Shanghai Expo Pavilion [Thomas Heatherwick]

More about Thomas Heatherwick's Shanghai Expo Pavilion

 

MAXXI Museum Art XXI, Rome [Zaha Hadid]

Click here to get to Zaha Hadid's Maxxi

The Shard, London [Renzo Piano]

Click here to get to know more about Renzo Piano's The Shard.

The Challenge of Change: Dealing with the Legacy of Modern Movement

from Google Books

Wallace Harrison & the Thermal Glass

Wallace Kirkman Harrison (September 28, 1895 – December 2, 1981) was an American architect.

Other Reads:

Revival of an Icon

Dalle de Verre: Modern Stained Glass

When Modern Becomes Historic: Preserving the Mordernist Building Envelope

United Nations Building 

The United Nations Building in New York was the first major international building to be constructed after the war.

A multinational advisory committee was established for the design of the building. It was composed of a number of leading architects, including Le Corbusier.

The director of planning and lead architect was Wallace K. Harrison who helped design tall buildings such as Rockerfeller Center before the war. During the development of the scheme, Harrison was involved in a number of conflicts with Le Corbusier, who allegedly claimed credit for the design concept. One such argument involved protection of the offices in the Secretariat (Tower) Building against excessive solar heat gain and glare. Le Corbusier had preferred stone facades but the board preferred to maximize sun and natural daylight using overall glazing. They decided this could be achieved best with curtain walling, even though at the time it was an unusual solution for a skyscraper.

The Equitable Building was the only example of a continuous glazed curtain wall in the country and “even in those energy rich days this much glass raised the question of heat gain and loss.” They considered four different glazing options in conjunction with internal venetian blinds.

These included single and double-glazing with and without tinted glass. Le Corbusier thought that the tower building should be protected from the sun by brise-soleil. Brise-soleil eventually were eliminated because snow and ice collecting on them in winter would create a hazard.

To select the best of the glazing options, Harrison turned the problem over to the mechanical engineers Syska & Hennessy. They conducted an experiment by placing recording thermometers in front of two windows, one with tinted glass and the other without, oriented as they would be in the building. After two weeks the thermometer behind the tinted glass had consistently recorded a temperature of 5.5°K to 8.5°K (10°F to 15°F) lower. This convinced Harrison that tinted glass without brise-soleil could moderate the heat and cold and justify its extra cost.

In hindsight this appears to be a huge leap in logic. However, the internal environment did not rely on tinted glass alone. The windows had venetian blinds on the inside and 4,000 of the new “Carrier Weathermaster” high-velocity induction units beneath the sills. Up to the time when these units became available, large building air-conditioning systems were almost invariably all-air and had correspondingly large ducts.

Carrier recognized the problem in the 1920s and decided that high velocity air was the answer. He did not pursue it atthe time but developed a range of room terminal units intended to reduce the total volume of air by supplying primary air at a lower temperature and mixing it with room air.

It was not until 1937 that he developed the idea further. Patents were applied for and the first installations were completed in 1940, only months before the United States entered the war and new building construction virtually ceased.

The application of this type of “air and water” terminal unit method of air conditioning was another important advance. The air and water induction unit air-conditioning system had three main advantages over the all-air systems at the time: 

• Most heat gain and loss from the building is through the window and the under-sill location of the units compensates with minimal effect on the room condition.
• Heating and cooling energy is transported around the building by water, a much more efficient medium than earlier systems that used air.
• Considerably less vertical duct space is required, as the main supply ducts operate at high velocity and only handle enough air to meet the minimum fresh air ventilation requirements.

The location of the unit beneath the window and how the horizontal ducts connecting to the units were concealed, on the floor below, in ceiling voids formed by the now ubiquitous, acoustic ceiling tiles.

Despite problems with the curtain walling, the combination of tinted glass, venetian blinds and a high velocity perimeter induction unit system must have worked well, as it was repeated on numerous buildings for the next 20 or 30 years. Peculiarly though, for an air-conditioned building, the windows in the tower were operable although no reason seems to have been recorded why they did not follow the pattern set by Belluschi. 

from Air Conditioning in Office Buildings after WWII

Frank Lloyd Wright & the Textile Block

 












Frank Lloyd Wright (born Frank Lincoln Wright, June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator, who designed more than 1,000 structures and completed 532. Wright believed in designing structures that were in harmony with humanity and its environment, a philosophy he called organic architecture. This philosophy was best exemplified by Fallingwater (1935), which has been called "the best all-time work of American architecture".^[1] Wright was a leader of the Prairie School movement of architecture and developed the concept of the Usonian home, his unique vision for urban planning in the United States.

His work includes original and innovative examples of many building types, including offices, churches, schools, skyscrapers, hotels, and museums. Wright also designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass. Wright wrote 20 books and many articles and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His colorful personal life often made headlines, most notably for the 1914 fire and murders at his Taliesin studio. Already well known during his lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time".

The Textile Block
One of the great innovators in the history of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright experimented with new design vocabularies and building systems. Shown here are three examples of his imaginative genius.

In the 1920s Wright designed a number of houses in California using precast "textile" concrete blocks reinforced by an internal system of bars. This style is exhibited in the first drawing shown here of the Storer home. Built in Hollywood for Dr. John Storer seventy years ago, the house is now used in films, television, and print media to represent the future. Typically Wrightian is the joining of the structure to its site by a series of terraces that reach out into and reorder the landscape, making it an integral part of the architect's vision.

The second design is for a richly decorative stone lintel for the front of a house built in Milwaukee. Influenced by the architectural ornament of the Viennese Secession and the abstractions of Cubist sculpture, Wright here adapts images of Native American chieftans in a decorative frieze that rivals the work of his own master, Louis Sullivan. 

Through the 1920s he designed a number of innovative houses in California using precast "textile" concrete blocks reinforced by an internal system of metal bars. One of the first of these experiments was this unbuilt project for a house at Eagle Rock, near Pasadena. Typically Wrightian is the joining of the structure to its site by a series of levels and terraces that reach out into the landscape. 

Preeminent architect Frank Lloyd Wright made a significant impact on the built environment both in the United States and throughout the world. He created structures that transformed residences, commercial buildings, and public spaces for more than half a century. Often Wright himself designed each of the elements for his projects including the windows. Intended as a neighborhood kindergarten, Wright built a “playhouse” for repeat clients Avery and Queen Ferry Coonley in Riverside, Illinois. In this instance, Wright adapted balloon shapes, the American Flag, and checkerboard patterns to create colorful stained glass windows visible in the drawing. [website source]

The Millard House (Interior)

The Millard House

Other Reads:
Textile Block Period/ Mayan Inspired (on Pinterest)
Ennis House

Alvar Aalto & the Bent Wood

Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (3 February 1898 – 11 May 1976) was a Finnish architect and designer, as well as a sculptor and painter.^{[from Wikipedia]} His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware. Aalto's early career runs in parallel with the rapid economic growth and industrialization of Finland during the first half of the twentieth century and many of his clients were industrialists; among these were the Ahlström-Gullichsen family.^[2] The span of his career, from the 1920s to the 1970s, is reflected in the styles of his work, ranging from Nordic Classicism of the early work, to a rational International Style Modernism during the 1930s to a more organic modernist style from the 1940s onwards. His furniture designs were considered Scandinavian Modern.^[3] What is typical for his entire career, however, is a concern for design as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art; whereby he – together with his first wife Aino Aalto – would design not just the building, but give special treatments to the interior surfaces and design furniture, lamps, and furnishings and glassware. The Alvar Aalto Museum, designed by Aalto himself, is located in what is regarded as his home city Jyväskylä.








Wolfburg Kulturahaus