Extruded aluminum rain screen_Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre_REX + OMA

Project: Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre

Location: Dallas, USA

Year:2009

Architect(s): REX + OMA

The Dallas Theater Center (DTC) is known for its innovative work, the result of its leadership’s constant experimentation and the provisional nature of its long-time home. DTC was housed in the Arts District Theater, a dilapidated metal shed that freed its resident companies from the limitations imposed by a fixed-stage configuration and the need to avoid harming expensive interior finishes. The directors who worked there constantly challenged the traditional conventions of theater and often reconfigured the form of the stage to fit their artistic visions. As a result, the Arts District Theater was renowned as the most flexible theater in America. The costs of constantly reconfiguring its stage, however, became a financial burden and eventually DTC permanently fixed its stage into a “thrust-cenium.”

The Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre overcomes these challenges by overturning conventional theater design. Instead of circling front-of-house and back-of-house functions around the auditorium and fly tower, the Wyly Theatre stacks these facilities below-house and above-house. This strategy transforms the building into one big “theater machine.” At the push of a button, the theater can be transformed into a wide array of configurations—including proscenium, thrust, and flat floor—freeing directors and scenic designers to choose the stage-audience configuration that fulfills their artistic desires. Moreover, the performance chamber is intentionally made of materials that are not precious in order to encourage alterations; the stage and auditorium surfaces can be cut, drilled, painted, welded, sawed, nailed, glued and stitched at limited cost.

Below, installers integrate the signage systems for the Wyly Theatre as construction neared completion in 2009. The following photos show details of the round perforations in the aluminum column which create this signage. These perforations are backed by a lighting system, which light to reveal the building's namesake, a line of text which lights up to read "Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre" down the midsection of the building.

Zahner was brought on to develop a designed solution for the exterior surface surrounding the building. During the preliminary stages, several designs were discussed, including cladding the structure in a perforated panel system. Architects opted to build a facade like none before it, yielding a look that emulates the billowed fabric of a closed curtain.

The architects first contracted Zahner to provide Design Assist for the structure, which enabled the team to further develop and increase the efficiency and lower cost for producing the complex facade. The first phase of a Design Assist contract culminates with the production of the mockup. The mockup serves as a critical function in each design.  Mockups reveal both what works, and what doesn't work, and also gives the other contractors an understanding of how to best assemble and install the final components.

Zahner provided the design, engineering, fabrication, and installation of the extruded anodized aluminum facade. The designed extrusions were produced with partner Dante Tisi  and the facade consultants at Front  in New York.

Sources: 

-Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre_REX + OMA

http://www.architectureweek.com/cgi-bin/awimage?dir=2010/0707&article=design_2-2.html&image=14691_image_4.jpg

http://www.archdaily.com/37736/dee-and-charles-wyly-theatre-rex-oma/

http://www.azahner.com/portfolio/wyly-theater

Kinetic mbient reflection membrane_FLARE Building_WhiteVoid.Interactive Art & Design

Project: FLARE Building

Location: No defined

Year:2008

Architect(s): WhiteVoid.Interactive Art & Design

FLARE is a pneumatic building facade system. The FLARE system consists of a number of tiltable metal flake bodies. An infinite array of flakes can be mounted on any building or wall surface in a modular system of multiplied 4x4 FLARE units. Each stainless steel flake reflects the bright sky or sunlight when in vertical standby position. When the flake is tilted downwards by a computer controlled pneumatic piston, its face is shaded from the sky light and this way appears as a dark pixel. By reflecting ambient or direct sunlight the individual flakes of the FLARE system act like pixels formed by natural light. The system is controlled by a computer to form any kind of surface animation. Sensor systems inside and outside the building communicate the buildings activity directly to the FLARE system which acts as the buildings lateral line. FLARE turns the building facade into a penetrable membrane, breaking with all conventions of the building surface as a static skin.

Sources: 

-FLARE Building_WhiteVoid.Interactive Art & Design

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMzoMyU0YQ4

http://www.whitevoid.com/#/main/architecture_spaces/flare_facade/description

Homeostatic Façade System_Decker Yeadon

Project: Homeostatic façade system

Location: No defined

Year: In process

Architect(s): Decker Yeadon

A self-regulating façade system designed by architects in the USA automatically adjusts to suit changing exterior environments, such as sunlight and temperature variations. The Homeostatic Façade System by Decker Yeadon operates on natural principles to keep interior conditions in check.

The system comprises an engineered ribbon, inside the cavity of a double-skin glass façade. The ribbon is made of dielectric elastomers: polymer materials that can be polarized by applying an electrical current. These materials are also flexible and consume very little power.

Both sides of the dielectric material are coated with silver electrodes. This silver layer reflects light, and also distributes electrical charge across the material, causing it to deform. This helps the façade to regulate temperature inside the building.

As environmental conditions change, the charge in the silver layer causes motion using a sensitive actuator. An artificial muscle is created by wrapping the dielectric material over a flexible polymer core. Increased charge causes the elastomer to expand, making the core bend and pulling the elastomer material to one side. This in turn causes the paired halves of the ribbon to bend. The effect is that the façade closes up, with the opaque construction blocking out light.

The architects’ design incorporates ribbons of the dielectric material across the façade. As electricity is passed over the surface, it opens and closes to control solar heat gain through the facade. The huge advantage of this system is highly regulated and specific solar control in a façade.

So is this a smart material, an example of biomimicry – or just canny design? It’s the combination of expertise from various fields that makes design work like this stand out. Understanding natural principles, such as the way a muscle works, are part of the solution. Including the technical knowledge of dielectric materials helps. Adding the vision of applying the principle to a building’s façade makes the design part of what we call the smart environment.

Decker Yeadon is an architecture office based in New York that specialises in incorporating new material technologies in their design to help address contemporary issues. In particular, the architects show that smart materials and nanotechnology can offer solutions to a range of problems, from water conservation to security.

 

Sources: 

-Homeostatic Façade System_Decker Yeadon

http://materia.nl/article/homeostatic-facade-system/

http://thegroyne.com/2014/08/materiales-inteligentes-fusion-perfecta-diseno-tecnologia/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEipnLf40_Y

Folded aluminum doors_Door at Ernsting Warehouse_Santiago Calatrava

Project: Door at Ernsting Warehouse

Location: Coesfeld-Lette, Germany

Year: 1983 - 1985

Architect(s): Santiago Calatrava

Ernstings Mini-Laden is a casual-wear retailer with headquarters in a rural area on the outskirts of Coesfeld in northern Germany.  The Warehouse is located next to Ernstings¹ original building. The brief asked for a design that would go beyond mere functionality to provide the company with an enhanced, representative image within the textile sector. 

The warehouse, the subject of the competition, was designed by Gerzi,  a firm specializing in the textile industry, which was also responsible for organizing and planning the underlying structure of the warehouse; a large concrete frame with masonry infill.

Calatrava proposed cladding the new building in a single material,with each facade treated as an independent event.  The proposal served as both an exercise in the global application of a single material and as an investigation into the varied ways of using untreated aluminum, a staple of industrial construction, to give expression to a straightforward and predetermined structure.

In realizing the project, Calatrava employed aluminum to produce different effects of texture and light.  The corrugated southern facade responds to sunlight as if it were a giant sculpture.  Its verticality contrasts with the northern facade, that only receives light when the sun is at its zenith, where the emphasis is horizontal with a specially formed S-profile cladding.

The corners are treated as points of transition with certain elements serving as characteristic features.  The bridge that links the original building to the northwest corner of the new warehouse is an aluminum-clad space-frame that also houses a conveyor system. For the loading bay doors, vertical slats are hinged along a curved line and connected at their lower points to a horizontal frame, that can be raised or lowered.

When the frame is raised the vertical slats leave the plane of the facade and, due to the differentiated triple-jointing of each U-shaped extruded profile, assume the shape of a graceful cantilevered roof. These bay doors were the first application of an idea that originated in a sculpture by Calatrava; a form based on the shape of the human eye.  Here, the form became an experiment in kinetics, used to investigate the mechanical transformation of planes in a building.

Sources: 

-Door at Ernsting Warehouse_Santiago Calatrava

http://kibsgaard.se/CALT/EW/EW.htm

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Ernsting-Warehouse-and-Santiago-Calatrava&id=3013224&gt

Intertwined concrete facade_Tod's Omotesando_Toyo Ito & Associates

Project: Tod's Omotesando Building

Location: Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan

Year: 2002-2004

Architect(s): Toyo Ito & Associates

In Omotesando area, many shops have been constructed, for luxurious trademarks. Toyo Ito chose the concrete as main building material, being a bold proposal, the use of a substantial and strong, absent material in the “glass architecture” that it characterizes to the adjacent buildings. After to think about how to design the facade, in order to introduce openings on the concrete facade, it was conceived the idea of using an integrated structure by the superposition of silhouettes of trees. 

The innovative structure with the concrete walls and glass, with the tree shape, it makes that its branches are structural and they surround the building for its six faces, creating a spectacular visual effect and allowing the widest glazed entry. Due to its "L" form (plans) and its narrow facade, it was designed the branched structure that unifies the volume itself. This exterior surface serves such as graphic pattern and structural system. It is constructed by reinforced concrete (30cm of thickness) and fixed glazing without frame. The resultant surface supports the slabs without any internal column.

The facade, with interlaced concrete supports re-interprets the silhouettes of the elm trees that border on the street. Following the structural logic of botany, the columns are more wide in the base of the building, becoming more slender at the same time they are gaining height. Therefore, they are branching out in a major number of structural elements. Basically, it is a merge between a block and a curtain wall, that it is supported by concrete and steel members. Also, to avoid the break of the glazing, before a possible earthquake, the structure rests on shock-absorbers located in the foundations, something habitual in the Japanese constructions.

Tod's Omotesando Buliding- pictures of the facade, from outside and inside

Tod's Omotesando Buliding- model.

Tod's Omotesando Buliding- elevations (A); Exploded axonometry.

Tod's Omotesando Buliding- Testing the facade using other materials.

Tod's Omotesando Buliding- Relationship between facade and human scale (A); Assembly drawing (B); Construction drawing (C).

Tod's Omotesando Buliding- Window and slab detail.

Sources: 

-"Tod's Omotesando Buliding". es.wikiarquitectura

http://www.ramonaalbert.com/facades-materials-and-methods-projects/

https://es.wikiarquitectura.com/index.php/Edificio_Tod_Omotesando

Concrete filled steel wall_Mikimoto Ginza 2_Toyo Ito & Associates

Project: Mikimoto Ginza 2

Location: Tokyo, Japan

Year: 2005

Architect(s): Toyo Ito & Associates

 This is a rectangular building, 17m wide by 14m deep, with nine stories above ground and one basement level. The lower levels are used as a shop and offices for Mikimoto and the upper levels are leased as offices. Mikimoto Ginza 2 is wrapped in four thin walls to create a tube structural system. There are no internal columns, and the floor slabs are a stack of nine homogeneous layers.

In this project,  Toyo Ito used a steel plate-sandwitched concrete structure in which concrete is poured into a space between two steel plates. Panels composed of steel plates (t=6-12mm) sandwiched together with studs and structural reinforcements are made in a factory and conveyed to the construction site. After erection and adjustment on the site, they are welded together and 200mm of concrete is poured inside. Through this system, which treats the steel plates as expendable formwork, it was possible to create an extremely thin structure and achieve high strength and redundancy. Also, since it is a non-directional planar structural system, it was possible for openings to be inserted freely.

The openings of this building employ random shapes derived from a quasi-crystalline geometry generated by the dividing the façade planes with seven triangle shapes. By integrating the structure and the fluid opening pattern (as if capturing a moment of fluctuation), and through the use of a special coating, the building expresses both soft lightness and refined intensity. This design is not based on pure geometry, nor does it follow a (structural) expressionist approach, but employs a new method. It goes without saying that such a design has become possible for the first time through the use of structural analysis technology known as the “finite element analysis method.

In order to realize flat facades without joints, the welded joints were smoothed flat on site and the steel received many layers of paint, from rust proofing to topcoats. By eliminating the joints usually found in curtain walls, the external image of the building presents a different kind of abstractness, and the multilayer coatings draw out the materiality of the steel plate to the maximum and directly express the strength of the structure.

Mikimoto Ginza 2- Construction Systems-The plates were then transported and assembled on site.

 It took a total of 330 pieces to build the facade.

Mikimoto Ginza 2- Construction Systems-To weld the plates and paint them.

Mikimoto Ginza 2- Elevations (A); parametric design of the facade (B)

Mikimoto Ginza 2- Sections and exploded axonometry.

Mikimoto Ginza 2- Concrete filled Steel wall details.

Sources: 

-"Mikimoto Ginza 2". OpenBuildings,

http://architecturalmoleskine.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/toyo-ito-mikimoto-ginza-2.html

http://openbuildings.com/buildings/mikimoto-ginza-2-profile-2818#