Spring 2009
Published by The American Institute of Architects
The Architecture and Design Journal of the National Associates Committee
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LIGHT & SHADOW
FORWARD MISSION To be the architectural journal of young, aspiring architects and designers of the built environment specifically targeting design issues. Spring 2009. Volume 09, No. 1. Published biannually by the AIA. THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS 1735 New York Ave., NW Washington, DC 20006-5292 P: 800-AIA-3837 or 202-626-7300 F: 202-626-7547 www.aia.org/nac AIA STAFF Jaclyn S. Toole, Director, Member Communities Zach Porter, Manager, Member Communities NATIONAL ASSOCIATES COMMITTEE (NAC) OFFICERS Meggan Lux, AIA - Associate Director Jonathan M. Taylor, Assoc. AIA - Chair Katie Harms, AIA - Advocacy Director Mark Schwamel, Assoc. AIA - Community & Communications Director Jack Baumann, AIA - Knowledge Director NAC COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE Chris Grossnicklaus, Assoc. AIA - AssociateNews Editor-in-Chief Joanna Beres, Assoc. AIA - AssociateNews News Editor Jeanne S. Mam-Luft, Assoc. AIA - Past Forward Director (2008) Copyright and Reprinting: (C) 2009 AIA. All Rights Reserved. SUBMISSIONS Forward welcomes the submission of essays, projects and responses to articles. Submitted materials are subject to editorial review. All Forward issues are themed, so articles and projects are selected relative to the issue’s specific subject. Please contact the Forward Director, Christina Noble, at Christina.Noble@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing. FALL FORWARD 209 Detail, Decoration & Ornament
The Architecture and Design Journal of the National Associates Committee
NATIONAL ASSOCIATES COMMITTEE MISSION The National Associates Committee is dedicated to representing and advocating for Associates, both mainstream and alternative, in the national, regional, state, and local components of the AIA.
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FORWARD DIRECTOR Christina A. Noble, AIA, LEED AP
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LIGHT by John Pawson
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LIGHT THROUGH MATERIAL by Marcus M. Farr
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ILLUMINATING GROUND ZERO by James Carpenter
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THE INTRIGUE OF LIGHT by Jason Bruges
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LIGHT HOUSE by Gianni Botsford
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SOLAR UMBRELLA by Lawrence Scarpa
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EXTERIOR SHADE ELEMENTS: AN EFFECTIVE STRATEGY FOR BUILDING INTEGRATED PHOTOVOLTAICS by Jesse Wolf Corsi Henson
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SPECULATING ON A DESIGN PRACTICE by Hilary Sample
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SHADOWS REDEFINED by Brian M. Kelly
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METAPHORICAL BLINDNESS by Victor J. Irizarry Martinez
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The Architecture and Design Journal of the National Associates Committee
TOPICS by Christina A. Noble
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LIGHT & SHADOW
TOPICS THE FUTURE OF FORWARD by Christina A. Noble
In 2009 Forward will — well, move forward. Since its 2003 inauguration in HTML format, Forward has served as a quarterly publication produced by the National Associates Committee (NAC) to provoke discussion amongst AIA Associates within the American Institute of Architects. As the AIA Emerging Professionals’ website states, the National Associates Committee represents “roughly 18% of the entire membership of the American Institute of Architects” and is “key to moving the profession forward into the new millennium.” Forward is a communication vehicle that will enable Associates to achieve this goal. To better represent Forward’s researched and design-focused content in 2009, its image has evolved into one more similar in style and form to respected print journals, while maintaining the sustainable benefits of email distribution. The format will change into a PDF with biannual distribution as a comprehensive journal announced in AIArchitect and AssociateNews. These changes seek to increase Forward’s presence in the architectural community while addressing the journal’s overall mission and strategic goals for 2009: Forward Mission: To be the architectural journal of young, aspiring architects and designers of the built environment specifically targeting design issues. Strategic Goal for 2009: Continue to increase the credibility and respectability of the AIA National Associates Committee architectural journal Forward through more researched, scholarly and design-focused content, and the inclusion of established, respected contributors. In 2009, this updated format as a packaged and print-ready PDF (which will take advantage of the design control that is more possible over that of the previously used HTML template system) and new distribution method of twice a year (as opposed to a quarterly issue) will enhance its ability to encourage thoughtful discussion and respectability within the AIA and the architectural community at-large. In this improved and revamped journal format, Forward offers the opportunity to include longer,
more deliberately constructed content contributed by Associates, researchers, and designers expert in their line of study. Lengthier, more in-depth articles combined with the continuation of themed issues allow authors and readers to analyze and debate a topic from multiple points of view. By inviting authors from various perspectives to contribute, a themed Forward issue not only sparks interesting discussion between contributors, but also ignites the imaginations of readers to continue research and contribute writing of their own. Not only will we strive to continually improve the written content of each issue with the inclusion of thoughtful research, but we will also strive to improve the quality and quantity of images throughout the journal. A PDF format will allow those creating the journal the flexibility to include more and larger images so that the content can fully reflect what we do on a day-to-day basis: architecture and design. In the past, themes such as sustainability, the making of our communities, and design technology have led to a great deal of content and discussion: I hope to continue debating similar topics, especially those that have a design focus, as well as others of particular concern in 2009. I look forward to serving as the 2009 Forward Director and hope you’re equally excited about the journal’s future as I.
Christina A. Noble, AIA, LEED AP Forward Director Ms. Noble has worked as an architectural professional for eight years and is employed with Gould Evans in Phoenix, Arizona. She has worked on numerous high profile and large-scale projects in her career, including collegiate, mixed-use, government and private development high-rise buildings. Christina graduated from Rice University with her Bachelor of Architecture in 2002.
LIGHT
by John Pawson
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Let the form of an object be what it may – light, shade and perspective will always make it beautiful. John Constable (English painter, 1776-1837)1
I am interested in the sort of light that makes you see and experience something differently. Arnold Chan, a lighting designer, talks about light as an emotion and it is true that there is perhaps no one single factor which has a more profound impact on how you feel in a place. In traditional Japanese architecture, for example, the intensity of atmosphere has a lot to do with the way natural light is filtered through shoji paper panels, suffusing the interior spaces with subdued light, simultaneously calming the spirit and sharpening the senses, heightening one’s sensitivity to the texture of a tatami mat or the detail of the junction between two surfaces.
Image this page: Church, Le Thoronet Abbey, France Photography by Hisao Suzuki
Le Thoronet: Counterpoints of Light and Mass The late twelfth century Cistercian abbey of Le Thoronet in the south of France is an example of a place I am happy to sit for an entire day, watching the sun move around a building. I have yet to take up an invitation to be locked in over night, pursuing this experience to its logical conclusion. The place demonstrates how light and mass are counterpoints of one another and how architecture coalesces these two entities. The abundance of light in the sanctuary of the monastery’s church, in conjunction with the loftiness of the vaulting, intensifies the impression of scale. The absence of openings to the south, by contrast, create an area of comparative darkness, which gives the uninterrupted mass of the walls particular force. Depending on the hour, the fall of light and shadow briefly articulates the junctions where the sharp-edged piers meet the curves of the columns. The changing sunlight also illuminates shifts in tint, flushing the limestone pink and exciting subtle exercises in perspective
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One of the great privileges and pleasures of working with some of the best photographers in the world is proximity to their understanding of light – an understanding so acute it is almost like another sense. One of the many lessons I have learnt is that conventionally good light does not always produce the best photographic results, just as a conventionally beautiful site is not necessarily the most stimulating context for architecture. A prime case of the latter is the tiny plot in a suburb of Tokyo where we built a courtyard house, which is hemmed in by other buildings on every side and strewn with overhead cables. Magazine editors always want to re-touch the pictures to remove the cables and my response is always that the cables are the point.
LIGHT 7 FORWARD 109 Church, Le Thoronet Abbey, France Photography by Hisao Suzuki
St Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth century abbot responsible for drawing up the architectural blueprint on which Le Thoronet is based, was clear about the significance of light in Cistercian monastic design as the only permissible form of enrichment. When I was designing the new Cistercian Monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur in Bohemia, I worked very hard to get the light right.
The design process began like any other. When I walked the new site, I asked myself about the quality and quantity of light. As the buildings’ forms shaped in my head, I reflected upon how they would catch the light. As well as sunlight, I thought about how applied lighting could render the spaces legible and usable - how light might be added to order or subdivide the spaces, to provide variety, rhythm and a sense of spatial sequence and connection. The density of the monks’ programme made this a particularly complicated task. A monastery is like a micro-city, combining the functions of home, school, church, hospital, industry, workshop, office, farm, market garden, guesthouse, laundry and library. Each of these functions has its own specific lighting requirements, which the design has to answer.
Church, Monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur, Bohemia Architecture by John Pawson Photography by Hisao Suzuki
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As well as transforming surfaces, light also shapes form. It is no accident that the Provençal master-builder of Le Thoronet located the abbey’s church so that its mass would shade the cloister, while his counterparts in the colder north were orientating their cloisters to receive as much sun as possible. This is what it means to respond fully to a site – not just to the fall of the land, but to the fall of the light.
Novy Dvur: A Micro-city of Light
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which render the depth of window embrasures legible.
John Pawson was born in 1949 in Halifax, Yorkshire, establishing his practice in London in 1981. From the outset the focus has fallen on ways of approaching fundamental questions of space, proportion, light and materials. Private houses remain a consistent strand, but the body of work spans a wide range of scales and building typologies, from Calvin Klein’s flagship store in Manhattan and airport lounges for Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong, to the Sackler Crossing in London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Cistercian monastery of Our Lady of Novy Dvur in Bohemia was awarded the Frate Sole International Prize for Sacred Architecture in October 2008.
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In the monastery’s church, where the language of light becomes more highly charged, the task becomes something of a different order, however, with spiritual as well as practical purposes to serve. Virtually all of the effects at Novy Dvur were meticulously engineered. Dramatic vertical compositions of indirect light to each side of the nave are designed to draw the gaze forwards through the space towards the apse and altar - white or blue, according to the angle of the sun and the clearness of the sky. The apse is a white curve, which rises uninterrupted for over 16 metres (52.5 feet). Concealed from sightlines within the nave, a flight of stairs descends into a hidden void behind the altar where openings at ground level produce a series of ethereal effects of sunlight, some of them entirely unforeseen – including an exuberant helix, cast behind a sculpture of the Madonna and Child. I don’t get to visit the monastery in Bohemia nearly so often as I would like, but when I am sitting in the church watching how the sun and a series of simple white rendered surfaces come together in this remote, rural site, I have a fleeting sense of satisfaction in what we have achieved. This sense of rightness in the conjunction of light and mass is what the architect hopes for, every time he or she erects a wall.
Notes:
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1 C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, (1843).
by Marcus M. Farr
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LIGHT THROUGH MATERIAL
New technologies in responsive materials such as resins, films, plastics and photo-reactive materials are an obvious seduction for architects and designers. Often new materials and fabrication techniques are tested in disciplines outside of typical architecture and design applications, such as the air & space, computer or automotive industries, and are brought into architecture in the form of experimental installations or surface treatments. The awareness of applied material systems that offer new architectural potentials is an ongoing activity, but rarely is a material seen as light giving in itself.
Furthermore, this idea has an inherent potential to not only influence architectural materiality but to also play a powerful role in informing the construction of architectural form and space. With this in mind, the traditional role of architecture as mediating light between function/structure/wall evolves into a physical interaction between material surface, structure and translucency where light is the direct expression of the design material. This composition generates a shared relationship for both the visual and material world.
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The potential for architects to design with materials that are “inclusive of light,” rather than with openings and windows, could offer a change in the way we design and practice. This ability to experiment more effectively offers profound architectural possibility and a more intimate relationship with the building’s material identity.
LIGHT THROUGH MATERIAL 11 When researching recent applications of new, light emitting materials in architectural design, one of the more interesting examples involves
“photo-reactive” technology. This technology involves the use of dyes and additives in varying degrees when casting plastics and resins. One such product is “Reversacol”, a photochromic dye created by the James Robinson / Vivimed lab in the UK. Reversacol can be added to plastics, inks, and a variety of coatings to create a change in the way the host material filters light. More specifically, the coating can affect the color of the material and its translucency because of the way Reversacol interacts with UV rays. Obvious uses are in the glass industry such as self-tinting eye-glasses and sunglasses. But take the concept of “photo-reactive surface” further, into an architectural application and you get a project such as the “OR Project”, an installation at the 2008 International Furniture Fair in Milan. OR was created by the design team of Christoph Klemmt, Ran Ankori, Maya Carni, Francesco Brenta, Laura Micalizzi and Elisa Oddone. The project consists of a vortex shaped form installed in a courtyard that is ever-changing in its relationship to light and Image previous page: OR Project, 2008 Milan International Furniture Fair Image from DEZEEN Image this page: Bloch Building, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Architecture by Steven Holl Architects Photography by Marcus Farr Studio
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An example of recent architecture that has moved beyond traditional thinking and embraced the dichotomy of technology and lighting is the Bloch Building, an extension of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City designed by the New York office of Steven Holl Architects. From its inception, the architecture is “about” and “of” light. “The primary building material is light,” states Steven Holl Architects partner-in-charge, Chris McVoy. “Lighting is not seen as separate from the architecture.” Technologies in glass design have allowed the museum to incorporate translucent materials to light the museum and the collections, without UV damage to the exhibited works. The walls are comprised of structural self-spanning channel glass planks, 16 inches wide. The interior of the center glass surface contains a sandblasted translucent insulation and is lightly textured on the exterior giving the buildings interior and exterior surface a sheer and constant glow. The cavity of the glass wall utilizes two layers of low-iron laminated sheet glass, which, according to the architect, gives the clearest color rendering possible for daylight.
LIGHT THROUGH MATERIAL 12 The form is created with polygonal scales composed of material that physically reacts to ultra-violet light, making it change in color and appearance depending on whether or not the structure is in shade, shadow, sun, or darkness. According to the design team, “the polygonal segments of the surface react to ultra-violet light, mapping the position and intensity of solar rays”. The structure/skin of the vortex moves from being translucent white when in the shade or shadow to being a glowing composition of colored light when in sunlight. During the evening, the project takes on another form as a glowing, atmospheric ‘chandelier’ that emanates light to the courtyard. The colors and shades of light
generated by the photo-reactive surface are in direct correlation to the weather and lighting conditions of the given day, offering extreme potential as an architectural tool for building skins, exterior applications, and informative surfaces. Another material offering significant potential within architectural surface technologies and light is ETFE, also known as “ethylene-tetrafluoro-ethylene”, a fluorocarbon-based polyImage this page: Bloch Building, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Architecture by Steven Holl Architects Photography by Marcus Farr Studio Image next page: OR Project, 2008 Milan International Furniture Fair Image from DEZEEN
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environment.
In conclusion, the ability to identify and utilize materials that can lend themselves to real, architectural applications can have a profound impact on how we interact and perceive the built environment. The role of light and materiality is crucial to architecture, and our interaction with it is constantly evolving. It is the architect’s responsibility to analyze and imagine new relationships so that we may continue to grow and experience stimulating environments.
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Nowhere is this material more evident than in the Herzog and de Meuron designed Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany. The exterior skin of the arena is covered in a tufted ETFE pneumatic membrane, both translucent and lit from within, the panels emulate glowing scales with changing light values based on need and desire. Because the surface of the façade is composed of “programmed” synthetic skin, it can be customized to suit an infinite variety of moods and color values, as well as complex geometric patterns, monochromatic displays and alternating tones. Each pneumatic membrane panel, 2,760 of them, are composed of 2 approximately .2 mm thick sheets of ETFE which are sewn together and filled with air.
cluding the National Aquatics Centre, (the Water Cube), and the Beijing National Stadium.
RESEARCH: Woyke, Elizabeth. “Material for an Architectural Revolution.” Business Week, April 24, 2007: online.
According to online research, DuPont invented ETFE as an insulation material for the aeronautics industry in the 1970’s. ETFE reads as a miracle material. It does not melt easily, is highly resistant to corrosion and weather damage, resists rain and dampness, and does not emit toxic fumes when under flame. Compared with glass, ETFE itself is 1% the weight and transmits more light. Amazingly, it has also been documented to be less expensive and more efficient to install, can bear 400 times its weight and can be stretched. Moreover, ETFE is completely recyclable. It is commercially branded with DuPont, Daikin, Asahi Glass, and Vector Foiltec.
Fairs, Marcus. “Project OR in Milan” DeZeen, April 18, 2008: electronic post,
Other notable buildings using ETFE include recent 2008 Beijing Olympic buildings in-
http://www.dezeen.com/2008/04/18/project-or-by-christoph-klemmt/
www.dezeen.com.
LINKS: http://www.orproject.com/ http://www.james-robinson.ltd.uk/index.htm www.mediaarchitecture.org/allianz-arena-munich www.covertex.de/projekte/ www.allianz-arena.de www.emporis.com/ge/wm/bu/?id=allianzarena-munich-germany www.siteco.at/de/referenzen.html www.architekten24.de/projekt/allianz-arena-muenchen/uebersicht/index.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETFE http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/apr2007/ id20070424_903199.htm
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mer plastic.
LIGHT THROUGH MATERIAL 14 ETFE, Alianz Arena, Germany Image from source-mediaarchitecture.org
Marcus Farr, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP is a designer and fine artist. He currently operates Marcus Farr Fine Art / Architecture, a studio specializing in fine art, installations and speculative architectural projects. Studies abroad include painting and drawing at the Galleria dell Accademia and the Uffizi in Florence, Italy. Further studies were conducted at The Italian National Archives. Before becoming a full time photographer and artist Marcus worked as an associate architect and a landscape architect for leading offices in Chicago and Houston including the Carlos Jimenez Studio and The Office of James Burnett. Mr. Farr received a Master of Architecture from Rice University.
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ILLUMINATING GROUND ZERO
Full scale podium screen mockup: The concept behind the smaller dimension, orientation and bead blasted surface of the rear prismatic wire was tested and found to be effective at reducing moiré, obscuring views into the transformer vaults and dematerializing the building’s surface. Phototography by David Sundberg
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by James Carpenter
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Seven World Trade was the third building to collapse on September 11, 2001. It is the first building to be rebuilt. The devastation on 9/11 transformed the site physically and symbolically – our task was to reconsider the site and revitalize a space that was remembered for destruction and sorrow and re-envision it as a space to celebrate New York’s inhabitants. The architectural design team hired us to consider the Seven World Trade Center’s (7WTC) podium as a key element in the transformation.
We proposed an Interactive Light Wall that between dawn and dusk would signal the importance of the site by dynamically representing the intrinsic relationship between the individuals of the city and its buildings. The Interactive Light Wall is integrated into the
Photograph of the finished building showing the south Interactive Light Wall, which faces ground zero, and the east lobby wall at dusk. Phototography by David Sundberg
Screenshots of the software interface that analyzes video images and recognizes pedestrians (pink points) and their movement (pink vector lines). Kinecity’s program translates this information into blue light strips indicated in the window below the video image which results in the LED lighting within the podium being activated. The tracking system was designed with redundancy to tolerate multiple camera failures and even a failure of one of the computers. Phototography by JCDA
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The podium would have to fulfill its previous function as the location of street-level electrical transformers feeding much of lower Manhattan, while responding to the new historical and cultural significance of the site. The new plan would mean that 7WTC’s southern façade would face the new World Trade Center development at street level, including the memorial, while the northern façade would be the face of the new World Trade Center development on the Greenwich Street axis to the north. The tower itself is a 60-story extruded parallelogram which acts as crystal prism that captures the quality of light found in Lower Manhattan while bringing that light down into the narrow streets that surround it. The parallelogram plan of the building followed the decision to return the city’s grid across the World Trade Center development, which at and west of Greenwich Street, is a parallelogram grid. Previously 7WTC had been cut off from the rest of the WTC development and did not take into account pedestrian or street level activity. However the new design would merge the challenge of integrating the new electrical transformers and enlivening the pedestrian experience at street level.
ILLUMINATING GROUND ZERO 17 Daytime detail of the front surface reflection of stainless steel screen wall. Photography by Andreas Keller
Detail of custom weather proof LED housing positioned between double screen units. Each LED unit is removable for maintenance from the outside while each LED diode is individually addressable. For every blue LED there are two white LEDs which can achieve various levels of color mixing.
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The stainless steel screen panels are made of cold drawn equilateral prismatic wires orientated vertically and resistance welded in a specified pattern and angle of rotation. Welded to a 5’ x 14’ x 10” (1,524 x 4,267 x 254mm) stainless steel sub frame, the front screen prismatic wires have 1⁄2” (13mm) cross-sectional faces that are highly polished. The inner screen’s prismatic wires have 1⁄4” (6mm) cross-sectional faces that are glass-bead-blasted to diffuse and scatter light. The two wire sizes possess complementary light-reflecting properties and reduce the moiré (bifurcating) effect created by two layers of parallel lines.
ILLUMINATING GROUND ZERO 18 Located along the north and south facades of 7 World Trade Center, the Interactive Light Wall is a camera-recognition and computer controlled LED system integrated within the stainless steel double screen wall. The Interactive Light Wall marks the direction, speed and number of pedestrians on the adjacent sidewalk along the full height of the seven story podium. Inserted between the two screens, the LED’s illuminate the bead blasted front surface of the rear prismatic wire. This diffused light is redirected between the front screen’s prismatic wires whose front surfaces remain in shadow. The layers of light and shadow, activated by the pedestrians, create an ambiguous sense of depth that dematerializes the building, merging individual and city.
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Phototography by David Sundberg
Phototography by David Sundberg
north and south facades of 7WTC’s seven-story podium. The podium’s stainless steel double screen wall fulfills the requirements of providing the necessary ventilation for the transformers’ waste heat and blast resistance in the case of a transformer explosion. The double screen consists of two layers of triangular wire each welded onto a sub-frame – the orientation of the wires were set in response to light, both the existing daylight on site and to the LED fixtures inserted within the double screen. The double screen prevents views into the vaults day and night while extending the sense of depth within the building’s skin. At night the podium screen comes alive with the Interactive Light Wall. Consisting of a sixteen video camera recognition system and four computers controlled by proprietary software designed by Kinecity, the system collects and analyzes images of pedestrian traffic. The system computes the pedestrians’ motion parameters and converts them into illumination maps that are sent as images to the LED controller, a separate system designed by LED Effects. The LEDs, embedded within the building’s podium screen wall, illuminate in response to pedestrians’
James Carpenter studied architecture and sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. Mr. Carpen ter exhibited his sculpture and installation film projects in the United States and Europe and worked as a consultant with Corning Glass Works. He developed new glass materials including photo responsive glasses and various glass ceramics. These research projects were aimed at potential architectural applications which would utilize the unique technical capabilities to control and manipulate light and information. This work eventually brought him back to the practice of architecture. This emphasis on theoretical, aesthetic and industrial materials research, together with Mr. Carpenter’s ongoing practice in architecture and structural glass design, continues to inform and guide the work of James Carpenter Design Associates. Mr. Carpenter is the recipient of numerous awards including the National Environmental Design Award from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Institute of Architects Honor Award and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004.
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Installation of the stainless steel screen. Concrete wall and vaults house electrical transformers for lower Manhattan. The porosity of stainless steel screens provides the proper ventilation.
passage along the sidewalk adjacent to the building. The individual’s presence is scaled to match the scale of the city. Each individual is expressed as a single seven-story bar of light, while groups create patterns of intersecting bars. In this way each individual visiting the immediate area experiences the simple everyday phenomenon of their shadow transformed into light and this light merging luminously with the building and with the light of others. The result is a sense of heightened observation and engagement with the site’s history and future as a cultural district, hosting visitors from across the country and the world. As visitors and inhabitants visit the World Trade Center, the Interactive Light Wall will remind them that just as they are energized by the city, so in turn, the city is fundamentally brought to life by their energetic participation.
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THE INTRIGUE OF LIGHT by Jason Bruges
As an artistic medium, light is attractive because of its versatility; it can be controlled and manipulated, but also ephemeral and difficult to define. Light can be magical; each time it finds itself in a new context it behaves differently. In a multi-sensorial environment, light is one of the key players; it affects primeval responses for those experiencing it - we wake up to it, we work by it and we tell time with it. Combine this with technological devices and the possibilities seem endless. However, the artistic vision, idea or concept drives the palette of technology used - not the other way around. Around the world, there is now a diverse group of architects, set
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The power of natural light, whether sunlight or its reflection on the moon at night, to directly influence our moods and sense of wellbeing has been widely documented and speculated. In the day-to-day practice of our studio, we have yet to create a piece that uses natural light and instead, so far at least, have limited ourselves to experimenting with the man-made. Nonetheless, over the last seven years I’m frequently overwhelmed at how potent a form of communication light can be in art and design. It affects emotions, triggers wonder, pleasure, and intrigue. It colours our perception and experiences of places, structures and environments.
Pixel Cloud Photography by Jason Bruges Studio
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designers, interaction designers, traditional lighting designers, artists, animators and industrial designers all attracted to working with light. These practitioners have considerable experience of working in a wide range of contexts (galleries and museums, public squares, corporate buildings and private homes) and are increasingly intrigued by the potential of technologies such as LEDs, OLEDS, innovative display and projection equipment. Technology from different industries is being appropriated and used in new ways and assemblages. Within each project, a different quality of light is explored. This process involves interrogating new ways in which light can be used to evoke a reaction, change our interaction with a space and our interpretation of an aspect of the world around us. Whilst the conceptual development often follows a similar path - it is iterative, with continuous texting and experimentation – the resulting works are site specific, each one making observations and responses to their own particular set of conditions.
Focal Shift
Milan and New York, 2009 ‘Focal Shift’ is a collaboration with Jake Dyson. Jake’s Motorlight Wall investigates how a modular installation can work in a limited space. ‘Focal Shift’ is an example of how the opportunities and the interest in dynamic and time-based work has infiltrated into the transitional and liminal spaces in buildings to enliven and enrich them.
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Photography by Jason Bruges Studio
THE INTRIGUE OF LIGHT 22 Images by Jason Bruges Studio
Coney Island, NY, 2007 - ongoing This project seeks to provide a strong element of interactivity while using environmentally responsible methods of powering the installation. The on-shore wind will power small, vertically mounted turbines that generate energy needed for the artwork. Playing even a minor part in the ongoing regeneration initiatives is exciting because of the area’s rich history. Coney Island has a fascinating legacy as a place of innovation within leisure and entertainment (the carousel was invented there). By recording the buzz and activity during the summer season and then playing back and illustrating it with light during the quieter times, the project functions as an ‘attractor’ which we hope will engender the sense of enjoyment and delight so characteristic of Coney Island.
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Steeplechase Plaza
Allen & Overy, Bishops Square, London, 2007 Pixel Cloud, is an eight-storey tall 3D matrix of light globes suspended in the Allen & Overy new London Headquarters’ North Atrium, by Foster and Partners. The spacing between the light globes mimics the architectural grid of the building. Our R&D process produced a light globe that is individually addressable (i.e. you can ‘address’ each globe, commanding and controlling them to behave or respond in a certain way). Pixel Cloud’s scale and composition, along with the use of a combined power, data and structural loom is highly unusual. The effect and function of the atrium is to bounce light into the building and form a link to the outside world for its occupants. The chandelier amplifies this passage of light with its gently undulating coloured globes. It has the ability to react in real-time to changes in environmental conditions, bringing in an awareness of the sun’s location/orientation, movement of clouds across the sky, the time of day and sense of seasons. Pixel Cloud was built with the capacity to read weather conditions, via an RSS feed, from the various Allen & Overy global offices. For a company with an extensive worldwide network, celebrating the link between its people and places helps create a positive sense of belonging to individual staff members.
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Pixel Cloud
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Photography by Jason Bruges Studio
THE INTRIGUE OF LIGHT 24 Photography by Julian Abrams
Broadwick House, London, 2007 Recall integrates with Richard Rogers’ Broadwick House in Central London. Situated on the exterior Broadwick Street façade, Recall is inspired by Rogers’ philosophy of a 24-hour City, where a building’s functional flexibility allows 24-hours of use. During a working day, the lifts rise and fall, open and close, carrying workers from floor-to-floor. At night, the building sleeps and the lifts rest. Recall records the nuances of daytime activity and then reproduces them at night as a kinetic artwork in amber light panels. The exact amber colour is the same as many industrial system directional indicators. The installation captured lift call commands to build a database of the day’s activity such as the floors visited, length of stationary times, acceleration, deceleration, and the length of time doors are held open. This notation forms the evening performance which runs from dusk until midnight everyday.
Jason Bruges Trained as an architect at Oxford Brookes University and the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College of London), Jason brings an awareness of the built environment, artistic sensibility and technical skill to his creative projects. He worked with Foster & Partners for three years before moving to Imagination to become a senior interactive design consultant. Jason Bruges Studio was founded in 2001 and now works with a team of twelve to develop and deliver projects across the world. The studio produces innovative installations, interventions and products for clients across the globe. We have become known for interactive spaces and surfaces that sit between the worlds of architecture, interaction design and site-specific installation art.
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Recall
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LIGHT HOUSE
Our design process was an experiment. Usually architects design a building and then test it. For the Light House we spent six months understanding the solar geometry before the design was considered; no sketching and no modeling took place during this process. With a very patient client we did not present or produce any ideas for the project until we fully understood the site’s environmental conditions. This gave the building a different set of attributes and created a design best suited to its unusual enclosed site.
Image this page: Light House from above Photography by Helene Binet
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by Gianni Botsford
LIGHT HOUSE 26 The diagrams illustrate an early stage of dividing up the information by producing horizontal sections of the site. Each section shows differing levels of sunlight (red) and daylight (blue) from the Radiance analysis database for different seasons of the year.
The site offered a hugely urban problem fourteen separate buildings abuttted our site. The site itself had an almost east-west orientation with more open sides to the south. The site was heavily overlooked and overshadowed on the south and west elevations and it was critical to maintain privacy whilst optimizing daylight and sunlight penetration into the house. We interpreted the cultural opacity (one’s perceived relationship to the sun in architectural terms between cultures) in the UK as demanding maximum sun. In very hot
climates the tendency is to turn one’s back to the sun, and the opposite is true in colder climates. As a result, the Light House needed to redistribute and contain light so that we could change perceptions about life in London. Traditional design processes tend to start with the design and then evaluate their success. This will often lead to inaccurate assumptions and is prone to preconceived thinking. We realized very early in the design process that this site was intrinsically linked to the surroundings by daylight, sunlight and view criteria that change throughout the seasons and these dominated the design approach. Our aim was to avoid falling into ‘default’ solutions through a process of detailed site and brief analysis prior to any design phase. We utilized research work I carried out in the mid 1990’s at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. At that
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The Light House is a new 8000sf house on an enclosed back-land site in Notting Hill, London, for a family of two academics and their two children. The clients had previously lived in typical London vertical townhouses of up to five stories, and wanted the house to be connected and interactive by being more horizontal; the brief required a very private house for the family to live and work.
A cloud of voxel datapoints with high levels of sunlight.
Highest and lowest levels of sunlight seen together.
Physical model of the average sunlight and daylight levels on the site.
We were trying to create an architecture of local adaptation. We defined a general framework that held everything together (not physically; more visually), but that also allowed everything to change depending on the local and global environment. Our framework became a 3d grid which itself adapted to the local and global environment - the grid spacing, the angle of the roof, and so on. Nature is similar. The animal body plan, which is the same for so many animals, is the framework. Based on this framework, nature can adapt the animal (for example its overall shape or color) to completely different environmental conditions. Similarly, design includes constraints such as requirements for daylight levels and contextualism - and there are local and global versions of both. In addition, the environment also includes what in biology is referred to as internal environment - how one part of the design may affect another part. Our starting point was to represent the empty volume of the site as a three dimensional grid of over 6,000 voxel data points (3d pixels) each consisting of a range of varying attributes.
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Morphogenesis is the process of development of form structure and organization in nature, much of which is informed by the environment. In my research, what I was primarily interested in was how differences occurred in different latitudes but with similar starting points, and how this leads to unexpectedly different form generation. As the forms were generated purely by solar rules it was clear that architectures across the globe should vary significantly if they are to respond to their local environment, and yet this is often not the case.
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time I studied computationally generated solar form (which is inspired by the morphogenetic processes of nature) and developed computational models that explore space and optimize potential proposals by utilizing a ‘generate and simulate’ cycle.
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LIGHT HOUSE 29 Visualisation of the daylight data (left) and highest levels of sunlight throughout the year (right)
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In order to interrogate the data successfully the 3 dimensional volume for each room in the house had to be established as well as the temporal, spatial and qualitative nature of each room.
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Interior View of the Light House Photography by Helene Binet
LIGHT HOUSE 31 FORWARD 109 Interior View of the Light House Photography by Helene Binet
Working with the environmental engineers, Arup, a detailed environmental analysis for each individual voxel on the site was carried out using Radiance software. This analysis produced a database of solar and daylight conditions throughout the year, taking into account weather patterns specific to London. Such environmental data is large and complex and therefore the computer becomes an ideal tool for hypothesizing and extrapolating possible proposals. We developed database mining software tools for the extraction of generalized conditions and conclusions from the environmental data, as well as a number of visualization tools to understand the data more fully. The unique aspect of this process is that it is an intrinsically three dimensional rather than two-dimensional. Some critical discoveries were made during this period that greatly influenced the final form of the house. Subsequently, the clients’ preferences and lifestyle were superimposed onto this environmental data. This led to the emergence of a
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REFERENCES: Chris Luebkeman and Kristina Shea, “CDO: Computational Design and Optimization in Building Practice,” The Arup Journal 3 (2005). John Frazer, Themes V11: An Evolutionary Architecture, (AA Publications, 1995).
Gianni Botsford, RIBA was born in Venice, Italy, studied at Kingston University and The Architectural Association, London. Mr. Botsford established Gianni Botsford Architects in 1996. He was appointed AA Research Fellow in 1997. He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a founding member of Autotectonica. Research work into Optimisation and computationally generated solar form with Arup, and Dr Janssen at Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ. informs the practice. Collaborations with Urban Future Organisation and Morphogenesis Architecture Studio allow larger scale studies.
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Interior View of the Light House Photography by Helene Binet
project that was tuned to both the three dimensional environmental conditions and the brief. The section became inverted, placing the bedrooms on the ground floor and the living spaces on the first floor, essentially a double height ‘piano nobile’. The inward looking nature of the site in conjunction with the inverted section led to the development of a completely glazed ‘sky facade’ roof. This ‘sky facade’, the only visible facade, was seen as an environmental moderator, filtering sunlight and daylight through layers of transparency and opacity. Three different densities of fritting were allocated to the roof panels according to criteria from the rooms below using a separate optimization process. Solar optimized terraces and gardens created internal courtyard volumes into which the surrounding spaces face. What started life as an essentially dark and impossible site has been transformed into a luminarium, with light able to both enter and be controlled at all levels and seasons.
SOLAR UMBRELLA by Lawrence Scarpa
Greg Goldin, Los Angeles Magazine Inspired by Paul Rudolph’s Umbrella House of 1953, the Solar Umbrella is a contemporary reinvention of the solar canopy - a concept that provides thermal protection in climates with intense exposures, a kind of “Global Regionalism”. The building responds to traditional ideas of architecture’s sensitivity to site and microclimate while simultaneously incorporating twenty-first century technologies. These design strategies, passive and active, render the residence nearly energy independent; electric bills are less than $500/year. Besides being the source of nearly all of the electricity used in the house, the panels insulate the interior, reducing the need for the energy they provide. The solar canopy also has a deeper meaning and purpose. Only an inch thick and 33 feet long, the photovoltaic glass-andsilicon panels establish a motif: light, though ephemeral, can be made palpable. Something having almost no mass--a group of solar cells that resembles a suspended gas wafer--floats over the house. The solar panels also provide the aesthetic dimension of the Solar Umbrella Image opposite page: South (Woodlawn Ave.) elevation showing new addition Photography by Marvin Rand
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dispersing sunlight into a visible spectrum of reds and violets, dappling the interior spaces with rich colors, giving the house its signature look: superflat, a mortarboard aloft on stilts. Each of these strategies and materials is multipurposed, crafted to exploit the potential for performance and sensibility, while achieving a rich and interesting sensory and aesthetic experience. As you enter the house directly above the front door, light streams into the living room through the solar panels located on the exterior south façade of the house. We revealed the bottom edges and backsides of the solar panels and suspended them from the exterior of the house. We didn’t want them to disappear. When the sun illuminates the panels, the solar cells refract light, much like the surface of a soap bubble, turning various shades of purple and yellow and red. Simultaneously, filtered light enters the living room through a perforated steel stair leading to the master bedroom above. The perforations in the stair allow diffuse light to enter the living space below while allowing heat to rise through it, inducing airflow throughout the house. Light also enters from the east through a sliding wall of glass connecting the living room to the garden. CNC routed natural cherry wood walls and solar radiant concrete floors coalesce with the light entering the space. These qualities of the materials and light define the spaces they enclose. The component parts of the house are unabashedly, nakedly on display. The solar canopy is multivalent and rich with meaning--performing several roles for functional, formal and experiential effect. The house is composed of a series of interlocking solids and voids that create a richly layered depth. The structure delicately touches the land – it is defined by a series of horizontal and vertical lines, meant to be more void than solid. Space is never fully enclosed. The house is transparent and allows views to penetrate from front to back. Formal elements
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The first thing you think-when you park outside the Solar Umbrella is ‘This cannot be a house or a building of any kind.’ There appear to be no walls, no windows, no roof only four anthracite-black panels, as slender as playing cards and seemingly as weightless, laid delicately on the top edges of a pair of concrete pillars soaring 25 feet into the air. You see right through it. The other houses on Woodlawn Avenue are 1920s bungalows and Spanish Colonial Revivals: four walls clad in wood or stucco, anchored to the street by low-slung roofs and sturdy front porches. This wafer-thin superstructure is something else altogether-more air than building. Barely touching the ground, the Solar Umbrella is a kite among stegosaurs.1
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The living room opens out into the lawn via sliding glass doors. Detail shows underside of solar panels serving as protective cover. Photography by Marvin Rand
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The bedroom is served by an extended porch, blurring the lines between inside and outside. Again, the solar panels serve a formal expressive and practical role as protective canopy. Photography by Marvin Rand
As Greg Goldin describes in Los Angeles Magazine, the solar umbrella house is “something else altogether-more air than building. Barely touching the ground, the Solar Umbrel-
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Window placement allows light to penetrate the interior of the residence at several locations, allowing every room in the house to have ample day lighting and cross ventilation. A series of stepped roofs and glazed walls further broadcast light. Additional skylights and clerestories coax sunlight inside, even in low-traffic areas. A brise-soleil of industrial broom heads softens and thickens the south façade, filtering light rays to the second-floor patio and bedroom, while simultaneously providing privacy to the space. Above the kitchen a narrow, wedge-shaped lantern rises, pulling in natural light (warmed by its purple acrylic lining) and, conversely, doubling as a heat chimney when the skylight is opened. Light and shadow--ephemeral and fluid effects-become palpable formal tools that enliven the more permanent and fixed elements of the design. Collectively, these components establish an effectively layered composition, rich in visual, formal and spatial interest, forming an unbound fretwork of light and air embracing the sun.
la is a kite among stegosaurs.” He expressed the essence of Pugh + Scarpa Architects’ belief, that, by example we could encourage people to forge a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the fundamental, yet delicate relationships that exist between themselves, the natural world, its vital resources, and our collective cultures. When my wife, partner and fellow-architect Angela Brooks and I decided to remodel and enlarge our 1920-era 650-square-foot Venice bungalow, we hoped our home could have the power to enrich our personal experience and broaden our architectural language. Our intention was to engage viewers, to heighten their sense of awareness, and to bring a deeper understanding and vitality to their experience.
NOTES: 1 Greg Goldin, Los Angeles Magazine (October 2005).
Lawrence Scarpa, AIA, Principal, Pugh + Scarpa Architects, is a recognized leader in design innovation: formal, social, and sustainable. Under his direction as Lead Designer of Pugh + Scarpa, the firm has received more than 40 major design awards, notably 13 national AIA Awards, including the 2006 and 2003 AIA Committee on the Environment “Top Ten Green Project” awards, 2005 Record Houses, 2003 Record Interiors, 2003 Rudy Bruner Prize, and finalist for the 2002 United Nation’s World Habitat Award. In 2004, the Architectural League of New York selected him as an “Emerging Voice” in architecture. His work was recently on exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. He has taught and lectured at the university level at numerous schools, including UCLA, University of Florida, Mississippi State University, SCI-arc, the University of Arkansas, Louisiana State University, and Yale University.
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along these visual corridors--stairs, bearing walls, structural columns, guardrails, built-in furniture and cabinetry-- vary in density, color and texture.
by Jesse Wolf Corsi Henson
Before us as building designers and crafters lies a challenge to create inspirational, nurturing and comfortable spaces while reducing our footprint. When one is asked to reduce our footprint, often efficiency is assumed to mean sacrificing comfort or doing without. For example during the oil crisis of the 1970’s one answer to efficiency was to reduce window area and maximize wall area in the belief that by keeping nature out, energy savings would be achieved. However this strategy erected a barrier between nature and ourselves and left us millions of rooms lit by artificial means. Today we have answers which harness the sun and other natural forces. These solutions restore our connection to the environment while maintaining the potential to significantly improve efficiency. One strategy worth consideration is Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) exterior shade elements. (See figures 1 and 2). Photovoltaic (PV) refers to the conversion of sun light into electricity. The first applications of PV technology with architecture were similar to a “satellite dish” concept with maximum energy generation being the sole determining criteria. The desire for maximum energy generation often resulted in an uncompromising aesthetic awkwardness which generated little popular enthusiasm or demand for a promising sustainable technology. Over time the solar industry has evolved Building Applied PV (BAPV) applications such as rooftop systems that maximize energy generation while providing cost effective and straightforward installations. A second approach has also evolved, termed BIPV,
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STRATEGY FOR BUILDING INTEGRATED PHOTOVOLTAICS
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EXTERIOR SHADE ELEMENTS: AN EFFECTIVE
• Daylighting: Maximization of glare-free natural illumination to avoid energy consumption and cooling loads associated with artificial ambient lighting systems. • Distributed Generation: Maximization of direct sun to PV elements for on-site energy generation. It must be noted that these objectives have the potential to be in conflict and as such require a holistic viewpoint of mutual shared benefits. For example photovoltaic elements can effectively shield building surfaces from the sun, yet if they are spaced too close together, direct sun can be interrupted with shadows cast onto PV surfaces thus adversely affecting electricity generation.
Bioclimatic Approach to Architecture When addressing the goal of reducing solar gains, it is helpful to review some background. Solar and climatic loads are effectively minimized through two modes of environmental control, selective and exclusive.1 Different climates allow for varying degrees of both modes with the overriding factor being how the natural environment falls within the human comfort zone. For a hot arid climate the
comfort preference may be to exclude solar gains for the majority of the year, while selectively allowing solar gains in the winter. With regards to how selective and exclusive are accomplished, the bioclimatic approach towards architecture seeks passive, low energy means.2 Mechanical or automated assistance, however intelligent it may be, is seen by the bioclimatic approach as too easily dominating ambient natural forces. In pursuing an engagement with the environment, the more simple the approach and solution, the less artifice and energy is required. Or put more concisely, simple is just more simple. It is important to acknowledge the development of reflective glazing and other advances that have brought substantial improvement to human occupant comfort and reduced energy consumption. However, these improvements Image opposite page (Figure 1): BIPV exterior shades on ECN Building 31, Petten, Netherlands Photography by J. Henson Image this page (Figure 2): BIPV exterior shades on CalTRANS Los Angeles, USA Photography by J. Henson
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• Shading: Minimization of direct solar gains to exterior and interior building surfaces.
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where PV modules replace conventional glass curtainwall and cladding systems. In addition to energy generation, rationales behind BIPV strategies include improving aesthetic qualities and minimizing total construction cost through multifunction materials. However, neither current BAPV nor BIPV application strategies consider the financial and environmental benefits of passive roles these technologies could have within the building. Passive roles for PV can be defined according to the extent to which solar gains are modified or controlled. There are three primary objectives in controlling solar gains:
Incorporation of BIPV’s passive role has been shown to effect maximum reduction in operational energy requirements during the building’s lifecycle.4 Based upon Olgyay & Olgyay’s prior work in the field of bioclimatic architecture where energy consumption is reduced by passive means four climate types and cities of the United States were selected for Henson’s study: Hot-arid (Phoenix, AZ latitude 33°26’N), Hot-humid (Miami, FL latitude 25°48’N), Temperate (New York, NY latitude 40°47’N), and Cool (Minneapolis, MN latitude 44°53’N). Phoenix (Hot-arid) achieved in excess of 67 % savings in utility electrical consumption due to the combination of passive savings (28%) and active generation (39%). Other locations also achieved significant combined results, Miami (Hot-humid) 56%, Minnesota (Cool) 55%, and New York City (Temperate) 52%. However, it is significant to observe that even with a low percentage of façade coverage by BIPV shade elements combined results remained above 30% savings for all locations tested. Also the climate comparison results show self-shading shifts the traditionally recognized optimum tilt angle for maximum annual generation from
More detailed analysis of perimeter office space located in Phoenix, AZ shows independent and combined results of each strategy: daylighting, exterior shading, and PV energy generation. (Refer to Table 1.) Over 70% combined annual energy savings was achieved based on 33% façade coverage of BIPV shading elements for 300 square foot perimeter office space. In addition to the annual analysis, a 25-year cost per kilowatt-hour ($ / kWh) computation was made for the BIPV shades using the following equation: $ / kWh = (kW initial cost * total system size in kW) / 25 year electrical savings in kWh Computing the first cost of BIPV shades over 25 years worth of utility savings provides some interesting comparisons for the perimeter office space. For example a 1.25 kW BIPV shade system costing $7,000 per kW yields $0.23 per kWh when considering active generation alone. Note $7,000 per kW is a prevailing PV industry rate for installation and materials that does not account for incentives. If the passive energy savings were also considered in the 25 year energy calculation, then
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BIPV’s Measurable Results
being similar to location latitude to a more vertical tilt (90°). (Refer to Figures 3 through 6 for study of optimum tilt angle for fixed (non rotating) BIPV exterior shades.) Not surprisingly the Phoenix location yielded the highest annual output, due to its increased available sun hours over the other locations. However, Minneapolis ranked second, with New York City third, and Miami a close fourth. A major consideration why New York City outperformed Miami can be attributed to cooler ambient temperatures even though latitude (potential sun hours) was significantly weighted to Miami’s favor. And Minneapolis’ second ranking again reinforces the importance of cooler ambient temperatures and less precipitation versus latitude. Recall high ambient temperatures negatively affect PV performance.
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reinforce barriers to nature’s seasonal modulations by preventing a differentiation between heating, cooling, and temperate periods. In contrast, passive measures such as shading devices can provide a desired balance between heating and cooling loads depending on their position. Direct correlations have been substantiated between solar exposure and building energy consumption. Clear and logical arguments have been promoted which illustrate the positive effect shading devices have in controlling solar radiation before it strikes the building skin. In his 1998 study, Sciuto identified the potential for a combined reduction of 25-50% in perimeter zone energy and electric lighting use if shading devices are properly applied.3
Fig. 5: Annual Energy Output for South facing BIPV shades at 50% Facade Coverage
Fig. 6: Annual Energy Output for South facing BIPV shade at 66% Facade Coverage
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Fig. 4: Annual Energy Output for South facing BIPV shades at 33% Facade Coverage
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Fig. 3: Annual Energy Output for South facing BIPV shades at 16% Facade Coverage
NOTES: 1 D. Hawkes & W. Forster, Energy Efficient Buildings: Architecture, Engineering and Environment, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). 2 V. Olgyay & Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, (Princeton University Press, 1992). 3 Sciuto (1998). 4 Henson, (2004 and 2005).
Building owners and design professionals are encouraged to seriously consider the passive roles afforded by BIPV applications. PV applications that act merely as an energy generator do not maximize the potential energy savings. By incorporating passive roles PV can effect maximum reduction in operational energy requirements during the building’s lifecycle. In addition the passive role of PV can improve comfort and maximize natural illumination through controlling solar gains. Other positive considerations on the larger scale include reduced demand for non-renewable sources of energy. Every kilowatt hour of energy saved means one less pound of coal will be extracted and burned and one less gallon of water will be diverted to energy generation.
Jesse Henson, AIA, LEED AP
Jesse is pictured at Kyocera’s Solar Grove ® photovoltaic covered parking concept, which he co-created during his tenure at Kyocera Solar, Inc. Jesse’s research on BIPV has been published and presented at the following annual conferences: American Solar Energy Society 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and Kyocera North American Technical Conference 2004. Among his local activities he serves as Central Region Director for the Arizona Solar Energy Association. Jesse pursues his passion for sustainable design as an architect with Gould Evans Associates, in Phoenix, AZ.
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PV is one of the paths towards reducing our footprint.
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costs of electricity provided by BIPV shades was $0.13 per kWh. As a point of reference electric utility rates in California can exceed $0.23 per kWh and are considered some of the highest in the US. Hence the dramatic and sustained growth in California of the photovoltaic market in supplying electricity at rates competitive with fossil fuel based energy sources.
by Hilary Sample
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SPECULATING ON A DESIGN PRACTICE
The introduction of film offers the opportunity to purposefully create an intricate series of cross relationships between conventional static drawings such as the plan, section and axonometric. The fluid motion of film enables an expanded visual field beyond the limits imposed on previous generations. The techniques of representation available to architects have undergone a radical shift away from drawing and physical model making, even beyond the digital realm, now towards new methods of form-finding through film, scripting and sophisticated animations. Architecture is no longer limited to the fixity of a line drawing or a static rendered image, each with
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Charles and Ray Eames’ celebrated films were made to explore the world around them with a broad lens while constructing spatial ideas and narratives. Their work, along with the work of Alison and Peter Smithson, promoted new modes and moods of practice by adopting then emerging forms of media to construct form and meaning to their architecture. These kinds of practices are significant to contemporary practice for the way they experimented with new media in relation to expected forms of visual representation and the methods of work that previously existed. Architecture continues to be a practice that increasingly gains technological support, and continually explores and plays with the use of technologically inflected media. Film is a way to test design ideas produced in the studio and better understand them privately first. Then later we can present the film and the entire process on the Internet, within the public domain.
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its frozen effects. Producing an image eternally unchanged seems antiquated. These new methods of working are becoming more essential to the design process, are accessible to all architects and designers. They can be readily adopted in the studio or office, but not in an amateurish way. The architect can now make more probing studies – which can be crude, quick or painfully slow – restoring the visual-tactile relationship that has been largely lost with the use of most computer modeling techniques. Film making within a studio setting enables alternative ways of exploring not only the ideas behind forms and spaces, but also permits the creation of new narratives. Film also enables a new way for understanding the potential to admit light, permitting the construction of new external forms, resulting in a rethinking of internal plans and a reconfiguration of interior spaces. Light gives shape to the shapeless, and as today’s energy problems seek new forms of habitation that are more dependent on natural lighting, ways of testing a form’s performance require a more sensitive approach to study. The ability of architects to delineate the fluid is more important than ever and allows us to create new modes and moods of practice.
We created a film to present Urban Battery in all its different forms- from research, to simulating its physical form in the city, simulating its effects, and imagining urban narratives. The competition was to rework a strip mall site. However, we were more interested the potential of the redevelopment of many strip mall sites rather than one singular proposal. Through a twenty-minute film, we created a summary of the project that began with research about health and energy in the United States, quantifying current energy uses, and relating these subjects to the local conditions in Scottsdale. This information was depicted in a series of graphics and diagrams that were presented sequentially. The images gradually zoom in from the US overall to Arizona and eventually to the city of Scottsdale.
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Urban Battery
SPECULATING ON A DESIGN PRACTICE 45 The strip mall is already perfect and abject. Redecorating a strip mall makes no sense; all it needs is maintenance and perhaps a fresh coat of paint. Reconfiguring a strip mall in an attempt to bring some life back into it, to make a glorious architectural spectacle or somehow produce a small urban fragment—a reproduction of a lively part of New York’s West Village that has been radically cropped and condensed, for instance—is flawed. Strip malls are about economic efficiency, doing the least, stripped-down.
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Animating the street was part of the proposal. We reconnected the adjacent neighborhoods through new paths for exercise and social spaces. Additionally, the Urban Battery’s form appears with colorful glass panels that contain algae (algae, we learned from scientists at Yale University and Princeton, rapidly changes color, growing into an intense almost fluorescent green) and serve as a large billboard. The Urban Battery wall casts a shadow over the entire parking lot and provides shade to encourage outdoor events within the space.
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Urban Battery has a minimum footprint and a maximum surface area. It acts as an energy producer and storage unit for bio-fuels. It also filters air, houses oxygen regenerating plants and provides bike paths, public gardens and a community events space within its structure. In terms of zoning, Urban Battery is a power station, vertical greenhouse and billboard all rolled into one to create a new healthy urban infrastructure. It doesn’t fit into the zoning chart. However, given the lack of planning that gave birth to the strip mall in the first place, we believe that Scottsdale and many other parts of the U.S. are already prepared to accommodate this sort of programmatic innovation. The film weaves together stories, statistics, images and actual footage of the site to fabricate a projected reality revealing an urban sustainable vision.
The Ordos 100 project has no client. When asked who might live in the house, the organizers of the competition said it wasn’t necessary to program it for a particular individual but to follow the given program. Utilizing film, we studied possible scenarios for how the house would be inhabited. We simulated a day in the life of a family where daylight flows into darkness as the day ends, lights turn on and off as its inhabitants and fictional characters, X and Y, occupy rooms, the day progresses and their moods shift.
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Ordos
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X and Y live in the Inner Mongolian desert, a vast and undeveloped site covered with snow in the winter and exposed desert, dunes, and brush in summer. The arid climate induces dramatic temperature swings from day to night. Responding to this unusual climate, a relationship of courtyards and thermal chimneys was developed to allow for the optimization of comfort and light. The project draws on traditional Chinese courtyard houses and nomadic Yurt typologies to explore issues of performance and sustainability. Each living space of the house is designed as a distinct volume, with individual sloping roof forms, all unique to each program.
SPECULATING ON A DESIGN PRACTICE 48 All units have a mechanically operated skylight and operable windows on at least two sides. During the summer, air is drawn through the windows at the ground level and exhausted at the top. In the winter, with the windows closed, the sun will heat the exposed surfaces during the day and utilize the walls’ mass to reduce the amount of required mechanical heat at night. Deep porches and
courtyards provide shade while skylights allow each unit to be washed with indirect light throughout the day. Hilary Sample, Assistant Professor, Yale University is Principal in the design office MOS. Prior to teach ing at Yale, she was the Reyner Banham Fellow at SUNY Buffalo, and taught at the University of Toronto and Northeastern University. In 2005 she was a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and in 2007 a visiting scholar at the Canadian Center for Architecture. With her office MOS, the firm received the 2008 Emerging Voices Award, the 2008 Architectural Record Design Vanguard Award, Surface Magazine’s Avant-guard award, received first prize for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art competition Urban Battery and is currently building the PS1/MoMA Young Architects Program project Afterparty. MOS is currently working on the UTEC teen center in Lowell, Massachusetts, Ordos 100 villas in Inner Mongolia, and a Drive-In and Park in Marfa, Texas.
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Formally, the plan is generated through the logic of connecting rooms at their corners and playing games of doubling, splitting, and mirroring. Each spatial activity of the house is divided into separate room types, which are developed as hollow shell hip-roofed units. As the unit aggregates, each space takes on a programmatic distinction and reshapes in plan. Using parametric modeling, the more compressed a unit is, the taller it becomes, resulting in six distinct courtyard spaces and eleven rooms, which range from 4m to 10m in height. Working with regional materials of brick and concrete, each unit is built of structural concrete and faced with brick on the exterior. The living unit has the largest clear span.
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SHADOWS REDEFINED by Brian M. Kelly
Student Outline Extraction of Shadow Study
The project to follow, authored by myself and executed during the first year of a Bachelors of Architecture program, allowed students to work with the casting of shadows in real time while designing architectonic form. Through the process, students explored shadows existent in the built environment, and as a result of analysis and design responses, created forms that were sympathetic to the relationship of light within form and the variances possible by way of intentional sculpting and manipulation of light. The project began with a photographic exploration of the campus capturing shadows removed from the objects they were attached
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Shadows have often been described as a companion and, more times than not, go unnoticed by the people creating them. Although they are often ignored, they play a vital role in our perception of the natural and built environments. We gauge our placement and relationship to objects, such as the ground surface we are walking on or the wall we walk beside, through these projections. The direct connection of our shadow to our feet ensures us that we are on the ground plane and secure in its foothold on us. Shadows have also historically been used to place people within their context on a physical and spiritual level. Da Vinci used the projection of shadows at a global scale in an effort to better understand position and relativity of heavenly bodies, while Brunelleschi used shadow projection to conceive and develop perspective theory.
SHADOWS REDEFINED 50 With the prior relationship of the object to shadow broken, students attached this outline to a new object. Using a model base containing a vellum projection screen, designs were created in dark studios with the presence of a pin light source projecting shadows in real time. (Figure 7) Forms were manipulated while light was projected onto the screen containing the chosen figure ground. All design happened within the area called the “space of projection.” The space between the light source and the shadow, where distortion and overlap allows for an incredible degree of freedom in formal strategies, afforded the students opportunities to exercise formal moves not existent in other exercises of similar scale. Materials for the models were limited to chipboard and basswood, capitalizing on the attributes of point, line, plane and volume. The materials also allowed greater opportunity to express design intentionality through the use of contrast. Models were to be created and suspended atop a 4” tall dowel, and were not permitted to touch the
Left Image: Student photograph taken as a catalyst to begin the project Middle Image: Figure ground extraction of photograph Right Image: Outline extraction of photograph
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to. The intent was to document the projection and blockage of light in the form of a shape. (Figures 1-3) After critique and discussions, multiple photographs were limited to two, and analysis of the outline and figure ground diagrams resulted in shapes separated from their context. With the removal comes an opportunity to establish a new context, releasing it from the original object that it was linked to. (Figures 4-6)
SHADOWS REDEFINED 51 Student Design Model
Student Design Model
model base. These parameters challenged students to explore formal strategies integrating properties of structural integrity and clarity, all while responding to and exploiting the potential of material composition as a means to articulate design direction. (Figures 8-12)
design model. (Figures 13-15)
Brian M. Kelly, AIA
was formerly a professor of architectural design most recently at Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo. His focus is in the development of beginning design curriculum incorporating a vibrant mix of theory with fundamentals. He is currently practicing architecture in Omaha, NE.
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The results of this project were designs that responded to established constraints (figure ground projection and manipulation, material restrictions, structurally sound compositions, and the design of intentional formal compositions) while pushing the boundaries of their formal vocabularies. Through the process, students’ preconceptions were challenged which encouraged them to take ownership of their projects. This was accomplished through the definition of intentionality and continual gauging of each design iteration. In the end, the project came full circle culminating in the projection of a new set of shadows of the
Perhaps another way of understanding the success of the project is summed up by a student comment made during class discussions. He stated, “I quit taking the sidewalks on campus because that is where I feel that the university is asking me to walk. I would rather walk outside of these lines; it is where I see more interesting stuff.”
Open your eyes. You are in front of a computer screen reading this article. This is a normal, everyday act. We are used to this method of communication because it is fast and efficient. But by isolating our knowledge of the world to a retinal experience, we prohibit a complete awareness of our surroundings and become consumers of a prescribed almost two-dimensional world. This phenomenon has resulted in the substitution of a physical reality based on our use of senses, (body interaction) into a virtual reality based on an abstract space (the image). By bracketing our beliefs we become blind, losing our power of observation and creating our conception of an ideal world. A good example of this ideal world is when we make a drawing of an object we “know”. Most people will spend more time looking at the paper than the actual object, drawing what they think they see instead of what they actually see. It is not until we touch the object that we begin to recognize obscured textures and shapes. At this point the object becomes real. This same type of experience can be applied to architecture. A bodily interaction is an inseparable aspect of the experience of space in architecture. A complete architectural experience is not simply a series of retinal images; a building is encountered – it is approached, confronted, related to one’s body, moved about, and utilized as a condition for other things. When thinking about these elements in design one should always remember what the Fox told the Little Price the book Le Petite Prince ”what is essential is invisible to the eye”.1
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by Victor J. Irizarry Martinez
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METAPHORICAL BLINDNESS
In the realm of ideas, intellect and feeling, precision and soul are united, creating an awareness of the world; design integrates the body as a means and arranges architecture as a direct extension of the body, using the senses to enhance its spatial qualities. Often the truly great architectural experiences cannot be captured in a photograph. This is due to the complexity of sensual elements that enrich these spaces. We close our eyes to enhance our other senses when we want to remember a special moment. The eye creates a sense of separation and distance; in contrast touch evokes nearness, intimacy and affection. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines spatial perception as a process through which humans and other organisms become aware of the relative positions of their own bodies and objects around them. Juhani Pallasmaa in Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture reminds us “the perceptual spirit and metaphysical strength of architecture are driven by the quality of light and shadow shaped by solids and voids, by opacities, transparencies, and translucencies. Natural light, with its ethereal variety of change, fundamentally orchestrates the intensities of architecture and cities. What the eyes see and
Although it is impossible to outline how far back in time the poetic meaning of light and shadow in architecture has been used it is worth mentioning that at least it is not something we can simply reduce to its practical nature. From the book of Genesis to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in The Republic, the presence of light has become an important metaphor in understanding a new world. For example, Gothic cathedrals used light (whether in its presence or absence) as a main component defining architectural spaces. The Pantheon in Rome incorporates an oculus in the dome to create a dramatic confluence of space and time. Prior to the nineteenth century, the architect’s concern for order was not merely formal. Even the traditional Vitruvian categories firmitas, commoditas and venustas, were not perceived as independent entities. The architects’ mode of operation was therefore a metaphor, not mathematical equations. Not only did form follow function, but also form could fulfill its role as a primary means of reconciliation, one that referred to the essential ambiguity of the human condition.3 Therefore, a Metaphor in architecture, rather than being solely a linguistic or rhetorical trope, constitutes a human process by which we understand and structure one domain of experience in terms of another. 4 One may say that light and shadow played an important role in the metaphorical formation of these great buildings, alluding not only to the buildings function or efficiency of program and square footage but to its sensual qualities in a more spiritual realm. The mysteries of Light have been a topic of discussions in many disciplines. In Science we recognize names such as Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. In Architecture, ttthere is a few artists and architects who will not conform to the shallow understanding of light
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the senses feel in questions of architecture are formed according to conditions of light and shadow”. 2
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The design process in architecture has fallen victim to a retinal isolation market. Most of the buildings we see today are designed for (and from) a static magazine image rather than as a dynamic physical experience. Instead, architecture should celebrate light and shadows, textures and patterns, as essential components to developing a metaphorical structure. A good example of a metaphorical structure is when Luis Barragan at his official address for the 1980 Pritzker Architecture Prize describes his buildings with words such as silence, joy, solitude and serenity. At that point he transcended the role of an architect with a mathematical solution to a problem by becoming a poet and artist celebrating the sensual characteristics of his architecture.
To understand architecture from another point of view and explore beyond two-dimensional graphics in the latest architectural magazine I challenge you to consider space, light, color, geometry, detail, and material as an experiential continuum. Consider not only the technical or functional aspects of the building but how these elements coordinate with its surroundings at all scales. What are the framed views around the building? How does light aid an observer’s understanding of a building during the day versus night when the perspectival experience disappears? Remember that people touch things according to their shape... sculpture needs your hand to communicate pulse and warmth, to reveal subtleties unnoticed by the eye. Sculptures need your hand to enhance them.6 The same is true for buildings. Architecture, more than form, is experience. The skin reads the texture,
NOTES: 1 This is in essence what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry expresses in Le Petit Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, El Principito, trans. Guadalupe Velázquez Medina (Tomo Dos,1996). 2 Juhani Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven Senses,” Questions of
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weight, density and temperature of matter. It feels the coolness of a shaded building corner and the harshness of a light beam cutting the verticality of a wall. As the Little Prince says in Le Petite Prince by Antoine de Saint- Exupéry, “we should see beyond the hat to a snake eating an elephant. 7
Perception Phenomenology of Architecture – A + U Specia Issue (1994). 3 Alberto Pérez- Gómez, Introduction to Architecture and the Crisis of the Modern Science, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983) 4 Mark Johnson, The body in the Mind, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15. 5 Steven Holl, “Proportion, Scale and Perception,” Questions of Perception Phenomenology of Architecture – A + U Special Issue (1994). 6 Adrian Stokes, “The stones of Rimini,” Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol. 1, p.183 7 Saint-Exupéry, El Principito, 8.
Victor J. Irizarry, Assoc. AIA is an architectural designer from Puerto Rico, currently living in Phoenix, AZ. He completed his Masters in Architecture at Arizona State University in 2002 where he was awarded a Faculty Letter of Commendation. Mr. Irizarry has worked in various countries including Puerto Rico, Mexico, Argentina, and the United States. Since 2002, he has been an Associate Professor at Arizona State University’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. In 2004, Mr. Irizarry received the ASU Devil’s Advocate Award for outstanding contribution to the university community.
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engaging this element as a primary material for design. Steven Holl in in Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, reminds us the primary concern with light, shadow, time and space emerged in the in the 1960’s as a characteristic of many artist’s work, and continues most intensely today in the work of artist such as James Turrell and Robert Irwin.5 In Turrell’s work the raw material is not clay, wood, metal or stone but light. Some examples of Turrell’s work include The Roden Crater, constructed in a dormant volcano in the Painted Desert of northern Arizona and the Knight Rise Skyspace at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. In both of these works the observer plays a key roll for the success of the art installation completing a full circle of interactive experiences. The work of Steven Holl is known for its mastery of wall planes and light. Louis Kahn was known for his poetical references to light and shadow. And in Luis Barragan’s work one can enjoy the beauty and manifestion of light in its most playful form with bounced color creating an atmosphere of joy and harmony with its surroundings.
SPRING LIGHT & SHADOW
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