investigating prefabrication, unitized construction, and technology transfer for at least a decade. For instance, the “cellophane” in the Cellophane House is actually a product called NextGen SmartWrap™—a composite material made of innovative products, rolled and printed onto fabrics and plastic films, and embedded with OLED technology. KTA developed SmartWrap™ in 2003 “to create a building envelope that can generate energy, control climate, and provide lighting and information display on a single printed substrate.” For the inaugural Solos exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smartwrap™ was installed on a metal structure (above) in Cooper-Hewitt’s Arthur Ross Garden.

READ♥SmartWrap: Building Envelope of the Future [C:OOL page]

READ♥KieranTimberlake: Alternative Construction Processes [C:OOL page]

The task isn’t made any easier by the hovering presence of preservationists and critics. The restoration architect’s success overshadows his or her due diligence and often ingenious problem solving. In the end, the icon is restored for prosperity, and all is right with the world.

Something is lost, however, on the students and caretakers of 20th Century Modernism. The restoration architect gains deeper knowledge of the building by dismantling it and then putting it back together. The process of restoration provides insight into the technological challenges that the original architect faced and how they were resolved. Design decisions are influenced as much by technological limitations, as they are by theory. Any new scholarship about Modernist architecture would benefit from serious analysis of the restoration process.

Case Study 1: Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall: Krueck & Sexton

Krueck & Sexton Architects faced tremendous challenges in the restoration of Mies van der Rohe’s 1956 masterpiece, S.R. Crown Hall, at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The Window Problem. The 68 original lites of the upper panels were replaced with PPG Starphire (low iron) glass, and the cycle of problems and solutions continued. The new panels weighed 700 pounds, making them too heavy for the original stops. The stops had to be enlarged from 51⁄48 inch to 31⁄44 inch in depth. As the wall sections [original (far left) and new detail; click on images to enlarge] show, this redesign is subtle enough to be called invisible. However, it has a slope. Mock-ups confirmed that a deeper reveal would look heavy. Sexton argued that by sloping the stop from 31⁄44 inch at the glass to 51/48 inch at face, it would read the same as the original. The architects convinced skeptical purists that, first of all, the slope cannot be seen. And secondly, compromising on the custom-design issue was better than specifying a heavy, and thus inappropriate, stock stop.

READ ♥ The Perils of Restoring “Less is More” [PDF]

Case Study 2: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum: WASA/Studio A

The graphic above shows where the facade cracks are located. Click on the image to enlarge.

Robert Silman Associates and WASA/Studio A partnered with Integrated Conservation Resources to repair and restore the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

READ♥ Restoring the Guggenheim [PDF]

Case Study 3: Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House: SOM

Lever House – Curtain Wall Replacement [More to follow]
Unilever commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (with facade consultants, Gordon H. Smith) to design the curtain wall remediation for Lever House in midtown Manhattan. Under the guidelines of the New York City Landmarks Commission, materials and systems were replaced with state-of-the-art solutions in modern wall technology that preserve this modern landmark while maintaining its original appearance.

RELATED LINKS
Modernism at Risk
“Only decades after their design and construction, great works of Modern architecture are being lost to neglect, deterioration, and demolition.”—World Monuments Fund

DOCOMOMO (DOCOMOMO-US) stands for DOcumentation and COnservation of buildings, sites and neighborhoods of the MOdern MOvement. DOCOMOMO promotes the study, interpretation and protection of the architecture, landscape and urban design of the Modern Movement.

The National Stadium, known as the “Bird’s Nest,” will serve as the main venue of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The structural form of the roof is described as a ”nest.” The stadium combines a sense of chaos with one of order. The structure appears to be random, but repeating patterns can be seen in the interwoven series of beams that interconnect in much the same way as twigs do in a bird’s nest.

This weightlessness is not pure illusion. The irregular nature of the structure meant looking for new methods of designing structural steel sections in order to minimize weight and make it feasible for the stadium to support its roof.—ARUP

READ♥ ARUP: Building the Bird’s Nest [PDF]

RELATED LINKS
Beijing National Stadium Official Web Site

[C:OOL] POV→ There may be no building to date that has been so obsessively documented. Every weld, every rebar, every crane turn, has been photographed and filmed. You can view the site from a satellite (left) via Google, if you need the big picture. Well, it is the World’s Tallest Skyscraper, designed by Skidmore Ownings & Merrill.

READ♥SOM: World’s Tallest Skyscraper: Structural Design [PDF]

READ♥The DesignBuild-Network: Burj Dubai [Web]

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